As with the vivid color differences of my initial recollections, the separate roles of Aunt Lila and my mother were always clear. There was no confusion as to their household functions. My mother was in charge. Lila was her assistant, an assistant whose help was pretty much limited to being a companion for the children.

My father had been an executive of a large wholesale dry-goods firm, a man overwhelmed by financial and family worries. Suicide was a blow that was shameful as well as tragic for any family in those years, and mine reacted to the shame by silence. I did not know that my father had taken his own life until I was about ten years old and I overheard the remark of a neighbor sitting on her front steps talking with another neighbor. As my younger brother and I passed by, we heard her say, "Those are the children of the suicide."

Donald and I had been shielded from the shameful act; there was not even a hint of a family secret. The solicitude of relatives and friends for my immediate family was demonstrated in part by their reticence. The tragedy that had overwhelmed the household had been relegated to the sphere of nonexistence. Consequently, I was angered by the callous remark that I believed to be false and insulting. It remains one of my most painful and indelible memories.
On the whole, however, my childhood memories are of a lively and cheerful household, full of the bustle of constant comings and goings. The shock of learning by accident of my father's suicide was lessened by the warm family spirit I remember so well. Donald and I went immediately to Bosley, as our confidant. We wanted to protect our mother from the ugly remark, for we of course accepted the then prevailing view of suicide. But, to our consternation, Bosley did not share our disbelief and anger. Instead, like the journalist he later became, he went to the offices of the Baltimore Sun and examined old copies of the paper. He then solemnly confirmed the report we had so vigorously rejected.

I recognized that my mother and the other adults in my life had known of the suicide, but somehow I did not feel resentment at having been kept in the dark. Once I had learned the adult secret, I joined in the family policy of silence. I must have felt that if my mother wouldn't talk to me about it, neither should I talk about it within the family. It was years before I mentioned my father's suicide to anyone but Donald, and even we spoke of it rarely.

I certainly never broached the subject to Aunt Lila, though in many ways I was closer to her than I was to my mother. This may have been partly due to my mother's being the family magistrate, although her severest punishment was a slap with a ruler on the palm of an extended hand. When I went to my mother for solace of a hurt, I was likely to receive a homily on how best to get on in the world. In contrast, Aunt Lila could be counted on for sympathetic understanding. My mother's fortitude in adversity was magnificent, but she was not cut out for the role of confidante. My father had left her our house and a modest income, which she used to raise and educate us all. One of her duties, she felt, was to prepare us for our role in life. Conventional in her values, she was ambitious for our success in a material sense.

Aunt Lila wanted something different for us, something less worldly. She wanted us to share her love of literature, her respect for learning and morality. But she was not preachy, so that her wishes were never just words of advice. I felt I had an ally in her, if a silent one, when I resisted my mother's favorite admonition: "Put your best foot forward." Long before I read Henry James, I was suspicious of the bitch goddess Success. And in retrospect, I can see that Aunt Lila's persistent commitment to things of the spirit gave a nice balance to my mother's emphasis on the importance of life's practical demands.

My clearest recollections of Aunt Lila are of her reading aloud to us. She began this practice before I was old enough to be an orderly member of her audience. This was a carryover of a familiar nineteenth-century American custom. She read in a clear, conversational tone. Yet her readings were a performance, a festive occasion, and perhaps it was here that my lifelong love of the theater began. Lila's audience often included friends of my older siblings and sometimes adults. When the girls went away to college, we boys continued to receive the rich benefits of Aunt Lila's reading and other literate gifts.

The Hisses were not a distinguished family run down. in his final tragedy, his friends and enemies would join in exaggerating the nobility of his origins. When disaster came to him, he was listed in the Washington Social Register, but his mother was not in its Baltimore edition.

Alger Hiss's father was a wholesale grocer; he committed suicide when Alger was nine. His older brother was a bohemian who died young. They lived near Lanville Street, which is the heart of shabby gentility in Baltimore. As he grew up, more substantial families around him were moving out into the suburbs. The Hisses stayed there in a neighborhood slowly running down. They were not a family of special social prestige, but the Baltimore in which Alger Hiss grew up had its own corner for the sort of family that... rested on that border between respectability and assured position. In the circumstances of her life, society felt a particular sympathy for Alger Hiss's mother.... In a family like this one.... it was better to be a boy than a girl, if only because Baltimore needed more boys than girls at debutante
parties.

Alger Hiss was born in 1904, the fourth of five children in an upper-middle-class Presbyterian family in Baltimore. The Hiss family was financially comfortable but emotionally troubled. When Alger was only two years old, his father committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. When Alger was 25, his sister Mary Ann committed suicide by drinking a household cleanser. Hiss’s older brother Bosley, died when he was in his early twenties of Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder aggravated by Bosley’s overindulgence in alcohol.

As a young man, the slim, handsome, and dapper Alger impressed most people as self-confident and more than a few as arrogant. He appeared to have avoided the depression that afflicted other members of his family and achieved success at a young age. Hiss graduated from John Hopkins University in 1926. While there, he shone both academically and in extracurricular activities. He was a Phi Beta Kappa, a cadet commander in ROTC, and was voted “most popular student” by his graduating class.

When I was a student at the Harvard Law School, from September 1926 until June 1929, Felix Frankfurter was far and away the most colorful and controversial member of the faculty. Brilliant and irrepressible, he was much more than a campus figure. His innumerable close friendships with leaders all over the country and abroad had already made him a man of national prominence by the time I was his student.

He was always conspicuous, despite his small stature, as he moved about the campus. This was because as he bounced along-short, dynamic, articulate - he was invariably surrounded by a cluster of students. Frankfurter was always teaching, in class and out. His didactic style was challenging, even confrontational. He invited discussion and he reveled in sharp exchanges. These continued after class had ended.

But Frankfurter was not popular with the majority of his students or his fellow faculty members. In both cases the reasons, I believe, were the same.

Frankfurter was cocky, abrasive, and outspoken. His style was simply not theirs. In addition, Frankfurter was the leader of the liberal wing of the faculty. Most of his older colleagues were politically conservative, as were most of the students.

The great legal scholar Dean John H. Wigmore of the Chicago Law School was among Frankfurter's opponents in the dispute over the Sacco and Vanzetti case, calling Frankfurter with distaste a "plausible pundit" - fighting words in the mannerly decorum of academia in those days. A stout civil libertarian, Frankfurter was a vigorous champion of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, right up to their execution in the summer of 1927 and afterward. He participated actively in groups formed to aid them, and he spoke and wrote tirelessly in their behalf. Frankfurter and those who shared his views were shocked at what they considered glaring errors in the conduct of the trial by the prosecutor-errors uncorrected, and indeed compounded, by the judge. Prejudice had run high against the defendants as Italians and as anarchists, and Frankfurter was outraged by instances where prejudice affected the conduct of the case. It raised questions about the fairness of Massachusetts justice, polarized opinions in that state, and aroused strong feeling throughout the nation and the western world.

Frankfurter's prominence in the Sacco-Vanzetti case made him a marked man in Boston, an object of bitter hostility on the part of the conservatives. It brought him into sharp conflict with the president of his own university, A. Lawrence Lowell, who served on the Massachusetts commission that recommended against clemency. The executions did not put a stop to Frankfurter's charges of a gross miscarriage of justice, or to the rancor aroused by the case. Wherever Frankfurter went, he attracted attention. During intermissions at Symphony Hall, where Boston's prominent citizens gathered, he was both glared at and beamed upon as he bounced and bobbed through the crowded lobbies. He seemed to enjoy the notoriety.

At the same time that Frankfurter's fearless championing of Sacco and Vanzetti made him a target of conservatives, it won him national acclaim from liberals as a defender of civil liberties. His stand was thoroughly consistent with his political views in general. He tended to speak with almost ribald disapproval of those he considered the reactionaries in our society, including judge Webster Thayer, who had presided at the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and had expressed his prejudices against them to a golfing companion. Such people, Frankfurter would say impishly, regarded themselves as men of importance but were really closer to being "the scum of society." He would utter such comments only at home with friends, but he never attempted to disguise his views in class, either.

Harvard Law School's traditional method of teaching involves sharp, incisive, even sarcastic questioning. While the technique often causes embarrassment or humiliation for the students, the practice, at least in my day, was generally accepted as a helpful means of sharpening their wits, teaching them to think and speak precisely when challenged. Frankfurter's obvious enjoyment of this form of verbal fencing made many of his students feel that he was displaying personal hostility, engaging in unfair ridicule. I didn't take any of his large lecture courses, so I can't personally assess those complaints. But I can well imagine Frankfurter being carried away by his showman's gifts and a large audience.

Frankfurter was a dedicated teacher, generous with his time, sympathetic to the aspirations of youth. I think his unpopularity with many students was based less on his teaching style than on his political views.

