![]() ![]() Nixon and HUAC investigator Robert Stripling, were unpersuaded by Hiss's denials. With his impressive background, high-placed connections, and polished, self-assured manner, Hiss made a far better impression on most committee members and observers than Chambers, a rumpled, admitted ex-Communist of dubious reputation. Two days later Hiss testified that he had never been a Communist Party member or sympathizer and had never known Chambers. The FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began a series of investigations, during which the record of Chambers's 1939 interview with Berle was uncovered, On August 3, 1948, Chambers appeared before the HUAC under subpoena and publicly named the members of his former Communist apparatus in Washington, including Hiss. ![]() He immersed himself in his career at Time, where he began as a book reviewer in 1939 and rose to senior editor by 1948 in hard labor on his Westminster, Maryland, farm and in the Quaker faith to which he converted.Īs Soviet-American relations deteriorated after World War II, concerns about domestic Communist infiltration and subversion were taken more seriously. Roosevelt belittled Chambers's story and Dean Acheson and Justice Felix Frankfurter, Hiss's former law professor and friend, vouched for Hiss.3 Discouraged by this response and wishing to build a new life for himself and his family, Chambers now sought to distance himself from his past. Berle was slow to investigate and dropped the matter after President Franklin D. Berle, Jr., of Hiss's Communist affiliation and activity. In September 1939, further disaffected by Stalin's pact with Adolf Hitler, he informed Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Influenced by Josef Stalin's party purges, Chambers defected from the Communist Party in April 1938. While at the State Department he helped arrange United States participation in the Yalta Conference and organized the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences leading to establishment of the United Nations. Hiss held progressively more responsible posts in the State Department before leaving government service in 1946 to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss moved to the State Department in 1936, where he became director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. In 1933, at Frankfurter's urging, Hiss joined President Roosevelt's New Deal Administration. ![]() Felix Frankfurter, arranged for him to work as a clerk for Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Educated at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, he became a protege of Prof. Hiss had impeccable establishment credentials. His duties included obtaining information from these officials and passing it on to a Soviet intelligence operative in New York.Īmong his Washington contacts was Alger Hiss. ![]() He came to Washington in the latter capacity in 1934 and made contact with several government officials identified as party members or sympathizers. Initially employing his literary talent as a writer for The Daily Worker, he later went underground as an espionage agent. In 1925 he dropped out of Columbia and joined the Communist Party. From his boyhood on Long Island, New York, he went to Columbia University and there became radicalized to Marxism. Whittaker Chambers was born April 1, 1901, to a politically conservative family of intellectual and artistic achievement. The case became a focus of obsessive fascination, a morass of conspiracy theories and lingering doubts of the sort later seen among Kennedy assassination buffs. The Hiss case was a Dreyfus affair which went wrong. ![]()
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