Interviewed separately by the FBI in June 1947, Hiss and his wife denied knowing anyone named Whittaker Chambers. In November 1946, Hiss resigned from the State Department and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York. State Department, and by October, Hiss was placed under FBI surveillance. He told of an unidentified Communist agent serving in the U.S.
#WHO WAS ALGER HISS CODE#
In September of that year, Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk, defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, taking with him numerous documents reflecting Soviet espionage. Edgar Hoover, who called it mostly “history, hypothesis or deduction.”īut in March 1945, the FBI forwarded a summary of the 1942 interview to the State Department’s security office. In 1942, questioned by the FBI about his past in the Communist underground, he again named Hiss among his associates. Chambers went to a presidential assistant with his story of Communists in government and named Hiss, among others. Truman to the presidency.īut his promising career began to fray in 1939 when Chambers, having broken with Communism, was hired as a writer at Time magazine. organizing session that met in San Francisco two weeks after Roosevelt’s death raised Vice President Harry S. Hiss was temporary secretary-general of the U.N. at the February 1945 Yalta Conference on the shape of the postwar world.
He was executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks conference that drew up the blueprint of the United Nations Organization, then assisted Secretary of State Edward R. He moved in 1939 to the State Department’s Far Eastern Division, and then to the new Office of Special Political Affairs organized for postwar planning, becoming its director in 1945. Priscilla Hiss died in 1984 at the age of 81, and a year later Hiss married his companion of a quarter-century, Isabel Johnson.Īs a government lawyer for the old Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a Senate special committee studying the munitions industry, the Justice Department and the State Department, Hiss had access to confidential documents. They had one son, Anthony Hiss, who survives. The marriage broke up in 1958, and Hiss obtained a legal separation in 1960, but the couple never divorced. In 1929, he married Priscilla Fansler Hobson, a socially conscious divorcee he called “Prossy,” who steadfastly maintained his innocence through both trials. A shabby-genteel upbringing in Baltimore clearly whetted his ambition to excel, and the worldwide Depression of the 1930s heightened his awareness of capitalism’s shortcomings. He was a high-achieving honors graduate of Johns Hopkins University in 1926 and of Harvard Law School in 1929, seasoned by a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and three years in private practice. Hiss came to Washington in 1933 as an attorney serving President Franklin D. Historian Allen Weinstein began an eight-year study believing Hiss had been framed but concluded in his book “Perjury” that Hiss had indeed been guilty as charged of lying under oath. Scholars debated the evidence for decades. Nixon helped Chambers develop his charges, then made the guilty verdict a steppingstone to the White House. As a first-term Republican congressman from California, Richard M.
In 1975 he was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar.Īs the celebrated case intensified public awareness and suspicion of Soviet methods and motives, it revived red-baiting as a political weapon and cleared the ideological track for such demagogues as Sen.
Impoverished by his costly defense and disbarred as a lawyer after his conviction, Hiss rebuilt his life while working as a salesman and occasional lecturer. Much of the material was transcribed on an old typewriter Hiss once owned, experts testified. Hiss was convicted primarily on the evidence of copied official documents that Chambers swore he received from Hiss before World War II and then concealed for a decade.
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