Strange Case of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Book Reviews

Strange Case of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. by Queen's Quarterly Book Summary

THE Hiss-Chambers case has haunted American liberalism for over fifty years now. The known facts are as follows. In 1948 Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss (then head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) of having once been a communist spy; Chambers admitted having been a courier for the Soviet Union, and alleged that while working at the State Department in the 1930s Hiss had passed classified documents to him for transmission to the Russians. At first Chambers, who appeared to have emerged from the political gutter, looked implausible as an accuser, while Hiss was a secure member of the establishment, a New Dealer who had the trust and respect of people such as Dean Acheson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, and Eleanor Roosevelt, among others. Hiss sued Chambers for libel, but then was indicted and tried on charges of perjuring himself in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although the first trial resulted in a hung jury, the second one convicted him. Chambers went on to write his best-selling Witness (1952), while Hiss was disbarred and ruined; Congress even deprived Hiss of a small federal pension (although in 1973 the Supreme Court declared that congressional act unconstitutional, and the state of Massachusetts eventually allowed Hiss to practise law again). But Hiss never succeeded in overturning the verdict against him or in winning a new trial. President Ronald Reagan awarded a Posthumous Medal of Freedom (1984) to Chambers, who had died prematurely in 1961; in 1988 Chambers's Maryland farm became a national historic monument. Hiss remained out in the cold, and his few remaining defenders are apt to seem like eccentrics, victims of a rare form of political vegetarian.

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Strange Case of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. (Queen's Quarterly) Book Reviews 2024

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