We students in his small seminars had full opportunity to benefit from his remarkable personality. His energy, his vitality electrified the room from the moment he came in. Yet his manner with us was gentle. Usually in high good spirits, he would from time to time explode into laughter or into an outburst of friendly remonstrance if one of us said something he found ludicrously or perversely incorrect. He was as demanding of us for accuracy as he was reputed to be of the men in his large classes, but with us there was no hint of ridicule.

In the two seminars I took with him, our subjects were the federal courts and administrative tribunals. They were fields he had made his special domain. In another's hands, the material might have been dustily technical. Felix, as we students spoke of him to one another, had the love of his subject, and the ability to impart it, that marks the true teacher. He venerated "the rule of law" and passionately strove for its evenhanded administration. He knew personally, or knew all about, the judges and commissioners whose rulings we examined. He was understanding of the pressures they faced, but when they failed to exemplify the high standards he set, he was stern in disapproval.

His emphasis on practical realities, including the human factors, made the courses seem like internships.
Frankfurter's enthusiasm for high-principled federal service was infectious. Many of us who were his students at Harvard later responded to the New Deal's need for lawyers, and he presided proudly over our recruitment into federal service.

Near the conclusion of my final year at Harvard Law School, I was surprised-indeed, overwhelmed-to receive a handwritten note from Justice Holmes. It informed me that on the recommendation of Felix Frankfurter, my favorite Harvard professor, the Justice had chosen me as his private secretary for the following year. Holmes wrote that if I were to accept I was to report to his house in Washington on the Friday before the first Monday in October (the fall term of the Supreme Court begins on that Monday). He added that because of his age - he was then eighty-eight-he must reserve the right to resign or die. This appointment was to me a much more important certification of my accomplishment as a law student than was the diploma iself. The opportunity to continue my legal education under the supervision of this eminent jurist was by far the greatest prize the law school could offer.

Holmes had had a new secretary annually since his appointment by President Theodore Roosevelt to the Supreme Court in 1902. As Holmes and his wife were childless, the secretaries had played a special role in the justice's life, in some ways serving as surrogate sons. I was the first of them, however, to be permitted to read aloud to him. That privilege enabled me to have a considerably closer personal relationship with the justice than the post itself called for and also brought about that special bonus that I would otherwise have missed in my year of service with him: I became privy to the existence of the justice's Black Book, his most personal record of his legal and general reading and the nearest thing to a diary that he kept. After his death, his executor, John Palfrey, had facsimile copies made of the Black Book and sent one to each of his secretaries, with the appropriate stipulation that none of us permit publication or duplication of it. The original is kept with the Holmes papers at the Harvard Law School Library, where it is available for examination by scholars.

I had had no previous hint of any possibility that I might spend a year with the great justice. He was the revered and beloved idol of students and faculty. I had not even known how his secretaries were chosen. Frankfurter, who had become my friend as well as my teacher, had with proper delicacy not mentioned his role as the selector of secretaries for both Holmes and Justice Louis D. Brandeis, much less that he had chosen me. No other honor or piece of good fortune has been such a source of delight for me as was that enchanted year I spent with Holmes beginning in October 1929. And no other relationship has had a deeper or more lasting influence.

Later that October, I was attending the performance of some now forgotten play. At intermission, I witnessed a number of men hurrying up the aisles and to the exits, leaving their companions behind. In the lobby, there was an air of agitation, and a great many men were waiting impatiently in lines that had formed at the few public telephones. Others dashed out to the sidewalk. Only when I saw the next day's newspaper did I realize that I had witnessed the herald of the Great Depression in the stock market crash of October 24. The anxious men must have been trying to reach their brokers in attempts to salvage something from the margin accounts that were a feature of the prosperous late 1920s and their constantly rising bull markets. The news made little impression on me at the time, because I was completely preoccupied with a wholly different world.

I recall a talk that Frankfurter gave to an assortment of businessmen and bankers who were among Boston's leading citizens. He pleaded with them to make larger contributions to private charities for the benefit of the unemployed and others in financial difficulty. He intimated that this would be a means of forestalling social unrest with its consequent threats to their persons and properties. I found myself, somewhat presumptuously, believing that Frankfurter should have gone beyond a call for personal generosity. From his teaching and my own observations I had become convinced that only large-scale governmental activities could meet the demands of the Depression. I had begun to see the total inadequacy of private charitable activities, and I became acutely aware of the shallowness of my conventional concern for the welfare of others.

Later, when I moved to New York City, I saw daily the growing breadlines and soup kitchens, the shanty towns in parks and vacant lots, the beggars along with men who masked their appeal for alms by "selling" an apple. My continuous personal encounter with mounting misery gave sharp reality to accounts of similar and even worse conditions throughout the country.

Once Roosevelt's candidacy was announced, I was strongly attracted to his banner, but had no thought that I would do more to advance his cause than urge my friends to vote for him. Nonetheless, I had wanted to do something constructive in a private capacity, something that would help in a small way to set things right. That desire to participate led me to offer my legal skills to a small group of young and similarly motivated New York lawyers who had come together to issue a journal for labor lawyers and those representing hard-pressed farmers. The group had assumed a rather grandiose title: The International Juridical Association-the choice of the word "International" no doubt to make clear the more than American extent of the Depression. As I recollect, though, our efforts were limited to examination of domestic decisions.

We reasoned that most lawyers engaged in helping those severely hurt by the Depression would be hard put to undertake extensive research on their own. Therefore, we could supply a needed service. Like the others in the group, I contributed some of my free time to reading the latest court decisions in order to find current precedents that would be of use to those we wished to serve. By personal choice and because of my boyhood summers on an uncle's farm in Maryland, I became responsible for reading the decisions that dealt with agricultural issues.

The part-time research-my initiation to pro bono Publico work that is part of a lawyer's social responsibility-was a step in my growing acceptance of political commitment. The cases I read for the journal in 1932, which would not otherwise have come to my attention, made me realize how little access the victims of the Depression had to legal services and how little geared to their needs our legal system was. I learned that social justice also required political reform.

My work on the little journal likewise gave me a sense of identification with members of organized groups like labor unions and farm associations, who by joint efforts and with concrete social and political programs were actively trying to help themselves weather the Depression. Here was a sizable constituency urging reforms and prepared to support political action to gain them. Without realizing it, I was already indirectly in touch with the grass roots of the New Deal.

By the time of Roosevelt's victory that November, I had become totally convinced that he was bound to succeed in the urgent task of relief and reform. I had concluded that the Depression was not a natural disaster; it had been avoidable. It was the result of decrepit social structures, of mismanagement and greed. The old order had for long years blocked needed reforms and by its blunders and corruption had precipitated the crash. Our nation, rich in resources and talent, would under vigorous new leadership undo the damage and enact reforms that would prevent future disasters. My optimism was plainly shared by great numbers of those supporting Roosevelt; that in turn bolstered mine. Here was the emergence of a cohesive political force. This was not the fictive public of cartoonists and editorial writers. I was conscious of a feeling of kinship with a host of like-minded fellow citizens. The feeling was exhilarating and new to me.

My acceptance of a political commitment in response to Roosevelt's assumption of office represented the final major change in my social and political attitude. At the time, I did not sort out the various changes in my thinking. But in retrospect I can see that there was a gradual progression.

My awareness of acute social needs demanded a shifting of perspective in my ethical outlook. I was no longer concerned with what convention expected from me. The focus became the needs of others as I saw them. Before, the essence of my posture was propriety - my living up to what was expected of me. This pharisaical position, possible in the 1920s, was no longer so when misery and suffering were the common lot of millions of Americans.

My desire to follow the directive in Frankfurter's telegram was therefore prompt and wholehearted. I was more ready for it than I had realized. Here again, as with my participation in the International Juridical Association, I found that the views I had so recently reached and my inclination to act on them were shared by others of my age with backgrounds quite like my own. But though I was thus not the only young lawyer who went to Washington that March of 1933, there were not all that many of us. We were entitled to think of ourselves - and we most certainly did - as a select few. I had this time taken a step or two in advance of the ranks of my generation, even of my close associates, though some of them came soon after.

The position offered me by Jerome Frank was to be one of his two assistant general counsels in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. That agency, created by the Agricultural Adjustment Act of May 12, 1933, was set up as an integral part of the Department of Agriculture. The act was one of the torrential series of major enactments that issued from Congress during the "Hundred Days."

Until the agency's administrative procedures were established, Jerome Frank and I and other AAA recruits worked without salary, preparing drafts of proposed legislation and working on proposed future projects. Our time was fully occupied by these tasks and by consultations with experts from the Department of Agriculture, who educated us about the details of the catastrophic agricultural situation. My boyhood farm experiences and my recent experience with the International Juridical Association made much of this tutoring familiar and all of it congenial.

