October 20, 2005
Plamegate, Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Incapable as I am of distinguishing between the trivial and the profound, I can only stick to the finer points of American history (this is still a history Web site, right?) and reiterate my previous point: Alger Hiss was not, as Mr. Gordon suggested, found guilty of turning over data from the Manhattan Project to Joseph Stalin. He was found guilty of perjury—on one count of lying about his contact with Whittaker Chambers after January 1, 1937, and on a second count of falsely denying that he had given Chambers classified government documents (the famous “Pumpkin Papers”). Importantly, whatever papers Hiss did or did not hand over to Chambers he handed over in 1937 or 1938—four or five years before the inception of the Manhattan Project. Hiss, in fact, never enjoyed access to atomic secrets. His meteoric career spanned the departments of Agriculture and State, and he was a key adviser at Yalta. But he wasn’t especially in the know about the A-bomb. Perhaps Mr. Gordon is thinking of Klaus Fuchs, who was arrested six days after Hiss was convicted. Fuchs was indeed guilty of atomic espionage. But I digress. Back to whitewashing the perpetrators of Plamegate, on whom we shouldn’t pass judgment until the special prosecutor has his say, unless we wish to exonerate them in advance, in which case we should freely speculate about closed-door grand jury proceedings.
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