![]() ![]() Hiss was first named in public as a communist spy in 1948. One of them referred to an agent whom the National Security Agency said was probably Alger Hiss. government released newly declassified documents, including intercepts of Soviet spy messages. Dmitri Volkogonov, a biographer of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, said in a 1992 letter to a student of the Hiss case that newly opened files showed no evidence that Hiss had spied for Moscow.Įarlier this year, the U.S. "The trial was a fair one by any standard."īut the question of his guilt or innocence was still being debated in the 1990s. ![]() Those documents "raise no real question whatsoever, let alone a reasonable doubt as to Hiss's guilt," U.S. In 1982, a federal judge in New York turned down his petition to reopen the case based on what Hiss's attorneys contended was new evidence obtained from government documents on the basis of the 1975 Freedom of Information Act. He would sacrifice his career and see his marriage disintegrate, and in the end, he still would not prevail. His conclusion drew sharp attacks in magazine and newspapers articles from Hiss's supporters.įor Hiss, the struggle to disprove Chambers's accusations would become a lifelong obsession. Weinstein started out believing that Hiss was innocent, but he changed his mind during his investigation. That book, "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," was one of more than a dozen to have been written about the affair, and it was based on an examination of more than 30,000 pages of FBI and Justice Department records. More than a quarter-century later, feelings about the case were still high enough to ignite a literary controversy when a Smith College historian, Allen Weinstein, published a book concluding that Hiss was indeed guilty. McCarthy (R-Wis.) launched his own anti-communist campaign in a Wheeling, W.Va., speech, declaring that the State Department had become "thoroughly infested with communists." McCarthy did not fail to mention that Secretary of State Dean Acheson had supported Hiss and had said at a news conference the day after the verdict that "I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss." Within a month after the verdict in the Hiss perjury trial, Sen. To some historians, the Hiss case marked the end of an era of New Deal liberalism in the United States and the beginning of a Cold War period of anxiety - at times hysteria - and debate over the degree of communist penetration of the government. His partisans insisted that his case was a "red herring" from the start, and they said his prosecution was no more than a political assault on the New Deal, the Yalta agreement and the United Nations. He played a key role in organizing the United Nations charter conference in San Francisco. He later joined the State Department and was an adviser at the 1945 Yalta conference at which the post-World War II map of Europe was drawn. Nixon into national prominence when Nixon, as a young Republican congressman from California, orchestrated the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into charges by Whittaker Chambers, a writer for Time magazine, that Hiss had passed copies of stolen State Department documents to him as part of a communist espionage operation during the 1930s.Ī Harvard-trained lawyer who had once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Hiss came to Washington in 1933 to participate in President Franklin D. Hiss, who served three years and eight months in prison after exhausting his appeals, insisted until his death that he was innocent, and his case stirred passion and controversy that continued for more than four decades. ![]() Alger Hiss, 92, the former State Department official whose 1950 perjury conviction for lying to a grand jury about communist espionage activity became one of the most celebrated and dramatic spy cases of this century, died yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. ![]()
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