Dreamers and Deceivers (31 page)

Hiss also enjoyed showing off his well-honed oratory talents. Inmates at Lewisburg were given the opportunity as part of their rehabilitation to take part in debates with local college students. Hiss trounced his Bucknell opponents so soundly that they barred him from any further appearances.

Lewisburg Penitentiary

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

November 27, 1954

It had been three and a half years since Alger Hiss first entered the Lewisburg Penitentiary. Some days had been better than others, but today—his last as a federal prisoner—was the one he had been looking forward to for all that time.

“I am very glad to use this chance,” Hiss said to a crowd of about seventy reporters who were waiting for him just outside the prison walls, “to reassert my complete innocence of the charges that were brought against me by Whittaker Chambers.” Already beginning to cast himself as a political martyr, he added, “I have had to wait in silence while, in my absence, a myth has been developed. I hope that the return of the mere man will help to dispel the myth.”

In a sense, Lewisburg had been a test run for Alger: an experiment of sorts. He had learned to develop a persona that would keep him safe in federal prison. Now he would develop a persona that would convince the public he was exactly the opposite of what he really was: a man who had spied on his country on behalf of one of history’s most brutal and totalitarian dictatorships. Hiss knew this would require showing people what they wanted to see, and telling them what they wanted to hear. And he would need plenty of allies. His family, friends, and any others he could recruit would all need to become accomplices to his grand scheme.

Upon his release, Hiss’s wife, Priscilla, wanted them to move away. Change their names. Forget their past. But Alger was not about to lie low and fade away into history.

The case of Alger Hiss had ended in the American legal system. But in the American political system, it was just beginning.

Princeton University

April 26, 1956

The public interest was intense. When five hundred press credentials were requested, the university intervened, declaring that Alger Hiss’s talk would last thirty minutes, including questions, and that only two hundred students and fifty reporters could attend.

This was to be Hiss’s first public appearance since being released from prison, and every reporter in America seemed intent on being there. It was just as Hiss had guessed. He had lost his law license, and was effectively blackballed from meaningful work, but he saw the Princeton invite as an opportunity to begin propelling his rehabilitation strategy forward.

The invitation from Princeton came from a student group that had invited a number of widely known public figures to address “The Meaning of Geneva,” a reference to the 1955 U.S.-Soviet disarmament conference that had taken place in Switzerland. When the group announced that Hiss would attend its meeting, there was a hue and cry from the Princeton faithful.
A convicted perjurer is attempting to use Princeton’s prestige to restore his reputation!
The university’s administration, while opposed to the appearance, defended the right of its students to invite Hiss, despite alumni displeasure.

Hiss dined at the home of his friend, Princeton history professor Elmer Beller, before the address. After supper, Hiss, Beller, and a few others followed a police escort through a horde of protesting American Legion members and alumni to Whig Hall. Papier-mâché pumpkins, anti-Hiss signs, and other artwork decrying the “Traitor Hiss” had decorated the campus all day.

When it was all over, not much had changed. Hiss knew his remarks that evening had been fairly dull. He was frustrated; his plans for a comeback had not progressed at all in the short time since his release. The conditions were not right, he reasoned. The court system had afforded him due process and Hiss had been convicted. Authorities and “the system” were still respected in America.

But he knew that would change. It always did. And once that happened, he would be ready to take full advantage.

18 Years Later

Baltimore, Maryland

May 21, 1974

Standing before the crowd at Johns Hopkins, Alger Hiss was resplendent in a three-piece suit. Carrying an unlit pipe in his hand, he was in a buoyant mood—and not just because he was being well received by his alma mater.

Richard Nixon, his old nemesis, was now knee-deep in a scandal of epic proportions. Nixon’s veracity and credibility were being questioned—and not just over Watergate, but over everything in his life, including his legendary prosecution of Alger Hiss. In a sense, the Hiss case became a cause célèbre among liberals eager to further demonize Nixon and the Republicans. Alger Hiss had protested his innocence from the outset, never wavering. Now more and more people were beginning to believe him.

