Yet he was. Or rather he probably was. Until the day he died last week, at the age of 92, Hiss insisted he was innocent, but the evidence of his guilt is stronger. The notion that someone so seemingly irreproachable was stealing secrets for the Kremlin helped launch the Red Scare and made Richard Nixon a national figure. The debate over whether Hiss had been somehow set up by overzealous Red hunters flared and sputtered for 50 years, illuminating class and ideological divides in one of the great melodramas of the American Century.
Hiss’s accuser in 1948 was a seedy, self-confessed liar named Whittaker Chambers, a former communist who had seen the light. In the postwar witch hunt staged by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chambers named dozens of fellow travelers. Unlike most witnesses, who tried to take the Fifth, Hiss denied everything under oath. He immediately became a hero to New Deal liberals, who maintained that Hiss was being framed by Congressman Nixon of California. With his bad teeth and sour mien, Chambers made an unattractive witness, especially compared with the cool and composed Hiss. Hiss tried to say that he barely knew the man, but Chambers was able to relate Hiss’s wife’s nickname (““Prossy’’), describe their gilt-stenciled Hitchcock chairs and even recall Hiss’s greatest triumph as a bird watcher: spotting a prothonotary warbler on the banks of the Potomac. Most important, Chambers also produced microfilm, hidden away in a pumpkin, of secret government documents he claimed Hiss had stolen. A federal jury believed Chambers; in January 1950, Hiss, convicted of perjury, entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary wearing both a three-piece suit and an enigmatic smile.
The Soviets had just developed the atom bomb, and many Americans were looking for somebody to blame. Who better than elitist Ivy Leaguers at Foggy Bottom? Within a few weeks, Sen. Joe McCarthy was brandishing his ““list’’ of 205 communists in the State Department, and the country entered a dark age of false accusations. Nixon, the resentful striver from the West, always cherished his role in the Hiss case. During Watergate, he told his aides to reread his account of the affair in ““Six Crises.’’ ““If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss,’’ Nixon declared, ““they would boil him in oil.''
Released from prison after 44 months, Hiss became a darling of the establishment’s lecture and cocktail circuit. Admired for his WASP reserve, Hiss always protested that he was a ““private person,’’ but he seemed to enjoy his own mythology, comparing himself to great martyrs like Dreyfus and Sacco and Vanzetti. Left-leaning academics searched for evidence that would vindicate him. One, Prof. Allen Weinstein, spent almost a decade pursuing witnesses from Mexico to Moscow and poring over archives in Washington. Somewhat to his horror, Weinstein decided that Hiss was guilty after all. Weinstein’s 1978 book, ““Perjury,’’ seemed to end the debate, but in 1992 a Russian historian, Gen. Dimitri Volkogonov, announced that he had reviewed the Kremlin’s records and that Hiss was innocent of spying. Liberals and most of the press, including NEWSWEEK, cheered–but then Volkogonov backed down, saying he had been misunderstood. Finally, last March, Russian cables declassified by the National Security Agency showed that a Soviet agent code-named ““Ales’’ had spied for the Soviets at Yalta. Ales, said the NSA, was ““probably Alger Hiss.’’ Hiss, by then nearly blind, replied through his son Tony that ““there’s really nothing there.''
If Hiss was guilty, how did he stonewall for so long? ““It was perfectly eerie,’’ says Nixon biographer Herbert Parmet, who once spent two hours talking to Hiss. ““If the man was guilty, he gave off absolutely no trace. I felt like he was either innocent or I was talking to a really good actor.’’ One theory: Hiss’s wife, a fervent leftist, was the real spy, and Hiss was covering for her. Oth- ers tried to explain Hiss with psycho- theories: he had been made stoic and secretive by a painful childhood (his father had cut his own throat from ear to ear when Alger was 2i). He had come to believe his own innocence or couldn’t betray the loyalty of his many defenders. Or per- haps he was just a very good spy, deceitful to the end.
