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Alger Hiss: Liar, Spy, Traitor

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Alger Hiss: Liar, Spy, Traitor Robert D. Novak I U 41l.f1A) Alger Hiss: Liar, Spy, Traitor • • Anchorman Peter Jennings con- establishment to acknowledge that question of Hiss's guilt or innocence cluded his elegiac obituary of Alger Hiss was a liar, a spy and a traitor? "is like the argument over who start- Hiss on ABC's evening news broad- The answer is in the corollaries to ed the Cold War—it's going to go on cast Nov. 16 by noting Boris Yeltsin Hiss's guilt: Joe McCarthy, for all his forever." This stance from a suppos- had declared that nothing in KGB excesses, had a point. Freshman edly serious historian of the Cold files branded the former State De- Rep. Richard Nixon performed a War links continued defense of Hiss partment official a Soviet espionage signal service in pursuing Hiss. The to revisionist analysis of Soviet in- agent. The problem it that the Rus- New Deal harbored Communists and tentions. sian president never said any such even traitors in high places. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is thing. To accept Hiss's guilt implies an one liberal intellectual with no The source of this misinformation acceptance of Chambers's descrip- doubts about Hiss's guilt—and a might have been a dispatch by tion of the New Deal (in "Witness," theory about why the best and the, Agence France-Presse claiming his 1952 account of the Hiss case): brightest betray their country. Yeltsin "recently said secret KGB "It was a revolution by bookkeeping files confirmed that Hiss never In his new book, "Miles to Go: A and lawmaking. In so far as it was Personal History of Social Policy," worked for the Soviets." AFP possi- successful, the power of politics had bly was confused by a statement Moynihan notes that the United replaced the power of business. This States suffered through a brutal se- supposedly clearing Hiss from the is the basic power shift of all the late Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, mili- ries of booms and busts between revolutions of our time. .. Wheth- 1890 and 1945, climaxed by the tary historian and sometime Yeltsin er the revolutionists prefer to call adviser. But Volkogonov recanted Great Depression and 25 percent by admitting he had not inspected themselves Fabians, who seek pow- unemployment. Since the Employ- files of Soviet military intelligence, er by the inevitability of gradualism, ment .Act of 1946, there has been where Whittaker Chambers said he or Bolsheviks, who seek power by stability (reason enough, the senator and Hiss were employed. the dictatorship of the proletariat, says, to oppose a balanced budget Other obituaries did not go as far the struggle is for power." constitutional amendment). But Hiss as Jennings, but the prevailing tone Chambers wrote that Hiss could and his colleagues had witnessed the suggested that here was an unsolved not be separated from the New Deal failure of capitalism and their own riddle of the Cold War. Allen Wein- and liberalism. Nixon, to his dying New Deal, and they turned to Mos- stein, whose 1978 book "Perjury" day, believed the dominant political cow. conclusively found Hiss guilty, told culture never forgave him for uncov- Moynihan expounded this theory me this was "exoneration by obitu- ering Hiss. Roger Morris, in order to me the day it was announced that ary." to destroy Nixon's credibility in the CIA's Harold Nicholson had That is ironic considering the new "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of been arrested for giving secrets to evidence substantiating Chambers's an American Politician" (1991), em- the Kremlin, as Hiss did. Unlike Hiss accusations that he and Hiss were braced a conspiracy theory of a plot and like Aldrich Ames, Nicholson secret agents: from Communist spy to frame Hiss. allegedly did it for money, not ideol- Noel Field's confession that Hiss Liberal historian Walter LaFeber ogy. was his key accomplice to the Na- contends, it was the Hiss trial . But Alger Hiss's idealistic base for tional Security Agency's decryptions that triggered the McCarthy era." his treason is no reason to persist in identifying Hiss as Soviet agent To McCarthyites, he continues, Hiss unfounded doubts about his guilt. It "Ales." became the symbol for an establish- is surely no reason to confuse mat- Why then, 50 years after the ment "that had sold the nation out." ters with manufactured assessments event, is there deep-seated reluc- Thus, disregarding all new evi- by Boris Yeltsin. tance within the American liberal dence, LaFeber concludes that the 0 1996. Creator. *Wawa lac. George F. Will .. Emblem of the Governing Class Alger Hiss spent 44 months in pris- he had never known "a man by the