Agricultural production had been expanded during World War I, often by the sowing of marginal land. Cessation of wartime demand soon led to surpluses of cotton, corn, and wheat - to mention only the basic crops. This in turn had brought low prices, lowered farm values, and made a heavy burden of mortgages taken out before the stock market crashed in October 1929. The protective tariff, the Smoot-Hawley Act, passed in 1930 in an attempt to reduce competition in the domestic market for a variety of industrial products, had made matters worse for farmers. By reducing U. S. imports, it also reduced foreign holdings of dollars for the purchase of American farm exports, thus increasing the glut at home and further driving down prices.

The main thrust of the AAA was to raise farm prices by reducing production. This was to be done by two programs: contracts between the government and farmers to reduce their crops, and agreements among food processors and wholesalers to restrict their output. My job was in the former area. I was in charge of the section, composed of about twenty-five lawyers, that drafted contracts for paying farmers to reduce their production. This meant that my fellow lawyers and I worked with the commodity experts within the Department of Agriculture and the AAA on provisions suitable for controlling the production of the individual crops. In this manner we ourselves became familiar with the details of land tenure and informed about the soil and climate conditions most beneficial for the basic agricultural products.

With the appropriate agricultural experts, we would then hammer out the separate provisions of the various types of contracts. Drafts of the contracts were also taken up with the Farm Extension representatives in the local areas where contracts would be sent for signature.

My responsibilities also included supervision of the Opinion Section, which, as its name suggests, was responsible for giving legal opinions as to the meaning and scope of authority permissible under the act we were administering.
Cotton was already in bloom when the act was passed. For this reason, the cotton contracts called for plowing under a proportion of the plants, while, with respect to most other crops, contracts became effective only for the succeeding year and provided for reduced planting. Because the glut in cotton was extensive and because of the importance of cotton to the entire South, the cotton "plow-up" program was by far the most significant of the AAA's early programs.

It was at the same time the most controversial. Destruction of useful products cut across the grain of popular sentiment at a time when those who were out of work found themselves short of necessities.

Some of the criticism of the cotton program relied on humor to make its point. Though a stubborn animal, the southern mule had been trained to walk delicately between the cotton rows at this time of year, pulling the cultivator to turn over the weeds. Soon it was reported that farmers found it difficult to persuade the mules to forget their training: The animals balked at having to trample the cotton plants as they dragged behind them the plows turning up the rows. When Paul Porter, one of my friends in the AAA, told of this item of mulish behavior in a public account of a trip he'd made in the South, it drew the jibe from critics that even a jackass knows better than to plow up cotton.
Those opposed to the AAA's programs also objected to the contract that called for the slaughter of pregnant sows and little pigs in order to raise hog prices. But hog prices did go up, as did cotton prices. So, in terms of the AAA's principal objectives, the result of these and other programs was gratifying. Farm prices in general rose, the morale of farmers improved, and we were on our way to the creation of a farm production control program, which, with increasing drawbacks, has lasted to this day.

For those of us who had come to the New Deal as social reformers, there were, however, some disturbing aspects of the AAA's cotton programs. Wheat, corn, and tobacco crops could be subjected to production controls with beneficial results to all who produced these crops. Cotton, by contrast, was still produced in the main on large plantations, which supported numbers of tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Each contract normally covered a separate farm, and its benefit payment went to the owner. For cotton, it seemed to us liberals in the AAA that, instead of this practice, shares of the compensation payment should go directly to the tenant farmers and sharecroppers whose crops were actually turned under. The contract form we drafted so provided. However, some of the landlord-owners, whose relations with their tenants were highly paternalistic, almost feudal, thought that all payment checks should go first to them and that they should make the disbursements.

The contract provision brought me, a mere bureaucrat, the distinction of a personal call in my office from the formidable dean of conservative southern senators, "Cotton Ed" Smith, Democrat from South Carolina. He wanted to know why he shouldn't be trusted to pay out shares of benefit payments to his own "nigras." I replied that I did not make policy; the Senator would have to address himself to my superiors. They stood firm. And, fortunately, most cotton farmers found the payment provisions acceptable. The sign-up campaign was not adversely affected, and this conflict between long-established traditions and liberal principles was handily solved.

But as we began drafting the contract for the cotton crop that would be harvested in 1934, we were faced by the plight of tenants and croppers who would be idled by the reduction in acreage. The political power of the big plantation owners was too great for us to prevent evictions.

A different conflict of interest was raised for us by the marketing agreements that permitted processors and wholesalers to fix prices and limit output. On one occasion, Senator James Pope of Idaho, a Democrat, a model of propriety and a stalwart supporter of the New Deal, called Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace to say that some of the finest people in Idaho, large-scale pear growers, had complained to him that young lawyers of the AAA had been insisting on provisions in their marketing agreements that would be injurious to their interests. He told Wallace that he didn't want to bring pressure on the Secretary's independent judgment-he just wanted to pass along the information. On the following day, the Senator called again, now to say that a delegation of small growers had just paid him a visit. They had been delayed in reaching Washington because, for financial reasons, they had come east by car. They complained to him of the undue influence of the big growers and praised the efforts of AAA officials to protect the rights of the small fellow. Pope said he was washing his hands of the situation and leaving it entirely up to Wallace.

My chief colleagues in Jerome Frank's office and I were part of a legion of Young Turks who manned many of the legal jobs of the early New Deal. We were few enough in number and similar enough in backgrounds and beliefs to feel common bonds. We were a band of brothers-members of a citizens' militia in mufti, mustered to fight the ills of the Depression. As a matter of course we consulted one another on our official problems. Our mutual stimulation ensured group efforts that went beyond the sum of our individual talents and energies. Functioning in a novel national predicament, we were creating our own precedents. The latest solution of one legislative or litigative problem was shared as likely to be useful in the daily duties of our fellows. We came together at lunch or dinner or of an evening in informally assembled work teams to deal with common concerns or with assuring coordination or cooperation among our various bureaus. Plans to create a new agency-such as the national Labor Relations Board - quite naturally called forth a gathering of an ad hoc group to formulate a program, to draft legislation or regulations.

Hiss's Washington journey from the AAA, one of the most innovative agencies established at the outset of the New Deal, to the State Department, a bastion of traditionalism in spite of its New Deal component, could have been nothing more than the rising trajectory of a committed careerist. But it was also a trajectory well suited to the aims of Soviet espionage agents in the United States, who hoped to penetrate the more traditional government agencies, like the State, War, and Treasury Departments, with young New Dealers sympathetic to the Soviet Union (whether or not they were actually members of the Party). Chambers, among others, would testify that the eventual penetration of the government was the ultimate aim of a group initially overseen in Washington by Hal Ware, a Communist and the son of Mother Bloor, who had rejoiced in the "sentiment" that the Popular Front had engendered in the Party. Hiss, Chambers would testify, was a member of the Ware group. When members did succeed in moving up the government ladder, they were supposed to separate from the Ware organization, which was well known for its Marxist participants. Chambers was dispatched from New York by underground Party superiors to supervise and coordinate the transmission of information and to ride herd on underground Communists-Hiss among them-with government jobs. A consistent theme of many of Hiss's defenders from the sixties on would be that Chambers had never been a Soviet spy-that his account of his secret life as an agent was as delusional as his claim of having been a close friend of Alger and Priscilla Hiss.

In the late summer of 1934, I took an additional job-that of counsel to the Senate Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry. That committee, headed by Senator Gerald P. Nye, Republican of North Dakota, had asked the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for the loan of my services. The committee received strong support from two large sectors of the public. One group, which included almost all veterans, resented the profiteering associated with arms contracts. The other, especially strong in the Midwest, cherished the long-standing American isolationist sentiments.

In the early days of the Nye Committee, as the body soon became known, its emphasis was upon "taking the profits out of war." The theme was widely popular at the time, and the committee was given major press coverage. Hitler's bellicose statements following his accession to power, in January 1933, had stirred fears of war which brought with them demands for rearmament among Germany's neighbors. Military orders from abroad were attractive to Depression-ridden American manufacturers of airplanes and other products useful for war-making...

Much of the New Deal's ardor was prompted by resentment of the corporate greed that had preceded and in part precipitated the Depression. Consequently, many of us New Dealers were sympathetic to the Nye Committee's populist fulminations against war profiteers. Sympathy for the purposes of the committee no doubt played some part in my being lent to them, but the AAA had a more direct reason to assist the committee. Two of its members were also on the Senate Committee on Agriculture.

The presence on the Nye Committee of Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan no doubt also increased the willingness of the AAA to cooperate with the committee. Vandenberg was notable for his vigor and ability as a leading Republican member of the Senate. For my part, I found the subject matter to be of national importance, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to gain more experience in the preparation of factual briefs of evidence and the examination of witnesses...

