Perjury: Revisiting The Hiss-Chambers Case

[Draggingtree]

May 10, 2013

defining ideas

Perjury: Revisiting The Hiss-Chambers Case

by Allen Weinstein

 

More than half a century after Alger Hiss’s second trial pronounced him guilty of perjury, the case remains controversial.

Once upon a time, when the Cold War was young, a senior editor of Time accused the president of the Carnegie Endowment of having been a Soviet agent. The Time editor made his charge stick, aided by an obscure young congressman from the House Un-American Activities Committee, a tough federal prosecutor, and the director of the FBI. As a result, the Endowment president spent forty-four months in jail and became a cause célèbre; the magazine editor resigned and died a decade later, still obsessed with the case; the prosecutor became a federal judge; the director of the FBI lived to guard the republic against real or imagined enemies for another twenty-five years; and the young congressman left obscurity behind to become the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

 

When the Hiss-Chambers case broke open, its main characters and events seemed more appropriate to spy fiction than to the realities of American life in the late 1940s. And although more than a half-century has passed since the jury at Alger Hiss’s second trial pronounced him guilty of perjury, the case remains controversial and the verdict leaves questions unanswered. Did Hiss become an undercover Communist while serving as a New Deal official? Did he turn over classified State Department files to Whittaker Chambers, a self-confessed former underground agent for the Communist Party? Or did Chambers, for obscure and malevolent reasons, deliberately set out to frame and destroy a respected public official?

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/146651

[Draggingtree]

FBI Trumpets Hiss Conviction – but Hides Hiss Papers??

By David Chambers On 2013.01.26 ·

 

The website of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has recounted the conviction of Alger Hiss 63 years ago this month in its blog “A Byte Out of History.”

 

It characterizes the 18-month ordeal by stating, “The central issue of the trial was espionage.”

The agency describes Hiss as a “well-educated and well-connected former government lawyer and State Department official who helped create the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II.”

It describes Whittaker Chambers more simply as a “senior editor at TIME magazine

http://whittakerchambers.org/2013/01/26/fbi-hiss-papers/