was no evidence of Hiss espionage. on and then his remaining 42 years in name of Whittaker Chambers." A very The general later recanted From Rus- the dungeon of his grotesque fidelity to lawyerly answer, that During his pro- sia came documents confirming Cham- the fiction of his innocence. The costs tracted self-destruction, he was driven bers's account of the communist un- of his unconditional surrender to the to admit to having known Chambers by derground in the United States in the totalitarian temptation was steep for another name, but not well. However, 1930s. From Hungarian archives came his supporters. Clinging to their belief Chambers knew so many intimacies— documentary evidence (from another in his martyrdom in order tp preserve from Hiss's household effects to the Harvard-educated American spy) that their belief in their "progressive" vir- thrill Hiss, an amateur ornithologist, Hiss spied. tue, they were drawn into an intellec- felt when he spotted a prothonotary In a 1990 memoir, a former KGB tual corruption that hastened the moral warbler—that Hiss was forced to officer asserted that Hiss's Soviet code bankruptcy of the American left. weave an ever more tangled web. name was "Ales." Earlier this year, the Hiss died last week at 92. The He lied about transferring his car U.S. government released files from insufferable agnosticism expressed in through Chambers to communists, and the "Venona Project," which intercept- many obituaries concerning his guilt is about not remembering how he had ed 2,200 wartime Soviet cables. A proof of the continuing queasiness of disposed of the Woodstock typewriter March 30, 1945, cable refers to an "anti-anti-communist" thinkers con- on which some incriminating docu- agent Ales in terms congruent with - fronting the facts of communism and ments had been typed. He lied by ■ its servants. testimony about Hiss by Chambers and , wp omitting from a list of former maids others. When Hiss was accused of espio- ses the one to whose family he gave the nage for the Soviet Union, his back- There is no hatred as corrupting as typewriter. He was convicted of per- intellectual hatred, so Hiss's support- ground—Johns Hopkins and Harvard jury (the statute of limitations saved Law School; protege of Felix Frank- ers always responded to evidence by him from espionage charges). furter; aide to Justice Oliver Wendell redoubling their concoction of rococo , Holmes; a diplomatic career that car- In 1978 historian Allen Weinstein. reasons for believing him framed by a ''" ried him to the upper reaches of the who began his research believing Hiss conspiracy so vast and proficient it left ir State Department, and to Yalta and innocent, published his definitive 'Per- no trace of itself. They still requ e his the United Nations' birth in San Fran- jury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," based innocence so they can convict America .,:, cisco; at the time of the accusation, on 40,000 pages of previously dassi- of pathological injustice. Never has so president of the Carnegie Endowment fied material and interviews with 40 much ingenuity been invested in so low - for International Peace—made him a people involved in the case but never a cause, or such futility. perfect symbol of cosmopolitan sophis- before interviewed, including Soviet Hiss loyalists finally were reduced to . tication under siege from America's agents who confirmed Chambers's tes- proclaiming that their loyalty was self- paranoid majority of yahoos. And then timony. Weinstein's conclusion: -There vindicating. As one of them said, "Al- there was his accuser,. Whittaker has yet to emerge, from any source, a ger would not have put his friends and ' Chambers. coherent body of evidence that seri- others through what they went "^) Porcine, rumpled and tormented, ously undermines the credibility of the through for him if he was guilty." That ii with bad teeth and a worse tailor, he evide re against Mr. Hiss." is, he was either innocent or a moral was as dedasse as Hiss was elegantly What emerged after the end of the monster, which is unthinkable. No, q) emblematic of the governing class. Cold War would have made peace hell indubitable. He, enveloped in his enig- The trouble was that Chambers kriew for Hiss, had he been auseeptibie to matic fanaticism, and they, impervious things. He knew Hiss. guilt or even embarrassment. A Soviet to evidence, • were all monstrosities, When Chambers said that while he general, falsely described as familiar huddled together for warmth in what had been a communist operative he with all pertinent archives, was pres- G. K Chesterton called "the dean had dealt with Hiss, Hiss testified that sured by a Hiss emissary to say there well-lit prison of one idea." . rj. .
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