HISTORICAL NOTES: The Alger Hiss Story

As Alger Hiss walked out of the Lewisburg (Pa.) federal penitentiary in December 1954—on parole after serving 44 months of a five-year sentence for perjury —he carried under his arm a package wrapped in Manila paper. Assuming that the package held his notes and papers, reporters asked if he intended to write a book. Replied Hiss: “I certainly intend to do some writing.” Last fall the literary grapevine buzzed with the news that Manhattan Publisher Alfred Knopf had bought the Hiss manuscript, and the gossip columns predicted that it would be one of the sensations of the year.

Published this week, Alger Hiss’s In the Court of Public Opinion (Knopf; $5) turns out to be a heavily legalistic, dully written analysis of the Hiss case; lawyers will instantly recognize it as a rewrite of Hiss’s motion for a new trial, which the courts denied. Hiss stoutly maintains his innocence of the charge that he committed perjury when he denied giving State Department secrets to Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers. His defense is essentially the same one that his lawyers used in his 1949 and 1950 trials. Author Alger Hiss seems remarkably devoid of personal outrage, but he pictures Defendant Alger Hiss as a political martyr in an era of “great, unreasoning fear of Communism.” In the argot of the prison yard, he was “framed.”

A Conspiring Era. As Hiss tells it, the case against him was a kind of conspiracy that began with one man and extended to the whole era. The man was Chambers—admitted longtime Communist who became a crusading anti-Communist (and senior editor of TIME), and denounced Hiss during the tumultuous hearings of the House Committee on un-American Activities in 1948. Chambers’ performance, Hiss says, was a deliberate effort to frame an innocent man he had known only briefly and casually a dozen years before—for reasons that Hiss is still at a loss to explain. The House Committee, Hiss goes on, had a “political stake” in finding a Communist spy; the FBI, investigating the case, became “overzealous.” The federal grand jury that indicted Hiss was stampeded by the committee and by “that portion of the public inflamed by the sensational press”; the man who prosecuted him (Thomas F. Murphy, now a U.S. district judge) outrageously “exploited the fear of Communism and the public loathing of Communists.”

Some jurors in his first trial, where the jury deadlocked 8-4 for conviction, dared to “go beyond the record and be their own witnesses” (by acting as their own experts on typewritten documents), Hiss writes. Some of the jurors in his second trial, at which he was convicted, were against him from the start and “lobbied” others over to their side. U.S. District Judge Henry W. Goddard, who presided at his second trial, was partial to the prosecution; the Appeals Court judge (Harrie B. Chase) who wrote the opinion denying his appeal failed to make a careful study of the, record, and developed “grave misconceptions” of the case.

A Friendly Climate. Lawyer Hiss wildly overstates the climate against him. The fact was that much of official Washington was solidly and politically on the side of Democrat Hiss at the time that Chambers challenged him. President Harry Truman called the hearings before the Republican-controlled House Committee a “red herring”; Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared he would “not turn my back on Alger Hiss.”

In the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Tom Clark, there was strong sentiment for the indictment of Chambers; two Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed—testified as character witnesses for Defendant Hiss at the first trial. And many of the leading lights of the Washington press corps made no secret of their liking for Hiss (a longstanding news source at the State Department) and their dislike of phlegmatic, pipe-smoking ex-Communist Chambers.

A Great Deception. Hiss winds up his literary case in precisely the same place where his legal case foundered: the charge that he was ultimately a victim of “forgery by typewriter.” During the trials, the case against Hiss was nailed down by documents which included typewritten pages of secret information that Chambers said Hiss had given him. In an effort to deal with this part of the Chambers case, the defense traced Hiss’s old Woodstock typewriter to its new owner and brought it into court during the trial. It turned out to be, indeed, the typewriter that had typed the documents.

In their motion for a new trial, Hiss’s attorneys in effect charged: during a brief interval in 1935-36 when Hiss had befriended Chambers, Chambers had stolen some samples of typing from Hiss’s old Woodstock; at some time over the ensuing dozen years (for reasons totally unexplained) Chambers had somehow got someone to build a machine that would type exactly like the old Woodstock, had typed the sheets of espionage material, and then planted the fake machine where Hiss’s own investigators would find it and bring it into court. This argument was effectively demolished by the Government’s answer to the new-trial motion, in which U.S. District Attorney Myles Lane described the new Hiss argument as “a combination of a Grimm fairy tale with a bit of a Rube Goldberg twist.” But Hiss rests his book, and in effect, his hope for vindication, on this forgery charge.

Deploring the fact that the motion for a new trial based on this theory was denied in 1952, Hiss writes: “Like so many other events in the case, even the disposition of this motion had a political setting. The case had begun four years earlier in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Judge Goddard denied the motion for a new trial on July 22, during the sessions of the Democratic Convention that was to nominate Adlai E. Stevenson, who had been one of my character witnesses.”

All in all, Alger Hiss’s book adds little that is new to a case that ran the full course of American justice.