4 - The Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers Case

Summary

The hiss-chambers case generated more newspaper and media coverage and more angry debate than any of the other early spy cases. It did so because the accused spy, Alger Hiss, was a prominent member of the Washington foreign policy establishment that had come to power under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. People very quickly chose sides in the Hiss-Chambers case based more on partisan political considerations than on the facts of the case. To his detractors, predominately Republicans and conservatives, Hiss showed that betrayal reached into the highest levels of the government and that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had been negligent or worse in regard to the threat of Soviet espionage. To his defenders, largely Democrats and liberals, Hiss was an innocent patriot attacked by sinister reactionary forces (Richard Nixon and the FBI) that concocted a false story of espionage with no goal other than discrediting the New Deal. This bitterly angry debate not only predominated at the time but has continued in the more than fifty years since Hiss was convicted of perjury.

The Hiss-Chambers case began as a minor episode in Elizabeth Bentley's story. In the summer of 1948 the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities called Bentley to testify about her career as a Soviet spy in the early 1940s.