Hiss Case

ALGER Hiss has never lacked for credentialed defenders.Dean Acheson, Felix Frankfurter and Eleanor Roosevelt avowed their belief in his claim that he did not belong to a communist spy ring in the 1930s.Now, 42 years after Hiss' conviction on two counts of perjury, a new defender has come forward bearing the most impressive credentials of all.He is Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, chairman of the Russian government's military intelligence archives and a reputable historian.In a videotaped interview with John Lowenthal, a longtime student of the Hiss case, he declared in no uncertain terms that Hiss was innocent.

I was amazed to read in Frederick N. Rasmussen's "Alger Hiss' trial still stirs readers" (June 26) the opinion expressed by Timmerman Daughtery that Hiss made a major blunder in hiring William L. Marbury as his counsel. As Ms. Daughtery put it, "if he'd gotten a 'real' lawyer, not a society boy in the beginning, the story would be a different one. " At the time, Mr. Marbury was approaching 50 years of age with 20 years experience as a trial lawyer. He had just completed service as chief counsel of the War Department in charge of procurement for the entire duration of World War II, and was the senior partner of one of Baltimore's most prominent law firms.

Forty-five years have elapsed since Whitaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of having been a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.Hiss, a former State Department official, denied the charges and was eventually convicted of lying in making that denial. As the U.S. wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was turning into anti-Communist hostility, the case became a harbinger of a change in the nation's political mood from New Deal idealism to Cold War ideological combat.The publicity that the Hiss case garnered brought a little-known congressman from California, Richard M. Nixon, to national consciousness.

"The other curious thing about the Hiss case is the psychology of believing that Hiss was a spy, which requires abandoning much of what we know about rational thought. " — Newspaper columnist Molly Ivins in 1996 I knew that my Alger Hiss column from a few weeks back would elicit plenty of mail, and I wasn't disappointed. The power of the Hiss story continues to arouse strong emotions even after the passage of more than 60 years. Some who contacted me by phone or email accused me of propagating the idea that Hiss' guilt was still in doubt.

The Alger Hiss case, it turns out, is not quite over.It has been nearly 50 years since the late State Department official was convicted of perjury for lying about working as a Soviet agent, the trial inciting what one writer of the day called an American "religious war." Hiss, a man of Baltimore, Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law School, became first an emblem of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal elite, then a defining figure of the Cold War. Hiss the man died at 92 in 1996, still claiming innocence; Hiss the symbol remains vigorous.

No pumpkins were planted at Pipe Creek Farm this year.It would have been fitting had there been a few of the large orange gourds lying in the small plot near the white farmhouse, because 44 years ago evidence hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin played a pivotal role in a national controversy that continues today.The recent announcement that a search of Russian intelligence archives revealed no evidence that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy resurrects the debate about evidence that Whittaker Chambers hid on his farm off Bachman Valley Road.

THIS IS THE time children get excited about the carving of the pumpkin. Nothing like a jack-o-lantern to bring on the thrills and -- chills of Halloween.But for some of the grandparents of such kids, pumpkins harken to a chilling local incident, not Halloween related.It happened in a Carroll County garden on the night of Dec. 2, 1948. By morning of the next day, a lone orange gourd would be the most famous pumpkin in America. It would put the phrase "Pumpkin Papers" into the language.At about 10 o'clock that night, three men came out of the back door of a white farmhouse on Pipe Creek Farm off Bachman Valley Road near Westminster headed for a small pumpkin patch.

FROM Tony Hiss, in the Nov. 16 issue of New Yorker magazine:"When people have asked me over the years what it has felt like to live through the Hiss case, I've always said that it has been like living inside a fairy tale, with a curse that couldn't be lifted. Many people have been friendly in talking to me about the case, but too often there was someone to pull me aside to say something like 'Don't you have any doubts? You must have some doubts,' or 'Well, guilty or innocent, your father has paid the penalty.

ALGER HISS goes to his grave in sole possession of the definitive answers to the spy case that rocked the country when anti-Soviet hysteria raged at the beginning of the Cold War.He goes to his grave proclaiming his innocence of charges by his storied antagonist, Whitaker Chambers, that he passed State Department secrets to Moscow even as evidence from long-secret KGB files piles up to the contrary. He goes to his grave with history's final verdict still out and his supporters and detractors still vehemently at odds.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- When the departure of old Alger Hiss from this vale of tears was dutifully front-paged around the country the other day, the prominent obituary surely startled many nonpolitical readers who had assumed him dead for years.As for the political community, it took only the most routine notice of his death, because in politics Hiss had long ago ceased being a person and become a code word, and more recently had ceased being a code word and become an embarrassment, a bad joke left over from a bad time.

