![]() Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, died in 1961, but Alger Hiss continued to profess his complete innocence of Chambers’s allegations until his death in 1996. One man was lying, one was telling the truth. Alger Hiss’s late-1970s appeal for a new hearing based upon allegations of unfair prosecution tactics at his original trials was denied in July 1982. Hiss told a very different story, claiming unflinching loyalty and denying even membership in the Communist Party. Hiss, according to Chambers, was a dedicated Communist engaged in espionage, even while working at the highest levels of the United States government. Time and time again the two men would tell flatly contradictory stories about Hiss's allegiances during the period from 1933 to 1938 to congressional committees. Whittaker Chambers was a short, stocky, and rumpled Columbia drop-out and confessed former Communist from a poor and troubled Philadelphia family. Alger Hiss was a tall, handsome Harvard-trained lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. 16 by noting Boris Yeltsin had declared that nothing in KGB files branded the former. One of the most brilliant law students in his class at Harvard, Hiss was picked after graduation. By 1948, Alger Hiss worked as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, per History. They featured two men who could hardly be more different, sharing only impressive intelligence. Anchorman Peter Jennings concluded his elegiac obituary of Alger Hiss on ABC's evening news broadcast Nov. Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore and attended Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School. The case catapulted an obscure California congressman named Richard Nixon to national fame, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious Communist-hunting, and marked the beginning of a conservative intellectual and political movement that would one day put Ronald Reagan in the White House.Įven without its important influence on American political debate, the trials of Alger Hiss for perjury have the makings of a great drama. One man was lying, one was telling the truth.No criminal case had a more far-reaching effects on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case. ![]() In another sense, though, Hiss’s conviction ended nothing, as the battle over his guilt or innocence had become a. ![]() ![]() They featured two men who could hardly be more different, sharing only impressive intelligence. When Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury on January 17, 1950, it was, in one sense, the end of a legal drama that began when Whittaker Chambers had named him as a Soviet spy on August 3, 1948. Nixon, then an unknown, first-term congressman from California, became nationally famous for his pursuit of Alger Hiss, and 20 years later, in 1968, was elected president. Newspapers of the time routinely called it the trial of the century. No criminal case had a more far-reaching effects on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case. Alger Hiss that made front-page headlines year after year in the late 1940s and early 1950s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |