Who Was Alger Hiss?

"Alger Hiss was a communist spy, a spy for the USSR, and, of course, the left hated Richard Nixon because Nixon was the guy who got Hiss. They've been trying to get even over that for years. Remember, Stalin killed more people than Hitler did. You won't find the liberals admitting that. That's why Alger Hiss is still their hero." --Rush Limbaugh The Authentic History Center: Edward R. Murrow on The Alger Hiss Trial "Belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life. Parts of the American government had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told." -Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), in his book Secrecy: The American Experience Washington DeCoded: "First, they tried to smear Hiss's main accuser, Whittaker Chambers, as a fantasist, liar, and spurned homosexual. When that fell short, Hiss and his defenders invented any number of Baroque theories to rebut hard evidence, including 'forgery by typewriter' to explain away portions of classified documents that had been typed on a Hiss-owned machine. Finally, they argued that the case against Hiss was a nefarious conspiracy, a Salem witch trial for the 1940s, orchestrated by such congenital anti-communists as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover who had only one goal in mind: the destruction of New Deal liberalism, so as to pave the way for the cold war abroad and domestic repression at home." -John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, April 11, 2007 EIB Note: Whittaker Chambers was a Soviet spy who defected to America. An outspoken foe of communism, he helped the good guys convict Alger Hiss for perjury and espionage.

"When the preface of [Chambers's book] Witness appeared as a feature in The Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss's innocence had once been a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition." -William F. Buckley, Jr. in National Review magazine, August 6, 2001

"[I]n 1996 when the CIA and National Security Agency made public several thousand documents of decoded cables exchanged between Moscow and its American agents from 1939 to 1957. These materials were part of a secret intelligence project called 'Venona.' A single document, dated March 30, 1945, referred to an agent code-named 'Ales,' a State Department official who had flown from the Yalta Conference to Moscow. An anonymous footnote, dated more than 20 years later, suggested 'Ales' was 'probably Alger Hiss.'" -James Thomas Gay, American History, 1998 (Alger Hiss's mugshot shown on the left)

"Writing in Six Crises, Nixon noted that, 'those who are lying or trying to cover up something generally make a common mistake – they tend to overact, to overstate their case.' Furthermore, the manner in which he qualified his answers, saying 'the name' Whittaker Chambers 'means absolutely nothing to me,' while never stating 'categorically that he did not know' the man, indicated to Nixon that Hiss was hiding something." -CourtTV Crime Library: The Alger Hiss Case

Insight on the News: Allen Weinstein Writes an Epitaph for the Cold War "This stunning book is the most thorough study of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers yet published. The conclusion that Hiss often lied is difficult to swallow for those who deplore the character and methods of Hiss's accusers. But, alas, the enemy of evil is not always good. Weinstein's evidence has been challenged by some critics. This reviewer finds it persuasive." -Foreign Affairs magazine on Allen Weinstein's book, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case.

TIME Magazine: Hiss: A New Book Finds Him Guilty as Charged - February 13, 1978