Hiss spoke at Johns Hopkins for forty-five minutes—touching on revelations from newly released tapes in which President Nixon talked to aide John Dean about his case. “Then we worked that thing,” Nixon told Dean. “We then got the evidence, we got the typewriter, we got the ‘pumpkin papers.’ The FBI did not cooperate. The Justice Department did not cooperate.”

Some who heard Nixon’s words believed he was reveling in past triumphs. But to others, especially to those who were inclined to suspect the worst about everything Nixon said, the president was all but confessing that he’d tampered with the Hiss case for political fame.

Hiss, of course, preferred the latter version of events, and he worked the partisan crowd, filled with antiwar and anti-Nixon lefties, to that end. He was a victim of government persecution, he claimed, “forgery by typewriter.” Nixon was a modern-day Inspector Javert, determined to ruin a good man.

When asked if he was bitter toward Nixon, Hiss took the high road.
“No one who did unkind things to me was the cause for bitterness,” he said. “Chambers was out of his head and Nixon was a man on the up escalator.”

Then, in a clear, steady voice, he added, “None of what went on was justified. It was all hyped up for political purposes. There was certainly no domestic threat of communism.”

Alger Hiss left the stage that night more triumphant than he’d been in years. Things were finally going his way.

Boston, Massachusetts

August 5, 1975

A unanimous decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court concluded that, despite his conviction for perjury, Alger Hiss had demonstrated the “moral and intellectual fitness” required to be an attorney at law. Supported by prominent leftists across the country, he was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar.

Hiss was the first lawyer to have been reinstated in the commonwealth’s history. More important to him, however, was the tacit nod of approval this action gave to his character. It was, to Hiss, one more important rung in his climb back to social prominence.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

October 8, 1975

“I was just the right size,” Hiss told students at the University of Pittsburgh, nodding in agreement, as he outlined the conservatives’ conspiracy against him. “I had been at Yalta, which people regarded as very sinister. I had worked in the United Nations. I also think some of the people who found me a communist thought I was Jewish.”

There was no question about it any longer: Thanks to Richard Nixon, Alger Hiss was a hit on college campuses.

Brimming with confidence, Hiss needled Nixon’s successor, whose approval ratings had plummeted after issuing Nixon a pardon over
Watergate. Hiss claimed he had contacted the
New York Times
to offer a statement: “If Mr. Ford is so handy with pardons, I’d be glad to get one—not on the basis of clemency, but on the basis of miscarriage of justice.”

17 Years Later

New York City

October 29, 1992

The polished voice of Alger Hiss had not waned after eighty-two years. And he still had much to say. “It won’t settle things for people I’ve regarded as prejudiced from the beginning,” he told a reporter, “but I think this is a final verdict on the thing.”

The report from General Dmitri Volkogonov, chairman of the military intelligence archives of the new post-Soviet government, was unequivocal: “Not a single document—and a great amount of materials have been studied—substantiates the allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union.” Volkogonov added that the espionage accusations against Hiss were “completely groundless.”

Some Americans found the revelation as shocking as it was curious. How could one man have possibly seen all of the intelligence of the bureaucratic and bloated Soviet government that had been gathered over six decades?

Hiss had little interest in questions like that. He was surprised and delighted by the unexpected stroke of good luck. “Rationally, I realized time was running out, and that the correction of Chambers’s charges might not come about in my lifetime,” he said. “But inside I was sure somehow that I would be vindicated.”

That feeling did not last for long.

New York City

October 23, 1993

Maria Schmidt, a Hungarian historian who had been researching the work of the dreaded Hungarian secret police, turned over the
documents to Cold War scholars. Looking through the once-restricted files of the Interior Ministry, she discovered a thick dossier of documents that included the statements of a Soviet spy named Noel Field.