Alger Hiss won't go away. No matter that his conviction was more than half a century in the past. That the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union have vanished. That Hiss himself -- traitor or martyr -- is nearly eight years dead. Somehow, some way, Alger Hiss manages to slip back into the public conversation. So here he is again, this time as sideshow in the debate over the Bush administration's nomination of Allen Weinstein as the new national archivist, the executive who oversees preservation and access to historic government records.

Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy, by G. Edward White. Oxford University Press. 297 pages. $30. The facts in the case of United States of America v. Alger Hiss have never been in serious doubt. Hiss, a lawyer from Baltimore, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., worked in the State Department under Roosevelt and Truman, ran the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- and spent his off hours spying for the Soviet Union. Whittaker Chambers, another Soviet spy, who broke with his masters and became a top editor at Time magazine, confessed his sins to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 and named Hiss as one of his agents.

"The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir," by Tony Hiss. Knopf. 241 pages. $24. Fifty years after his perjury conviction, the mention of the communist spy Alger Hiss still has the power to ruin a dinner party. To disclose where one stands on the Hiss case is to instantly take a position on the role of Communism in the history of the 20th century. Following a federal judge's order on May 13 to release the secret grand jury testimony that led to the trials in 1949 and 1950, it is clear that doubts and rationalizations of Hiss' guilt persist among "right-thinking" folks on the political left.

A federal judge in Manhattan ordered yesterday the release of secret transcripts from the grand jury investigations a half-century ago that led to a perjury indictment against Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State Department official accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union. U.S. District Judge Peter K. Leisure ruled that about 3,500 pages of secret testimony be released by the National Archives to a consortium of historians who sued for access to them. The historians' petition was supported by both sides of the continuing controversy over whether Hiss was guilty of spying.

The Alger Hiss case, it turns out, is not quite over.It has been nearly 50 years since the late State Department official was convicted of perjury for lying about working as a Soviet agent, the trial inciting what one writer of the day called an American "religious war." Hiss, a man of Baltimore, Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law School, became first an emblem of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal elite, then a defining figure of the Cold War. Hiss the man died at 92 in 1996, still claiming innocence; Hiss the symbol remains vigorous.

Fifty years ago, microfilm squirreled away in a hollowed-out pumpkin at Pipe Creek Farm in northern Carroll County played a pivotal role in one of the most celebrated espionage cases of the Red Scare.No pumpkins grow there anymore.Like air raid drills, fallout shelters and Khrushchev's shoe, this 390-acre Cold War shrine is a fading memory.But another legacy of this tract of steep pastures and breathtaking views persists -- that of the farm itself and the role it played in the life of a frumpy ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers after the turbulent years of the espionage case.

The other day the newspapers gave new prominence to the old story of the trial and conviction of Alger Hiss. This time the headlines told us that Hiss had been ''vindicated'' or ''exonerated'' by new evidence from Moscow.Don't believe it for a minute. The most recent eruption in the Hiss case came from a Russian historian, Dmitri Volkogonov, who searched Soviet archives looking for evidence that in the '30s Hiss supplied classified documents to the Soviets. He found none: ''Not a single document, and a great amount of material has been studied, substantiates the allegations that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union.

The Russian official who was reported to have cleared Alge Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union has backed off the statement, saying that he was "not properly understood."The official, Gen. Dmitry A. Volkogonov, a military historian who has been closely involved in studying various Soviet-era archives, said that at Mr. Hiss' request he had searched through KGB files for the 1930s and 1940s, and in them he found only one mention of Mr. Hiss, in a list of diplomats at the United Nations."I was not properly understood," he said in a recent interview.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- When the departure of old Alger Hiss from this vale of tears was dutifully front-paged around the country the other day, the prominent obituary surely startled many nonpolitical readers who had assumed him dead for years.As for the political community, it took only the most routine notice of his death, because in politics Hiss had long ago ceased being a person and become a code word, and more recently had ceased being a code word and become an embarrassment, a bad joke left over from a bad time.

ALGER HISS goes to his grave in sole possession of the definitive answers to the spy case that rocked the country when anti-Soviet hysteria raged at the beginning of the Cold War.He goes to his grave proclaiming his innocence of charges by his storied antagonist, Whitaker Chambers, that he passed State Department secrets to Moscow even as evidence from long-secret KGB files piles up to the contrary. He goes to his grave with history's final verdict still out and his supporters and detractors still vehemently at odds.