The members of the committee were a diverse and interesting lot. Only Senator Warren Barbour, Republican of New Jersey, took little or no interest in the proceedings. In my few contacts with him I found him colorless. In this respect he was not only unlike his committee colleagues but also quite unlike his naturalist brother, Thomas, a personal friend of justice Holmes. I had met Thomas Barbour during the year I served with the justice and remembered vividly that he could always be counted on for extraordinary tales of adventure and misadventure - such as the one about the escape from its container of a large boa constrictor that he had smuggled aboard an overnight Pullman car.

The other members of the munitions committee were all men of prominence, and each was a distinct personality. Nye, the chairman, was a Midwest populist who was friendly, outgoing, and breezy in manner. For him, the committee's subject matter and its extensive public visibility were important political assets that he made the most of. He was the panel's customary spokesman and as such was usually accompanied by a reporter or two as he moved across the Capitol grounds, and a cluster of pressmen often besieged his office.

James P. Pope, Democrat of Idaho, was a large, gentle, and kindly man. Liberal in his political views, he was a staunch supporter of the New Deal and later became a member of the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Homer Bone, Democrat of Washington, and like Pope a stalwart New Dealer, was a veteran of the political struggle for publicly owned power in the state of Washington. Like most New Deal advocates, Bone was no friend of big business. His espousal of the cause of public power had come about because, he said, large utilities were able to influence, if not control, regulating bodies set up to oversee their procedures and profits. "Who will regulate the regulators?" he was fond of asking in sessions with the committee staff when discussions turned to the possibility of wartime regulation to "take the profits out of war." Bone was intelligent, informed, and readily accessible to staff members. He later became a federal appellate judge.

The secretary of the Nye Committee was Stephen Raushenbush, an able and vigorous man with a long history of identification with liberal causes. Raushenbush was the chief intellectual force of the committee; he chose the topics to be covered and the companies and individuals to be investigated. He put together a small, hard-working staff some, like me, borrowed from the executive departments, and some who were volunteers (especially in the summer) from academia, including graduate students; still others were hired from the private sector as full-time staff members.
One of these latter, Robert Wohlforth, was Raushenbush's chief assistant. Wohlforth exemplified the youthfulness of most of us. Able and iconoclastic, he was hardly more than thirty but was sophisticated and fearless of the prestigious lawyers who usually confronted us when we questioned their clients.

The initial concentration on the questionable practices and the profits of aviation and shipbuilding concerns was followed by investigations of the Du Pont company and its relations with its foreign counterparts and other American businesses. The resulting hearings demonstrated cartel-like arrangements among firms like Vickers of Britain, Bofors of Sweden, Schneider-Creusot of France, and I. G. Farben of Germany. But at one stage of its work the committee's main interest shifted to Du Pont's profits during World War I, particularly to the construction by the company of the Old Hickory plant for the manufacture of explosives. This factory was paid for by the government on the basis of contracts that called for the payment of the costs, plus a percentage of those costs as a fee to repay the company for its efforts. Contracts of this kind provided little incentive for keeping costs low - the higher the costs, the bigger the fee.

The productive sources, though few in number, occupied unusually high (or strategic) positions in the Government. The No.1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. The No. 2 source in the same Department was Henry Julian Wadleigh, an expert in the Trade Agreements Division, to which he had managed to have himself transferred from the Agriculture Department. He had done so at the request of the Communist Party (Wadleigh was one of the fellow travelers) for the purpose of espionage. The source in the Treasury Department was the late Harry Dexter White. White was then an assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Later White became an assistant secretary of the Treasury, at which time he was known to Elizabeth Bentley. The source in the Aberdeen Proving Ground was Vincent Reno, an able mathematician who was living at the Proving Ground while he worked on a top-secret bombsight. Under the name Lance Clark, Reno had been a Communist organizer in Montana shortly before he went to work on the bombsight. The active source in the Bureau of Standards I shall call Abel Gross.

Thus, the group of active sources included: one assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State; one assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury; a mathematician working on one of the top-secret military projects of that time; an expert in the Trade Agreements Division of the State Department; an employee in the Bureau of Standards. The contacts included: two employees in the State Department and a second man in the Bureau of Standards.

In addition, the apparatus claimed the services of the Research Director of the Railroad Retirement Board, Mr. Abraham George Silverman, whose chief business, and a very exacting and unthankful one too, was to keep Harry Dexter White in a buoyant and co-operative frame of mind. Silverman also passed on as "economic adviser and chief of analysis and plans, assistant chief of air staff, material and services, air forces," into Miss Bentley's apparatuses. I did not recruit any of these men into the Communist Party or its work. With one possible exception (the mathematician), all of them had been engaged in underground Communist activity before I went to Washington or met any of them.

The espionage production of these men was so great that two (and, at one time, three) apparatus photographers operated in Washington and Baltimore to microfilm the confidential Government documents, summaries of documents or original memoranda, that they turned over. Two permanent photographic workshops were set up, one in Washington and one in Baltimore. Furthermore, the apparatus was constantly seeking to expand its operation. One of the Communists in the State Department and Vincent Reno, the man in the Aberdeen Proving Ground, were late recruits to the apparatus. Most of the sources were career men. In Government they could expect to go as far as their abilities would take them, and their abilities were considerable.

It is hard to believe that a more highly placed, devoted and dangerous espionage group existed anywhere. Yet they had rivals even in the Soviet service. While trying to expand the secret apparatus, Alger Hiss, quite by chance, ran across the trail of another Soviet espionage apparatus. This was the group headed (in Washington) by Hede Massing, the former wife of Gerhardt Eisler, the Communist International's representative to the Communist Party, U.S.A. In this second apparatus was Noel Field, a highly placed employee of the West European Division of the State Department. Field, his wife, brother and adopted daughter all disappeared into Russian-controlled Europe during the Hiss Case, in which he was involved. Among the Massing apparatus' contacts was Noel Field's close friend, the late Laurence Duggan, who later became chief of the Latin-American Division of the State Department.

Moreover, the Washington apparatus to which I was assigned was only one wing of a larger apparatus. Another wing, also headed by Colonel Bykov, operated out of New York City, and was concerned chiefly with technical intelligence. It numbered among its active sources: the head of the experimental laboratory of a big steel company; a man strategically connected with a well-known arms company; and a former ballistics expert in the War Department. Presumably there were others. I learned the identities of these sources from an underground Communist known by the pseudonyms of "Keith" and "Pete." Keith had been Colonel Bykov's contact man with them. Later he became one of the photographers for the Washington apparatus. Incidentally, he has on all material points corroborated my testimony about him, about our joint activities, and the technical sources.

There were no doubt other apparatuses of the G.P.U. and the Fourth Section in Washington, of which I knew nothing. Behind this multiplying of organizations is what Communists call "the principle of parallel apparatuses." This is a swollen way of saying that a variety of self-contained underground apparatuses, ignorant of one another's existence, operate side by side for more or less the same purpose. For the Russians are great believers in bulk. They are not highly selective, and they mass their apparatuses in about the same way that they mass their artillery.

The Washington apparatus to which I was attached led its own secret existence. But through me, and through others, it maintained direct and helpful connections with two underground apparatuses of the American Communist Party in Washington. One of these was the so-called "Ware group," which takes its name from Harold Ware, the American Communist who was active in organizing it. In addition to the four members of this group (including himself) whom Lee Pressman has named under oath, there must have been some sixty or seventy others, though Pressman did not necessarily know them all; neither did I. All were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. Nearly all were employed in the United States Government, some in rather high positions, notably in the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, the National Labor Relations Board, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Railroad Retirement Board, the National Research Project - and others.

Hiss's increased access to confidential sources, especially after he became an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, made it possible for him to funnel intelligence information of considerable value to the Soviets. For example, Hiss's placement, coupled with that of the British Soviet agent Donald Maclean, who held a high-level post in the British Embassy in Washington from 1944 to 1949, meant that Stalin had a firm grasp of the postwar goals of the United States and Great Britain before the Yalta Conference. A recent study, in highlighting Soviet intelligence success in the 1940s, singled out the contributions of Hiss, Maclean, and other British-based Soviet agents in "providing a regular flow of classified intelligence or (confidential) documents in the run-up to (Yalta.)" "Some sense of how Moscow felt that good intelligence had contributed to Stalin's success at Yalta," the study concluded, "is conveyed by Moscow's congratulations to Hiss." The reference was to a secret meeting in Moscow, just after the Yalta Conference, at which Hiss was personally thanked for his efforts by Deputy Soviet Premier Andrei Vyshinki.

