Chambers testified to an array of little things to establish that he and Hiss once had worked closely together. Little by little it became evident that Hiss was lying and Chambers was telling the truth. Richard Nixon, led the House investigation. He blustered, postured, feigned injured innocence. For the next 18 months he struggled desperately to explain the inexplicable. His only safe course lay in denying everything. One can imagine Hiss' consternation as he saw disaster looming. "Other members of the group were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss, Victor Perlo. He described Ware as the chief organizer. ![]() The committee summoned Chambers and asked him to name names. She identified Chambers as a fellow agent of the underground in the mid-'30s. Then, in 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities heard from a witness named Elizabeth Bentley. Leaving government, he became head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Ĭhambers tried repeatedly to alert top government figures to the existence of the Ware Group, but no one listened. He organized Roosevelt's entourage for the infamous Yalta Conference. He played a key role in establishing the United Nations. Hiss climbed to the top of a social and political ladder. He went on to become a highly respected senior editor of Time magazine. In the summer of 1938, at last disillusioned, Chambers broke with the party. A pattern developed by which Hiss would bring home top-secret documents, give them to Chambers for overnight copying, and then return the documents. As it later transpired, he had become deeply engaged in actual espionage. Among them was a lean and handsome Ivy Leaguer, Alger Hiss, then attached to the State Department.īy 1937 Hiss had gone beyond his original role of bending New Deal policies toward Marxist goals. There was no shortage of idealistic recruits. His task was to work with Harold Ware in organizing communist cells at high levels of the Roosevelt administration. In the early '30s the party assigned Chambers to Washington. The party put him to work at first as an overt communist journalist and then moved him underground as a covert courier and functionary. He was then an impressionable intellectual at Columbia University, a young man who dreamily saw a future for Marxism. The cast of supporting characters included a sitting president, a future president, a secretary of state and two justices of the Supreme Court.It all began in 1925, when 24-year-old Whittaker Chambers joined the Communist Party. The record teemed with purloined documents, false names, duplicity at high levels. The Hiss case had everything - an unlikely hero in the rumpled Whittaker Chambers, an unlikely villain in the impeccable Alger Hiss. From a newsman's point of view, no criminal case of the 20th century made a better story than the two trials of Alger Hiss 47 years ago. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time, and in January 1950, he was found guilty and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served three and a half years.Great cases make great stories. ![]() A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage. Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former U.S. In later life he worked as a lecturer and author. Before the trial Hiss was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a U.S. Statutes of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Alger Hiss was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |