On 17 August 1948, in a hotel room in New York with a House committee looking on, Alger Hiss asked Whittaker Chambers whether he had ever gone by the name George Crosley. “Not to my knowledge,” Chambers said. It was a strange answer for a man about to admit he had rented Hiss’s apartment under exactly that alias, and it set the tone for everything that followed: two men who had known each other well, both lying carefully, both watching the other lie back. Two weeks earlier, on 3 August, Chambers had told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss, a former State Department official who had helped draft the United Nations Charter and sat at Roosevelt’s elbow at Yalta, had been a secret member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Hiss denied it flatly. Neither man, that week, had any idea how far the lying was about to go, or how long it would take history to sort out who had done more of it.
What made the accusation land was who Hiss was. He was not some obscure clerk with a grudge. He clerked for (one of the most widely cited and influential Supreme Court justices in American history), trained under Felix Frankfurter, ran the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and had spent the previous decade at the exact centre of American foreign policy. Chambers, by contrast, was a rumpled senior editor at Time who had spent years underground as a Soviet courier before breaking with the party in 1938 and reinventing himself as a fierce anti-communist. When he named Hiss before HUAC, most of the committee assumed Hiss’s word would settle it. Hiss even asked to testify, denied ever meeting a man named Chambers, and did so with enough patrician confidence that HUAC nearly dropped the matter. Only a freshman congressman named Richard Nixon, working from FBI files fed to him by a priest who had once infiltrated labour unions looking for communists, pushed to keep going.
The case escalated because Hiss made it escalate. Furious at being called a communist on the public record, he sued Chambers for libel - a decision that forced Chambers, under discovery, to either back down or go further. He went further. In November 1948 he produced sixty-five pages of retyped State Department documents and four pages in Hiss’s own handwriting, which he said Hiss had passed him a decade earlier for delivery to Soviet intelligence. On 2 December, he led investigators to his Maryland farm and pulled five rolls of microfilm out of a hollowed-out pumpkin. The film was mostly worthless - two rolls turned out to be photographs of Navy paperwork on fire extinguishers - but it did not need to be dramatic to be devastating. The retyped documents were dated as late as April 1938, months after Hiss claimed to have last seen “Crosley.” Producing them meant Chambers was confessing, in public, that he had committed perjury every time he had previously denied that espionage was involved. He did it anyway, which tells you something about how much he wanted Hiss to go down with him.
Hiss could not be charged with espionage - the statute of limitations had run out - so the government indicted him on two counts of perjury instead, for lying about the documents and about when he had last seen Chambers. The first trial, in the summer of 1949, ended in a hung jury, eight to four for conviction, after Hiss produced an extraordinary line-up of character witnesses: two sitting Supreme Court justices, a former Democratic presidential nominee, and the man who would be the next one. The second trial convicted him in January 1950, on the strength of FBI typewriter analysis linking the retyped documents to a Woodstock machine that had belonged to the Hiss family. He served three and a half years of a five-year sentence and spent the rest of his life - he lived until 1996 - insisting the case had been rigged against him, the typewriter forged, the whole apparatus turned by a government intent on making an example of him.
I don’t think the theatre of that deserves to win him the argument, tempting as it is. For decades this was a genuinely contested case, and serious people argued both sides of it in good faith - Truman himself dismissed the whole affair as “a red herring.” But the evidence that has accumulated since 1995, when the United States finally declassified the Venona intercepts, points overwhelmingly one way. Those decrypted Soviet cables from the 1940s referenced a GRU asset codenamed ALES who attended the Yalta conference and then travelled on to Moscow - an itinerary that matches almost nobody except Hiss. Notebooks smuggled out of the Russian archives by researcher Alexander Vassiliev in the 1990s tied Hiss to that codename again, along with two others. None of this is beyond dispute - a handful of historians still contest the Vassiliev material’s provenance, and Russian officials have given contradictory answers whenever anyone has asked them directly. But the weight of it moved the argument. The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy called the case against Hiss “settled” in 1997. I think that verdict has only strengthened with time.
What the case actually did to American politics mattered more than the question of Hiss’s guilt ever needed to. It gave Nixon the national reputation that carried him to the vice-presidency and eventually the White House - a career built on doggedness about a case most of his own committee wanted to abandon. It gave the emerging conservative movement its foundational text, when Chambers turned the whole story into a bestselling memoir, Witness, that Ronald Reagan later credited with converting him away from the New Deal altogether. And it handed Republicans a devastatingly effective argument against the Democratic establishment: that the men who had run Yalta and built the UN had let a spy sit among them the entire time. Joseph McCarthy stood up in Wheeling, West Virginia, with his list of supposed communists barely two weeks after Hiss’s sentencing. He did not invent the appetite for that speech. Chambers and Hiss had spent eighteen months building it for him.
None of that settles whether every consequence that flowed from the case was proportionate to what Hiss actually did, and I don’t think it was. A perjury conviction over two questions of fact metastasised into a decade of loyalty boards, blacklists, and career-ending accusations against people whose only crime was having attended the wrong meeting in 1936. But the underlying fact pattern, unlike so much of what came after it, turned out to be true. Chambers was a liar who had lied about being a spy, then confessed to it under pressure. Hiss was a liar who never confessed to anything, right up until his death, and the record now shows that his certainty was never the same thing as his innocence. “Not to my knowledge” was Chambers’s evasion in that hotel room in 1948. It could just as easily have been Hiss’s epitaph.