Although there is clear evidence that Maclean and Hiss knew each other comparatively well, and were in a position to consult with one another publicly about postwar planning measures involving the Soviets, Hiss regularly denied any memory of even having met Maclean.

Hiss's access to information also meant that the Soviets could use him to learn a good deal about prospective United States policy toward the Far East, because Hiss had been privy to internal deliberations about postwar goals in that region as an adviser to Hornbeck. In addition, State Department records show that Hiss, when affiliated with the Office of Special Political Affairs, had made requests for confidential information from the Office of Strategic Services on postwar atomic energy policy and the internal security of Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union. In this period Hiss had the sponsorship, within the State Department, of Hornbeck, Pasvolsky, Stettinius, and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Yalta was to prove an even bigger success for Soviet intelligence than Tehran. This time both the British and the American delegations, housed respectively in the ornate Vorontsov and Livadia palaces, were successfully bugged.

The mostly female personnel used to record and transcribe their private conversations were selected and transported to the Crimea in great secrecy. Not till they arrived at Yalta did they discover the jobs that had been assigned to them. The NKGB sought, with some success, to distract both delegations from its surveillance of them by lavish and attentive hospitality, personally supervised by a massive NKGB general, Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov. When Churchill's daughter, Sarah, casually mentioned that lemon went well with caviar, a lemon tree appeared, as if by magic, in the Vorontsov orangery. At the next Allied conference, in Potsdam, General Kruglov was rewarded with a KBE, thus becoming the only Soviet intelligence officer to receive an honorary knighthood.

Stalin was even better informed about his allies at Yalta than he had been at Tehran. All of the Cambridge Five, no longer suspected of being double agents, provided a regular flow of classified intelligence or Foreign Office documents in the run-up to the conference, though it is not possible to identify which of these documents were communicated to Stalin personally. Alger Hiss actually succeeded in becoming a member of the American delegation. The problem which occupied most time at Yalta was the future of Poland. Having already conceded Soviet dominance of Poland at Tehran, Roosevelt and Churchill made a belated attempt to secure the restoration of Polish parliamentary democracy and a guarantee of free elections. Both were outnegotiated by Stalin, assisted once again by a detailed knowledge of the cards in their hands. He knew, for example, what importance his allies attached to allowing some `democratic' politicians into the puppet Polish provisional government already established by the Russians. On this point, after initial resistance, Stalin graciously conceded, knowing that the `democrats' could Subsequently he excluded. After first playing for time, Stalin gave way on other secondary issues, having underlined their importance, in order to preserve his allies' consent to the reality of a Soviet-dominated Poland. Watching Stalin in action at Yalta, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, thought him in a different league as a negotiator to Churchill and Roosevelt: "He is a great man, and shows up very impressively against the background of the other two ageing statesmen." Roosevelt, in rapidly failing health and with only two months to live, struck Cadogan, by contrast, as "very woolly and wobbly".

Roosevelt and Churchill left Yalta with no sense that thcy had been deceived about Stalin's true intenrions. Even Churchill, hitherto more sceptical than Roosevelt, wrote confidently, "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin." Some sense of how Moscow felt that good intelligence had contributed to Stalin's success at Yalta is conveyed by its congratulations to Hiss.

Recently ALES (Hiss) and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. After the Yalta conference, when he had gone on to Moscow, a Soviet personage in a cry responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade Vyshinsky, deputy foreign minister), allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the military NEIGHBOURS (GRU) passed oil to him their gratitude and so on.

I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party. I do not and never have adhered to the tenets of the Communist Party. I am not and never have been a member of any Communist-front organization. I have never followed the Communist Party line, directly or indirectly. To the best of my knowledge, none of my friends is a Communist....
To the best of my knowledge, I never heard of Whittaker Chambers until 1947, when two representatives of the Federal Bureau of investigation asked me if I knew him... I said I did not know Chambers. So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so.

By his categorical disassociation of himself from even the slightest connection with Communism or Communist-front activities, Hiss set in motion a narrative of his career that he would devote the rest of his life to telling and retelling. In that narrative Hiss was simply a young lawyer who had gone to Washington and became committed to the policies of the New Deal and international peace. His career had been a consistent effort to promote those ideals. He had never been a Communist, and those who were accusing him of being such were seeking to scapegoat him for partisan purposes. They were a pack of liars, and he was their intended victim.

Richard Nixon: As of course, Mr. Hiss, you are aware, the committee has a very difficult problem in regard to the testimony which has been submitted to the committee by Mr. Chambers and by yourself. As you have probably noted from the press accounts of the hearings, Whittaker Chambers during the period that he alleges that he knew you was not known by the name of Whittaker Chambers. He has testified that he was known by the name of Carl. Do you recall having known an individual between the years 1934 and 1937 whose name was Carl?

Alger Hiss: I do not recall anyone by the name of Carl that could remotely be connected with the kind of testimony Mr. Chambers has given.

Richard Nixon: I am now showing you two pictures of Mr. Whittaker Chambers, also known as Carl, who testified that he knew you between the years 1934-37, and that he saw you in 1939. I ask you know, after looking at those pictures, if you can remember that person either as Whittaker Chambers or as Carl or as any other individual you have met.

Alger Hiss: May I recall to the committee the testimony I gave in the public session when I was shown another photograph of Mr. Whittaker Chambers, and I had prior to taking the stand tried to get as many newspapers that had photographs of Mr. Chambers as I could. I testified then that I could not swear that I had never seen the man whose picture was shown me. Actually the face has a certain familiarity. I think I also testified to that.

Chambers had been shown to be inaccurate about almost every detail of his personal life, from when and how he left Columbia University and the New York Public Library to how he made a living, to whether his mother worked, to when he got married and how old his brother was when he committed suicide. More important, he had contradicted his earlier testimony given to the Committee on numerous crucial subjects, from when he joined and left the Communist Party and how long he was in it, to whether he had known Harold Ware, to how and where he first met Alger Hiss. Since he had testified under oath in both instances, it was clear that either he had willfully perjured himself or that he was a man incapable of differentiating truth from fiction.

However, there was one important thing he had remained consistent about, as he had been for the last nine years: he still maintained that whatever he and Hiss did in the underground, espionage was not part of their activities. "Alger Hiss didn't do anything of this character," Chambers said near the close of his examination on November 5. "I never obtained documents from him."

Throughout the first trial and most of the second, I was confident of acquittal. But as the second trial wore on, I realized that it was no ordinary one. The entire jury of public opinion, all of those from whom my juries had been selected, had been tampered with. Richard Nixon, my unofficial prosecutor, seeking to build his career on getting a conviction in my case, had from the days of the congressional committee hearings constantly issued public statements and leaks to the press against me.

There were moments when I was swept with gusts of anger at the prosecutor's bullying tactics with my witnesses and his devious insinuations in place of evidence-tactics that unfortunately are all too common in a prosecutor's bag of tricks. But at the time, my optimism prevailed over my anger. The mood at Andre's was my usual one. Nevertheless, I felt that I was facing trial by ordeal in the medieval sense of whether I could summon up sufficient physical strength to survive.

It was almost unbearable to hear the sneers of the prosecutor as he cross-examined my wife and other witnesses. How can one maintain an appearance of calm under such circumstances? I did, but at great cost in energy. The decorum imposed by court etiquette is an ordeal in itself. It was unnatural at such times for me to be impassive. There is no "proper" reaction. One sits naked before the inquisitive, and perhaps, as in this case, prejudiced jury. At times I despaired of justice. In court, fatigue and anger were my true enemies, though I did not usually recognize them as such. My sleeping hours were short and tension added its toll to normal fatigue. I often used the brief recesses to stretch out for a few moments on one of the tables in the room reserved for my counsel's deliberation.
When it was my turn to be cross-examined, the ordeal was of a different sort. Here, court procedures are all weighted in favor of the questioner. The witness may not argue or explain. I was able only to answer directly and briefly, however weighted or hostile the question. My lawyer could object to improper questions, but at the risk of letting the jury get the impression that we were reluctant to have the subject explored. But I was at least not forced to remain mutely impassive, and I was confident that later my lawyer could correct false impressions which bullying cross-examination might leave. It was especially in those moments of provocation triggered by false insinuations that anger and fatigue were to be guarded against. I lost my temper at least once and immediately realized I had erred. The etiquette of the bull ring did not permit the tormented to show even annoyance. I sensed that the jury thought the prosecutor must have scored a point if I reacted so sharply.

