Reply #32: McCarthy had nothing to do with Alger Hiss. [View All]

[recidivist]

I do not know who first reported Alger Hiss's CP membership and espionage to the FBI and/or the State Department. Whitaker Chambers was simply the first to name him publicly.

Chambers, an ex-communist and ex-Soviet spy who had gone on to become a senior editor of Time Magazine, was called as a corroborating witness to support the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, another former Soviet spy, who was testifying before HUAC. Chambers was asked about communists he had known in government. Hiss was among those he named. Hiss denied the charge, and after a celebrated fandango, went to jail for perjury because the statue of limitations had run out on espionage committed in the 1930's. Chambers, having broken with the Party in '39, could not testify to any subsequent espionage, and prosecutors never attempted to make a case that Hiss was spying through WWII, although that remains a possibility.

There are several twists to the case that many people still don't understand. One is that Chambers had already reported Hiss (and many others) to Adolph Berle, then at State, when he broke with the Party in 1939. He had subsequently been interviewed several times by the FBI and had repeated the charge. When he was called a decade later to testify before Congress, he was simply reaffirming publicly a story he had been telling for years.

A second fact is that Chambers was not the only person informing on Hiss. Hiss had, in fact, become notorious in the counterintelligence circles of the time. He had, nonetheless, been promoted repeatedly during the FDR and early Truman years, which made the case politically explosive in a Cold War context.

Anyhow, McCarthy had nothing to do with it. Read Witness and Perjury for a solid exposition of the case. It is also worth reading some of the pro-Hiss trash published over the years just to see the contrast between evidence seeking and truth telling vs. elaborate lying and systematic evasion.