Alger Hiss Convicted—But Was He Really Guilty?

Alger Hiss, center, with Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, in 1945.

(National Archives)

Fifty-six years ago today Alger Hiss was convicted of two counts of perjury and sentenced to five years in a federal prison. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, protégé of Felix Frankfurter, onetime law clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., former State Department official and head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hiss was among the best and brightest of his generation. His fall from grace was an early landmark in an altogether frightening period in American politics.

Hiss’s troubles began in August 1948, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) invited a number of ex-Communists to testify about Soviet espionage activities in the United States. Among those who named names before the committee was Whittaker Chambers, a onetime senior editor at Time magazine who claimed to have been a party member in the 1930s and who identified Hiss as one of his former Communist associates.

Though Chambers did not, at first, accuse Hiss of participating in any illegal activities, his charge stung, and Hiss fought back hard. He dared Chambers to repeat his claim outside of the HUAC hearing room (and thus without the benefit of congressional immunity), a challenge that Chambers quickly accepted. Hiss then sued Chambers for libel. Chambers, in turn, upped the ante and accused Hiss of passing government documents to Soviet agents in the late 1930s.

To Hiss’s friends, and to most influential observers, Chambers’s claim was entirely implausible. Hiss was polished, well-spoken, and always impeccably dressed in the prevailing East Coast fashion. The British journalist Alistair Cook, who knew Hiss in Washington, D.C., described him as having “one of those bodies that without being at all imposing or foppish seem to illustrate the finesse of the human mechanism.” Murray Kempton, another journalist who admired Hiss for his style no less than for his achievements, described the former Roosevelt and Truman administration official as possessing “a sense of absolute command and absolute grace.”

Whittaker Chambers, on the other hand, appeared fat, balding, nervous, and tousled in public. A chronically unstable figure who had once contemplated suicide, he struck few experienced hands as having even an ounce of credibility. But he did impress Richard Nixon, then a freshman congressman who had won election two years earlier by accusing his opponent, Rep. Jerry Voorhis, of harboring ties to the Communist party.

Sensing an opportunity to score points and make a name for himself, Nixon, benefiting from a constant stream of classified FBI materials provided courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover, doggedly pursued Hiss, who initially claimed that he didn’t know Chambers and then, under oath, that he had met him in the mid-1930s but had no contact with him since 1937.

Matters came to a dramatic climax when, in December 1948, Chambers led HUAC investigators to his farm in Maryland, where he produced a hollowed-out pumpkin in which he had hidden microfilms of classified State Department documents that Hiss had allegedly transmitted to him as late as 1938. The release of the so-called “pumpkin papers,” which appeared to come from Hiss’s typewriter, did much to bolster Chambers’s claim and would go down in history as one of Nixon’s crowning moments.

Since the statute of limitations had run out on espionage charges, prosecutors secured an indictment against Hiss on two charges 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. A first trial, in June 1949, resulted in a hung jury; six months later Hiss was convicted. He served 44 months of a five-year sentence and spent the rest of his life seeking exoneration.

Weeks after Hiss’s conviction, Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, stood up before a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia, and delivered his first major address on Communist espionage in the United States.

For liberals, the Hiss case would long stand out as an example of a good man having been framed and railroaded by cynical political opponents. For conservatives, including a great many Protestant fundamentalists from the Midwest and urban Catholics from the Midwest and Northeast, Hiss was a lasting example of an arrogant, treasonous wing of the East Coast political establishment.

Around the time of Hiss’s death, in 1996, secret cables sent to Moscow by Soviet agents operating out of Washington, D.C., in the 1930s and ’40s were decrypted and made public. Known as the Venona files, these documents at first seemed to settle the Hiss controversy. Venona transcript No. 1822, which was one of the most damning pieces of evidence to emerge against Hiss, concerned an American informant/agent codenamed “Ales,” who (according to the transcript, dated March 30, 1945) attended the Yalta conference and handed over classified material there to his Soviet handlers. An earlier transcript, dated March 5, explained that Ales “was at Yalta conference, then went to Mexico City, but has not yet come back.”

For a number of reasons, many historians have agreed that “Ales” was Alger Hiss’s code name. However, this was probably not the case. First, the March 5 cable explained that Ales had not yet returned to Washington. The problem is, Alger Hiss had returned from Yalta to Washington—two weeks earlier. Second, in earlier dispatches from Washington Hiss was identified as “Leonard,” not “Ales.” “Leonard,” moreover, does not appear anywhere in KGB files as a spy. He appears only in secret dispatches as a potential informant (as did many other high-ranking government officials, some of whom informed, some of whom didn’t).

So do the Venona transcripts implicate Alger Hiss? Maybe, but probably not. They don’t exonerate him either. Fifty-six years later, we know a lot more about that dreaded period in American history, but the controversy over Alger Hiss remains unsettled.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, to be published in April.