As Leslie Fielder pointed out in Commentary, the people in support of Hiss constituted “an elite corps … of the New Deal, distinguished civil servants and honored judges, it seemed as if the whole movement that from 1932 on had swept the country … was staking its very reputation on the innocence of this single man.” They tried to ruin Chambers. All the “right people” sided with Hiss in the case, including President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He had worked to further the New Deal at the Agriculture and Justice Departments and served as Assistant Secretary of State and as temporary secretary-general of the United Nations. Hiss had attended Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School. Army signals intelligence that intercepted cables between Moscow and its agents in the United States), as well as Allen Weinstein’s book Perjury.Ĭhambers by publicly identifying Hiss and the communist infiltration of our government, exposed himself to ridicule, smears, slander, vilification, and worse because Hiss was a member in good standing of the Washington establishment. The jury’s verdict was confirmed by subsequent revelations of the Venona Project (U.S. The second trial resulted in Hiss’ conviction and prison sentence. The first Hiss trial ended in a hung jury (8-4 for conviction). Chambers’ greatest champion in Congress was a young representative from California named Richard Nixon. And in dramatic fashion, Chambers led federal investigators to the hollowed-out pumpkin to retrieve the classified documents (known thereafter as the “pumpkin papers”) that Hiss and others had supplied to him. Chambers would subsequently accuse Hiss of supplying classified government documents to him for transfer to Soviet intelligence. Three years later, Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and identified Alger Hiss (then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he also had been with FDR at Yalta) as having been a member of the communist underground in the 1930s. The Romanov ghosts praised Stalin for outwitting his democratic allies. After the Yalta summit in early 1945, Chambers wrote a controversial article for Time entitled “The Ghosts on the Roof,” in which he had the ghosts of Nicholas II and Alexandra descend onto the roof of the Livadia Palace, where the “Big Three” (Stalin, FDR, and Churchill) met to decide the structure of the postwar world. Chambers at times transformed pro-communist stories into anti-communist ones, leading some Time correspondents to complain to Time’s owner, Henry Luce. Meanwhile at Time, Chambers rose to the position of foreign news editor, where he frequently battled with Time reporters, often rewriting their articles to reflect a more negative view of our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Chambers’ information was ignored by the Roosevelt administration. Chambers identified Hiss, Harry Dexter White (who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury), Lauchlin Currie (who became a member of President Roosevelt’s White House staff), and numerous others as communist operatives or agents of influence within the U.S. In September 1939, Chambers, who had joined the staff of Time magazine, accompanied by anti-communist writer Isaac Don Levine, met with Adolf Berle of the State Department and detailed his knowledge of the communist underground apparatus in Washington. Years later, after he bought his Westminster farm, Chambers secreted those documents into a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm for safekeeping. Sometime in 1938, in the midst of the Stalinist purges, Chambers left the communist movement and took with him a cache of documents that had been supplied to him by Hiss and others. Chambers in the letter to his children described the conflict between freedom and communism as a “total crisis - religious, moral, intellectual, social, political, economic.”
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