Alger Hiss

In 1907 his father Charles, having sold everything he owned to cover a brother-in-law's debts, cut his throat with a razor. Alger was two, and nobody told him. He learned it years later from neighbors, went to his older brother Bosley for the truth, and resolved to spend his life restoring the family name. Bosley died of Bright's disease and their sister Mary Ann killed herself, both while Alger was in his twenties. He was voted most popular student at Johns Hopkins and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, took a Harvard law degree in 1929 as a protege of Felix Frankfurter, and clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Then the New Deal — the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Nye Committee, and from 1936 the State Department.

He was executive secretary at Dumbarton Oaks, went to Yalta with the American delegation in February 1945, and served as secretary-general of the San Francisco conference that wrote the United Nations Charter, where the Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko praised his impartiality. In 1946 he took over the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had been a secret communist in federal service. Hiss denied it under oath, said he had known the man only as a freelance writer named George Crosley, and sued for libel. Chambers answered with typed State Department papers and then, on December 2, with five rolls of film pulled out of a hollowed pumpkin. The subcommittee that ran the confrontation was chaired by a first-term congressman named Richard Nixon.

The statute of limitations on espionage had run out, so the government charged perjury instead. The first jury hung in July 1949. The second convicted him on January 21, 1950, and Judge Goddard gave him five years. Dean Acheson told reporters he did not intend to turn his back on Alger Hiss, which Nixon called sacrilege. Hiss served three years and eight months at Lewisburg and came out in November 1954, 50 years old and disbarred, to sell stationery and later to work for a comb manufacturer at 20,000 dollars a year. The case carried Nixon into the Senate in 1950 and onto the national ticket in 1952. In August 1975 Massachusetts readmitted Hiss to the bar, the first lawyer ever readmitted there after a major criminal conviction.

He died of emphysema on November 15, 1996, still denying it, and the argument outlived him. Reading him guilty: a 1945 Venona decrypt naming an agent, ALES, who was at Yalta and then Moscow, the KGB material Alexander Vassiliev hand-copied and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes published in 2009, and a Hungarian file in which Noel Field named him. The Moynihan Commission called his complicity settled. Reading him innocent: the FBI's concealment of a serial-number problem with the Woodstock typewriter, Field's statement that torture had made him confess lies as truth, and Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya's case that ALES fits Wilder Foote better. Allen Weinstein, whose Perjury moved most historians toward guilt, called Venona persuasive but not conclusive.

Alger Hiss's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Dumbarton Oaks Conference other
  Executive secretary of the talks that designed the United Nations 1944
• Charter of the United Nations other
  Secretary-general of the San Francisco conference that drafted it 1945
• In the Court of Public Opinion book
  His case against the prosecution, written after prison 1957
• Recollections of a Life book
  The autobiography, still maintaining his innocence at 84 1988

• 1907 aged ~3 His father takes his own life Alger was two. He was told nothing and found out years later from neighbors.
• 1929 aged ~25 Harvard law degree, then a clerkship with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
• June 26, 1945 aged 40 The UN Charter is signed in San Francisco Hiss was secretary-general of the conference.
• August 3, 1948 aged 43 Whittaker Chambers names him before HUAC Hiss demanded to testify and denied everything under oath.
• December 2, 1948 aged 44 Chambers produces five rolls of film from a hollowed pumpkin They became known as the Pumpkin Papers.
• January 21, 1950 aged 45 Convicted on two counts of perjury at his second trial The first had ended in a hung jury six months earlier.
• November 27, 1954 aged 50 Released from Lewisburg after three years and eight months
• 1975 aged ~71 Readmitted to the Massachusetts bar at 70 The court found he had shown the moral and intellectual fitness required.
• November 15, 1996 aged 92 Dies at 92, still denying the espionage charge

• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. made the career of
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. pursued by
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. clerked for
• Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965
  Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law. mentor
• Dean Acheson 1893–1971
  Secretary of State who helped build NATO and the postwar architecture of American foreign policy. defended by
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. succeeded the movement of