As I sat there, I recognized to what extent a jury trial is really a contest between two opposing lawyers. Only they are active throughout the entire procedure. They are the principal actors, always at the center of the stage. The more complex the issues, the more the jury is led to judge the significance of the evidence by the demeanor of counsel. As a witness, even as the defendant, I felt at times like a pawn in a game played by others. This sense of the law as the rules for a game of chance, so foreign to my previous experience as a nontrial lawyer and to my commitment to the rule of law, was unsettling. I had never before seen a jury. Often I felt like a spectator rather than a participant in my own trial. I was dismayed to feel how little I could do to help myself in the gladiatorial combat of others that was so crucial to my own life. This sense of powerlessness only increased my outrage as I had to sit by, as impassively as possible, listening to false testimony - to lies - and watching the theatrical solemnity with which factitious documents became formal exhibits.

The trial will be haunted at every turn by the great political issue that bedevils the conscience and well-being of every responsible citizen of a democratic country. Has a democrat the right to be a communist and to keep his job and a good opinion of society?

Across the square in which Mr Hiss will be tried, the trial of 11 communist leaders goes on to try to establish for the first time a court test of whether a communist is ipso facto a man dedicated to overthrow by force the government of this country. In the public mind the two trials set up a riptide in the ocean of fear and distrust that washes across all American discussion of communism. It is the sense of this embroilment in a conflict of belief that is happening to lesser men now suspect in their fields of scholarship or government, and the degree of mystery that surrounds the personal relationship of two brilliant young men, that has made this trial fascinating to people uninterested in the legal issue and made it read so far like an unwritten novel by Arthur Koestler.

This morning Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison for perjury. This afternoon the drama moved to Washington, to Secretary of State Acheson's press conference. The question was: "Mr. Secretary, have you any comment on the Alger Hiss case?" Mr. Acheson replied in these words: "Mr. Hiss's case is before the courts, and I think it would be highly improper for me to discuss the legal aspects of the case, or the evidence, or anything to do with the case. I take it the purpose of your question was to bring something other than that out of me." And then Mr. Acheson said, "I should like to make it clear to you that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers may take in this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss. I think every person who has known Alger Hiss, or has served with him at any time, has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is, and what his conduct should be. That must be done by each person, in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me," said Mr. Acheson, "there is very little doubt about those standards or those principles. I think they were stated for us a very long time ago. They were stated on the Mount of Olives, and if you are interested in seeing them, you will find them in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, beginning at Verse 34."

We are reliably informed that Secretary Acheson knew the question was coming but had not discussed his answer with President Truman because he regarded it as a personal matter. When Mr. Acheson was up for confirmation before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was questioned about Alger Hiss, said he was his friend and added, "My friendship is not easily given, and not easily withdrawn." He proved that today.

Often while I was at Lewisburg, and since, I have remarked upon the similarities between prison and the army. Both institutions are designed to control large numbers of men. Both supply food, clothing, and shelter for large groups. Both must organize the activities of their charges and provide some recreation to balance the workload. Most important of all, both must impose strict discipline in order to ensure that these functions are carried out. An essential element in the successful implementation of discipline by each institution is the process of depersonalization. Privacy disappears; there is no individuality of dress; food and activities are as uniform as the clothing. At Lewisburg we marched in columns of twos to meals and to movies.

In federal prisons, each new arrival is placed in a separate cell, where he is kept locked up most of the time. This semisolitary confinement is somewhat euphemistically called quarantine, ostensibly to prevent diseases from reaching the main body of prisoners. The forty to fifty men in quarantine at the same time march to meals together in a separate area of the mess hall and share their segregated exercise and library hours. After a couple of weeks some of these newcomers are placed in temporary dormitories of their own. The segregation simplifies the physical and psychological examinations of the new arrivals. It also makes most of the men actually welcome their transfer into the general prison population.

The quarantine period lasts about a month. For most of the men in my entering batch, the limited solitary confinement was harsh punishment. We were even forbidden to call from one cell to the next. In addition, we were not allowed to "make commissary" - that is, we could not purchase cigarettes or candy at the prison store. We were told that it took several weeks for deposits to be received from our families and for individual accounts to be set up.

This initial period of confinement at least gave me the opportunity for uninterrupted reading. A visit to the library, which was large for a place like Lewisburg, had been one of our first forays. Its holdings were variegated. Many of the books would have outraged Senator Joseph McCarthy. There had been earlier political prisoners at Lewisburg. Mr. Smith, the librarian, in order to increase his holdings despite his limited budget, had allowed books to be sent to the prisoners from the outside, the books to remain in the library. The collected letters of Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, were there. So was The Sword and the Scalpel, the story of Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who joined the Chinese Red Army in the early days of the Chinese Revolution.

The Russian general in charge of intelligence archives declared that they contained no evidence Hiss had ever been a spy. He subsequently recanted his assertion, however. And four years after, researchers digging through U.S. intelligence documents found intercepts of Soviet transmissions that suggested an American known as "Ales," perhaps Hiss, had been spying on the U.S. during that era

On his and your request, I carefully studied many documents from the archives of the intelligence services of the USSR as well as various information provided for me by the archive staff. On the basis of a very careful analysis of all the information available, I can inform you that Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union. When in the 40's he worked as a diplomat, Mr. A. Hiss did have official professional contacts with Soviet officials. But Mr. A. Hiss had never and nowhere been recruited as an agent of the intelligence services of the USSR. Not a single document, and a great amount of materials has been studied, substantiates the allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union. Probably, such old allegations are based on a misunderstanding or incorrect information. I believe that public opinion should have long since cleared Mister Hiss of the old suspicions, which are completely groundless.

Here we go again. New York Post editor Eric Breindel, writing in The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal, insists that the recent release by the National Security Agency of an encrypted document sent by a Soviet spy in Washington to his superiors in Moscow on March 30, 1945, constitutes "the smoking gun in the Hiss case," proving "beyond doubt" that Hiss "was still a Soviet agent in 1945."

Since I am writing in what Breindel (who has died since this article was written) preemptively calls "America's leading forum for Alger Hiss apologia," one could be forgiven for expecting yet another plea for justice for Hiss. Sorry. I take no position on guilt or innocence (in truth, I still can't make up my mind). Today's lesson deals instead with a disturbing nexus of scholarship, journalism and Cold War fanaticism that, based on either a careless or a deliberately malicious reading of declassified national security documents, threatens our ability ever to make sense of the past half-century of our history.

The drill has become a familiar one: Hitherto secret documents or ex-spy confessions, often backed up by a major publishing campaign, reveal that so-and-so was a spy all along. Journalists trumpet the charge, calling on "respected" academics to either endorse or debunk the charges. Depending on the usually predictable political orientation of the academic in question, a person's reputation is either destroyed or merely damaged. The story then goes away until the next batch of documents appears or the next spy gets religion.

The major news of the second batch of Venona releases dealt with Alger Hiss, long the period's most fascinating case. The definitive examination is generally considered to be Allen Weinstein's "Perjury," and Weinstein is most often the scholar whom journalists choose to consult. The product of prodigious research, "Perjury" received the liberal/leftist seal of approval from Irving Howe and Garry Wills, among the most honorable and fair-minded scholars this country has produced. Yet serious scholars, among them the publisher of this magazine, have discovered important discrepancies in Weinstein's use of sources that he has never been able to explain. One of his sources sued him for libel and won a published retraction from The New Republic (which published Weinstein's defense) and, according to New York magazine, a "substantial five-figure sum" in settlement. Weinstein has repeatedly promised during the past decade and a half to allow inspection of his notes, but he has refused all requests, going so far as to turn scholars away from his door when they arrived for ap-pointed interviews.

Weinstein went on to become an informal adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and his mantle has been inherited by Eric Breindel. Breindel is not a scholar by any definition of the term. He has never written a book, or any significant historical study in a professionally refereed publication, as far as I am aware. He is paid to express Rupert Murdoch's opinions, and his work demonstrates all the scrupulousness that such an association might imply. He also freelances for Marty Peretz and Norman Podhoretz on matters related to Alger Hiss.

Breindel's claim to have discovered a "smoking gun" in the Venona documents is based on a cable sent to Moscow by the spy Anatoli Gromov about a talk he had with Ishak Akhmerov, whom Breindel identifies as "one of the most important Soviet agents ever to serve in the U.S." (also Hopkins's alleged controller). The March 30, 1945, cable identifies an agent named "Ales" who has been "obtaining military information." Breindel makes much of the fact that, according to Gordievsky, Akhmerov had discussed Hiss and other U.S. agents he allegedly controlled when he first brought up Hopkins. Here's the kicker: "Gordievsky - who did not have access to the Venona cables when he produced his memoir - reports without reservation that Alger Hiss's Soviet codename was 'Ales.' In a 1989 essay, Thomas Powers likewise declares that Hiss was known to Moscow as 'Ales.'"

Breindel might have had a case here, but for one unfortunate fact: Gordievsky's source was Powers. (Perhaps unacquainted with the process of checking footnotes, Breindel apparently did not bother to look up the source for the claim regarding Hiss's alleged code name.) When I called Powers to ask him where he heard the original story, he named a counterintelligence agent who had told him about it after seeing the very same Venona document. Powers said there was "no question that the agent was referring to the same document that was just released." In other words, Breindel's corroborative pieces of evidence turn out to be the same document he is alleging to corroborate. Some smoking gun.

Breindel notes that the NSA. glossary "prepared for internal use" says Ales is "probably" Alger Hiss, and adds that Hiss apologists will make too much of that modifier. But the author should have leveled with his New Republic readers by noting that this "glossary" was written by an unknown NSA functionary and dated twenty-four years after the original cable, and is not supported by any corroborative evidence. NSA consultant David Kahn says that while the work of the code-breakers may be airtight, he would not vouch for the agents' identifications.

Breindel continues that "almost everything in the message conforms to representations about Hiss made by previous sources, including Whittaker Chambers." Again, not quite. Neither Chambers nor anyone else has previously asserted that Hiss was passing on military information (aside from extremely tangential material included in State Department documents). How would Hiss, a mid-level functionary at State, have been privy to secret military information in the first place? In The Wall Street Journal Breindel falsely identifies the telegram's sender, Gromov, as "the KGB's station chief in Washington." In The New Republic, however, he correctly names him as "the NKVD's station chief." (The NKVD was the party security service that predated the KGB.) Either way, what was Hiss, whom Breindel now claims to have been working for Soviet military intelligence - the GRU - doing reporting to the civilians? The two services may have shared information on occasion at the very highest levels of the Soviet Politburo, according to noted Soviet intelligence historian Amy Knight, but they are hardly known for interservice cooperation.

The logical leaps necessary to substantiate Breindel's argument are hardly more reassuring. Since, as Breindel insists, Hiss remained a spy through 1945, it is "no wonder Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko - in a rare manifestation of postwar Soviet-American cooperation - told his U.S. counterparts in the summer of 1945 that Moscow wouldn't object to the appointment of Mr. Hiss as secretary-general of the U.N.'s founding conference." I get it. The Soviets have this incredibly useful top-level spy passing them valued military information and decide, just for the fun of it, to put a red light on his head by publicly anointing him as the only Soviet-approved U.S. official in the diplomatic corps. This last argument, repeated in both The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal, is sloppy even by Murdochian standards.

Most incredible of all, Breindel goes Gordievsky one better by suggesting that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent while serving under FDR. Breindel's evidence for this outlandish charge doesn't even measure up to his kamikaze attack on Hiss. It seems rather churlish to take offense at the sight of desperate ex-KGB agents cashing in on their murderous pasts by "remembering" sensational charges for which U.S. publishers are willing to pony up major advances. After all, these guys lied for a living. But the spectacle of U.S. Cold Warriors rushing to endorse the unsupported braggadocio of the Evil Empire's killer elite, rewrite history and destroy honorable reputations, is distasteful in the extreme. Until the media reject this new form of ideological hucksterism in favor of bona fide documentation of genuine espionage, our history will remain hostage to right-wing campaigns to smear and destroy. Such tactics display a contempt for history not exactly unknown in the now-defunct nation these men profess to detest.

As if progressives had not in recent years been battered and bludgeoned enough already, we now learn that J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers & company really got it right: all Communists are/were actual, or wannabee, Russian spies. We also learn that during the Cold War years (and even before) hordes of leftists were abroad in the land, stealing "our" atomic secrets (and God only knows what else) for delivery to Joseph Stalin.

In recent days, this message has been dunned into our ears by such opinion-makers as William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Theodore Draper, Michael Thomas, Edward Jay Epstein and David Garrow in the pages of The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentar, Wall Street Journal, The National Review, the "McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour," and lots more (without a dissenting voice to be heard anywhere).

This all-out blitz has been fueled by The Secret World of American Communism, written by Professor Harvey Klehr, of Emory University, John Earl Haynes, of the Library of Congress, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, formerly of the Comintern Archives in Moscow at the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents in Recent History. The authors claim to have put together a "massive documentary record" from the hitherto secret Comintern archives, revealing "the dark side of American communism." These documents establish, they say, proof both of "Soviet espionage in America" and of the American Communist Party's "inherent" connection with Soviet espionage operations and with its espionage services; and that such spy activities were considered, by both Soviet and the American CP leaders, "normal and proper."

Such assertions are not all that different from what J. Edgar Hoover (and his stooges) were saying half a century ago. But what reinforces the authors' statements are not only the documents from the Russian archives they claim to have uncovered, but also the imposing editorial advisory committee assembled to give this project an eminent scholarly cachet. This editorial advisory committee consists of 30 academics whose names are listed opposite the title page. They include seven Yale University professors, along with professors from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Brandeis, Southern Methodist, Pittsburgh and Rochester universities. There are also an equal number of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of officials of various Russian archives.

Reproduced in the book are 92 documents offered by the authors as evidence of what they say is the United States Communist Party's continuous history of "covert activity." These documents, according to Professor Steven Merrit Minor in The New York Times Book Review, reveal that American Communists "relayed atomic secrets to the Kremlin" and also support the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and others that the American Communist Party was engaged in underground conspiracies against the American Government. The authors also say that the documents suggest that those "who continued to claim otherwise were either willfully naive or, more likely, dishonest."

In actuality, many of the documents are ambiguously worded or in some sort of code known only to the senders and recipients. They often contain illegible words, numbers and signatures; relate to unidentifiable persons, places and events; and are preoccupied with bookkeeping matters, inner-party hassles or with protective security measures against FBI and Trotskyite spies. Most importantly, not a single document reproduced in this volume provides evidence of espionage. Ignoring all evidence that contradicts their thesis, the authors attempt to make a case relying on assumption, speculation, and invention about the archival material and, especially, by equating secrecy with illegal spying.

The book's high points are sections relating to what the authors call atomic espionage and the CP Washington spy apparatus. As someone who has carefully examined the archives at the Russian Center, and who over the past four decades has studied the trial transcripts of the major Cold War "spy" cases, I can state that "The Secret World of American Communism," notwithstanding its scholarly accouterments, is a disgracefully shoddy work, replete with errors, distortions and outright lies. As a purported work of objective scholarship, it is nothing less than a fraud.

In this context, certain facts ought to be noted:

* The Moscow archives contain no material relating to these key figures in the Cold War "spy" cases: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Ruth and David Greenglass, Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, Elizabeth Bentley, Hede Massing, Noel Field, Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, Colonel Boris Bykov and J. Peters. In my possession is a document, responding to my request, and dated October 12, 1992, signed by Oleg Naumov, Deputy Director of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History, attesting that the Center has no files on, or relating to, any of the above-named persons.

* Despite the authors' assertion that the documents in this volume show that the CPUSA's elaborate underground apparatus collaborated with Soviet espionage services and also engaged in stealing the secrets of America's atomic bomb project, not one of the 92 documents reproduced in this book supports such a conclusion.

* The authors claim the documents corroborate Whittaker Chambers' allegations about a Communist underground in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, and while the authors concede that Alger Hiss's name does not appear in any of the documents, they assert that the "subsequent documentation has further substantiated the case that Hiss was a spy." Yet, not one document from the Russian archives supports any of these damning statements.

A total of 15 pages in "Secret World" have some reference either to Hiss or Chambers. By my count, these contain 73 separate misrepresentations of fact or downright lies. For example, the authors claim that J. Peters "played a key role in Chambers' story" that Hiss was a Soviet spy. Peters played no role in Chambers' story about espionage. Chambers said that the key figure in his espionage activities with Hiss was a Russian named "Colonel Boris Bykov," a character whose identity the FBI spent years futilely trying to establish.

The authors claim Chambers testified he worked in the Communist underground in the 1930s with groups of government employees who "provided the CPUSA with information about sensitive government activities." In fact, Chambers testified to the exact contrary on 12 separate occasions.

References to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and their case can be found on five pages. In those pages, by my tally, are 31 falsehoods or distortions of evidence. For example, the authors say the Rosenbergs' conviction was for "involvement in...atomic espionage." In fact they were convicted of conspiracy, and no evidence was ever produced that they ever handed over any information about anything to anyone.

The authors also say the Rosenbergs were arrested as a result of information the authorities obtained from Klaus Fuchs, which led to Harry Gold, who led them to David Greenglass, who implicated the Rosenbergs. All of these statements are based on an FBI press release. In fact, no evidence has ever been produced that indicates that Fuchs, Gold or Greenglass ever mentioned the Rosenbergs before their arrests.

Discussing one other "spy" case, that of Judith Coplon, against whom all charges were dismissed, the authors in typical contempt of official court records write that "there was not the slightest doubt of her guilt." In comments running no less than half a page, they invent a scenario of the Coplon case that contains 14 outright lies and distortions. For instance, the authors say she "stole" an FBI report and she was arrested when she handed over' the stolen report "to a Soviet citizen." All these statements are false; in her two trials, no evidence was ever adduced that she ever stole anything or that she ever handed over anything to anyone.

They couldn't name Hiss if they did not even know him. The one telling fact which came out after the fact relates to the IBM analysis which concluded beyond the shadow of a doubt that the typewriter style or font used to produce the Pumpkin Papers did not even exist when these papers were allegedly found and typed.

Any other discussion, speculation or prevarication must first accept the fact of the forged papers as historical truth. The only discussion worth having in fact is who persecuted Hiss and why did they choose him as a target?

I think the answer is Wickliffe Preston Draper of The Pioneer Fund and his close crony Nathaniel Weyl who inadvertently admitted to me in a phone conversation that Weyl himself was guilty of a violation of the Neutrality Act during the Bayo-Pawley affair involving anti-Castro exiles. He lived out the rest of his life in the fear that he would be arrested and charged with this crime and others he admitted to in the course of the conversation including being an accessory after the fact to murder as he watched some of the anti-Castro exiles being shot in front of his eyes.

Alger kept insisting on the report, and Ernst (Field) was forced to tell him that he needed to consult his "connections."

In the next couple of days, after having thought it over, Alger said that he no longer insisted on the report. But he wanted Ernst to talk to Larry and Helen (Duggan) about him and let them know who he was and give him (Alger Hiss) access to them. Ernst again mentioned that he had contacted Helen and Larry. However, Alger insisted that he talk to them again, which Ernst ended up doing. Ernst talked to Larry about Alger and, of course, about having told him "about the current situation" and that "their main task at the time was to defend the Soviet Union" and that "they both needed to use their favorable positions to help in this respect." Larry became upset and frightened, and announced that he needed some time before he would make that final step; he still hoped to do his normal job, he wanted to reorganize his department, try to achieve some results in that area, etc."

Evidently, according to Ernst, he did not make any promises, nor did he encourage Alger in any sort of activity, but politely stepped back. Alger asked Ernst several other questions; for example, what kind of personality he had, and if Ernst would like to contact him. He also asked Ernst to help him to get to the State Department. Apparently, Ernst satisfied this request.

When I pointed out to Ernst his terrible discipline and the danger he put himself into by connecting these three people, he did not seem to understand it. He thought that just because "Alger was the first to open his cards, there was no reason for him to keep a secret." Besides, Alger announced that he was doing it for "us" and because of the fact that he lived in Washington, D.C.... and, finally, since I was going to go out of the country for a while, he thought it would be a good idea to establish contact between us.

The "Ales" cable is not proof that Hiss was a spy, just useful supporting evidence. Whether Hiss is mentioned in other Venona cables still unread is of course unknown, and no GRU intelligence files about Hiss or any other spy have been released....

Much additional evidence about Hiss's involvement with the Soviets has turned up since the voluminous and explicit claims by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley in the 1940s, claims which no serious scholar of the subject any longer dismisses... while the excesses of McCarthyism may be fairly described as a witch hunt, it was a witch hunt with witches, some in government....

What Whittaker Chambers had claimed was true, and it was convincingly and obviously true by the time Hiss went to jail for perjury. Hiss's denial, and his persistence in it for decades, and his support in it by so many otherwise smart people, was one of the great intellectual contortion acts of history. The evidence now... is simply overwhelming...

What continues to astonish and bewilder me now is why Hiss lied for fifty years about his service in a cause so important to him that he was willing to betray his country for it. The faith itself is no problem to explain: hundreds of people shared it enough to do the same thing, and thousands more shared it who were never put to the test by a demand for secrets. But why did Hiss persist in the lie personally? Why did he allow his friends and family to go on carrying the awful burden of that lie?"

Alger Hiss can no longer be seen as a figure of ambiguity. This is so even though his psychological makeup was highly complex, and his motivation resists easy characterization. The ambiguity associated with Hiss was created by his regularly asserting things about himself and his life that were not true, and by others - for their own ideological reasons and because of Hiss's extraordinarily convincing persona - choosing to believe them. In thinking about the Alger Hiss that remains after that aura of ambiguity is lifted from him, the place to start is to summarize the qualities that have attracted Americans to him, and to begin to see him as a rare, but constant presence in our world: the consummate spy.

The persona that Hiss presented, as his campaign for vindication evolved, contained qualities that resonated for overlapping circles of late twentieth-century Americans. Hiss was a product of elite academic institutions in a time period in which education was becoming the most important index of social status in America. He was identified with justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the judge most familiar to twentieth-century Americans. He was associated with the birth of the United Nations, an aspirational symbol of international peace. He was one of numerous Americans who had been optimistic about the prospective path of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. If he had been in the left wing of the New Deal, seeking to experiment with collectivist solutions to the problems of farmers and industrial laborers in the Depression, many other Americans similarly felt that only thoroughgoing reforms could alleviate the economic crisis of the 1930s. If he had believed that the United States and the Soviet Union would cooperate to further world peace through the United Nations, so had most Americans at the close of World War II.

In short, many Americans found qualities in Hiss they could identify with or admire. And many found qualities in Hiss's antagonists that, retrospectively, they found distasteful. The anti-Communism of the Cold War era appeared to many as simple-minded and repressive. Richard Nixon demonstrated that becoming president of the United States did not divest a person of mean-spiritedness and a lack of principles. J. Edgar Hoover's carefully constructed image as a virtuous "G-man" came apart under closer scrutiny. When one totaled up Hiss's favorable associations and the notoriety of his enemies, his continued professions of innocence took on to some an air of nobility.

Many people thus wanted to believe that Alger Hiss was innocent, and Hiss helped them by embroidering his narrative of innocence over the years, tailoring it to the changing tastes of an elite segment of public opinion, from which almost all of the information and perceptions about Hiss originated. As he shaped and reshaped his campaign for vindication, Hiss maintained his constant air of persistent, patient evenness. From Brock Brower in 1960, to Robert Alan Aurthur and Philip Nobile in the 1970s, to David Remnick in 1986, being in the company of Alger Hiss, and hearing him talk about his case, was a seductive experience. When one was outside the company of Hiss, and looked at the evidence, his guilt might have seemed more probable, but when one encountered him, and became exposed to his combination of graciousness and apparent serenity, ambiguity began to take over.

How was Hiss able to project, over so many years, an air of absolute confidence, even serenity, about his eventual vindication? How, especially, was he able to do so when he knew that his campaign was a confidence game, and that vindication would be a massive falsehood? Hiss's remarkable ability to sell himself and his campaign came from the vital role that his narrative of innocence played in his efforts to fashion, and to preserve, an integrated vision of his life. Integration-1 am using that term in the psychological sense of completeness, self-fulfillment, and inner peace was achieved, for Hiss, not by being innocent of covert espionage activity but by successfully pretending to be innocent.' Succeeding at this pretense of innocence-his version of vindication-would have meant that Hiss could see himself as an integrated personality who had lived a complete life.

Vindication meant that Hiss could take enhanced satisfaction in the work he had put in as a Soviet agent, now found not to have happened, and thus shoved, perhaps forever, behind the looking glass. It meant that he could take pride in acting as Soviet agents in the United States were instructed by their handlers to act. Never reveal your covert existence, they were told; if exposed, categorically deny any complicity; if convicted, strenuously maintain your innocence as long as you live...

A biographer of Fuchs speculated that he had been "dominated by the religious and ethical righteousness of his father" and "devastated by the suicides of his mother and sister," and had "retreated into the world of Communism and espionage, where he felt morally virtuous, politically active, and personally fulfilled." Although Hiss associated dominance and suicide with a different set of parents, the parallels are striking.

I believe that Hiss should be understood as one sort of human actor in the sweep of history, not as another. If Hiss is to be seen primarily as an actor connected to a distinctive time in twentieth-century American life, when the domestic and international politics of the United States first reoriented themselves around the ideology of Cold War anti-Communism, and then distanced themselves from that ideology, he will be in danger, as are all historic personages identified with particular eras, of disappearing from view as that era comes to be perceived as remote. He should be thought of, instead, as one of the successful spies in American history, not only because of the quality and duration of his espionage for the Soviet Union, but because of his singular ability, in his successive looking-glass wars, to deceive so many persons about the secret dimensions of his life.

Hiss was a complex, troubled, ingratiating, formidable personality who was in many respects ideally suited to maintain a secret life. If there is such a person as a natural successful spy, who could conceal the existence of his covert activities as skillfully as he engaged in them, Alger Hiss seems to have been one.... Not many people seek psychic integration through spying and lying. Even fewer are so good at those tasks that they come close to achieving their version of it. Alger Hiss was one. There have been and there will be others.