Victor
Navasky: In Memory of Alger Hiss |
From
The Nation, December 9, 1996
In Act One, the Republican right tried to use Whittaker Chambers's
allegations against Alger Hiss to discredit the entire New
Deal. Here was Hiss, the prototypical hot dog - a Harvard
Law graduate recommended for his clerkship with Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes by Felix Frankfurter, F.D.R.'s number-one headhunter.
An alumnus of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,
a New Deal invention, he was present at Yalta and at the founding
conference of the United Nations in San Francisco - all institutions
and events closely identified with the Roosevelt Administration.
Chambers, with his gift for melodrama, egged on by the ambitious
young House Un-American Activities Committee member Richard
Nixon, dipped into his pumpkin and came up with State Department
documents, which he accused Hiss of giving him for transmission
to the Soviet Union. It seemed as if the New Deal itself -
or, as Alistair Cooke later put it, that whole generation
- was on trial.
In Act Two, the right was joined by Cold War liberals (and
eventually neoconservatives), who tried to use the Hiss case
to prove that the brutal excesses of the domestic Cold War
- McCarthyism, the reckless Congressional investigator-inquisitors,
J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. (which with other agencies routinely
undermined constitutional rights) - were justified by the
internal Red Menace. If Alger Hiss, who seemed the model of
high-minded idealistic liberalism, was the secret agent of
a foreign power, no one was above suspicion. The civil liberties
traditionally restricted only in wartime were restricted,
with a vengeance, in Cold War time. That the Hiss case, like
the other politically charged trials of the era, was carried
on in a Cold War climate that precluded the possibility of
a fair trial carried no weight with those who assumed his
guilt from the start. After a mistrial, he was convicted of
perjury.
Act Three: Alger Hiss was released from prison on November
27, 1954, and from that date until his death on November 15,
1996 he devoted himself to establishing his innocence. With
William Reuben as his co-plaintiff and the National Emergency
Civil Liberties Committee footing the bill, he won the release
under the Freedom of Information Act of some 200,000 documents,
as well as copies of the microfilms that Nixon had held up
on national television in 1948 and said documented "the most
serious series of treasonable activities which has been launched
against the government in the history of America." (They turned
out to consist of material about life rafts and other ephemera
available on the open shelves of the Bureau of Standards.)
And in response to a request under the auspices of the Nation
Institute by Hiss's aide John Lowenthal for documents in Soviet
archives, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, head of the Russian military
intelligence archives, responded, after an exhaustive search,
"Not a single document substantiates the allegation that Mr.
A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the
Soviet Union. You can tell Alger Hiss that the heavy weight
should be lifted from his heart."
Volkogonov's finding achieved page-one status across the country,
and it appeared that Alger Hiss had at last won the vindication
he sought. But after a barrage of complaints from professional
anti-Communists like Herbert Romerstein, the general qualified
his finding and conceded that while his search had turned
up not a scintilla of evidence in re Hiss, he couldn't say
for certain that the case was closed. (Latter-day cold warriors
portray this as a "retraction," which it wasn't.) And recently
when the C.I.A. and N.S.A. released 3,000 World War II intelligence
cables, decrypted under the secret Venona project, Hiss's
antagonists pounced on a 1945 report about an agent code-named
"Ales," because it contained an anonymous footnote (dated
twenty years later) speculating that Ales was "probably Alger
Hiss" (see Eric Alterman, "I Spy With One Little Eye...,"
April 29).
The irony for those who knew him was that this man, whom his
enemies denounced as "traitor," "spy," "Communist," was a
model citizen: courteous, curious, incapable of bitterness
and dedicated to establishing his innocence through official
channels using the courts and the Freedom of Information Act.
At the end, his politics were progressive, probably more so
than before he went into the slammer. As his sometime aide
Jeff Kisseloff observes, his standard line was that forty-four
months in Lewisburg was a good corrective to three years at
Harvard Law School.
As the curtain came down on his life, it was clear that his
case would live on. A measure of the partisan passions that
still surround the Hiss case may be found in his New York
Times obituary. Traditionally, the final paragraph in
a Times obit lists the survivors. On this occasion,
however, the Times apparently felt it necessary to
close instead with a put-down from Hiss's most ardent adversary,
William F. Buckley, Jr., who had built a career, a magazine
and a movement on the assumption of Hiss's guilt.
The Times prides itself on publishing "All the News
That's Fit to Print." As long as it was going to violate its
house rule, it might have been more fitting to close with
the words displayed on the Charles Theater marquee in Hiss's
hometown, Baltimore, after he died: "Alger Hiss, R.I.P."
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