According to the documents, Field, an American who had worked with Alger Hiss at the State Department, told Hungarian authorities that Hiss had recruited him as a spy. Field had called Hiss a friend and trusted confidant, one of his greatest accomplices in the communist underground. Another document described Field’s view of Hiss’s self-assured testimony to HUAC:

Alger defended himself . . . with great intelligence. He had been trained as a lawyer and knew all the phrases and tricks. I, on the other hand, had no such experience. . . . I did not trust myself to stand before my accusers and shout “innocent” in their faces. . . . I also understood the same from a short letter from Hiss, who obviously could not write openly.

The revelations stunned even the most hardened Hiss defenders, especially as another major defender of the story began to crumble. General Dmitri Volkogonov, who had offered confident assurances of Hiss’s innocence only a year earlier, was now changing his tune. He had only seen selected archives, he confessed, explaining that many other files probably had been destroyed in the Stalin era.

But the new allegations did not faze Alger Hiss. He continued to proclaim his innocence to anyone who would listen. The Field documents, Hiss claimed, were invalid because Field, who was in Hungarian custody during the Stalinist-era purges, had made his statements under obvious duress.

EPILOGUE

New York City

November 15, 1996

Alger Hiss died at the age of ninety-two, but that did not stop the debate over his guilt—especially in the media. In its eulogy, the
New York Times
labeled Hiss “the erudite diplomat and Harvard-trained
government lawyer.” It called his conviction for perjury “one of the great riddles of the Cold War.”

The Associated Press published an obituary that cited General Dmitri Volkogonov’s earlier proclamation of Hiss’s innocence, without noting that the general had later backtracked on his statements.
NBC Nightly News
followed suit, with Tom Brokaw saying, “Hiss considered vindication a declaration by a Russian general, who controlled the KGB archives, saying that Hiss had never been a spy. Alger Hiss, dead tonight at age 92.”

Media aside, all reasonable questions about Hiss’s guilt were laid to rest right alongside him. In 1994, the State Department had made public an internal security probe of Hiss done nearly five decades earlier. The probe found that he had taken highly classified documents on matters of national security that were of great interest to the Soviets, for which he was not authorized. Hiss had quietly resigned after the investigation was completed.

Earlier in 1996, the National Security Agency made public a decrypted transcript of a Soviet cable describing a Soviet spy serving in the American delegation known as “Ales.” But it was the agency’s three-word annotation that garnered everyone’s attention: “Probably Alger Hiss.” The transcripts were from a large collection of coded Soviet cables, known as Venona, which the NSA had broken years ago, but which were not declassified until the 1990s. All told they identified 349 citizens and others legally residing in the United States who had worked for Soviet intelligence. “Ales” was prominent among them, and the details about this man’s activities and life fit Hiss’s nearly perfectly.

Not only had the U.S. government
not
framed Alger Hiss, but it had, in fact, covered up the most damning evidence against him for at least twenty-five years after making the determination that “Ales” and Hiss were the same person.

Until Venona, Hiss had been able to use others as a shield. He claimed their class prejudices, their political views, their family ties, all blinded them to the overwhelming evidence of his innocence. But as the
Wall Street Journal
noted, after Venona, the only people still proclaiming Hiss’s innocence were those who would not be convinced even had he personally confessed.

New York City

April 2007

On its website, CBS News trumpeted the headline “Author: Hiss Innocent of Espionage.” The network, long suspected of left-wing bias, had covered a daylong symposium at New York University, where one panelist claimed Hiss had been confused with another State Department official.

Alger Hiss’s stepson, who was also on the panel, claimed that there was another motive entirely for Chambers’s accusations against his stepfather. “It is my conviction that Whittaker Chambers was in love with Alger Hiss, that he was rejected by Alger Hiss and he took that rejection in a vindictive way.”

He offered no discernible proof for the assertion.

The willful suspension of disbelief over the motivations and dangers—even the very existence—of America’s sworn enemies continued virtually unabated, a trend that would continue to pose serious threats to America’s safety in the years ahead.