William L. Marbury

A prominent Baltimore lawyer and a boyhood friend of Alger Hiss, Marbury served as Hiss's attorney in the libel suit phase of the case. Marbury's request to Whittaker Chambers during pre-trial depositions to produce documentary evidence in support of his allegations against Hiss led Chambers to the dumbwaiter in Nathan Levine's apartment. Chambers claimed that, a decade before, he had put the evidence in an envelope and given it to Levine, who had placed it in the dumbwaiter.

Marbury's questioning of Chambers also produced a fuller picture of Chambers' account of his days in the communist underground - as well as more inconsistencies in his story - than he had revealed to HUAC. For more on this, see the excerpts from William A. Reuben's forthcoming book, "The Crimes of Alger Hiss."