A Verdict: 'Hiss Has Been Lying'

It was a cold-war confrontation, as unforgettable for its personal drama as for its historical significance. When, in 1951, Alger Hiss went off to prison for 44 months and Whittaker Chambers retired to a Maryland farm, the question still nagged: Who had lied? Today, in the minds of many people, doubts remain. But last week Hiss, 71, still denying Chambers' charges that he passed secret State Department documents to Soviet spies, suffered a damaging setback from a most unexpected source--the files of his own defense attorneys.

The controversy flared anew when Allen Weinstein, a respected historian from Smith College who had tended to believe Hiss innocent, did a complete turnabout. After examining 15,376 pages of FBI files that he had pried loose in a Freedom of Information suit last year and additional papers that Hiss instructed his lawyers to make available, Weinstein declared: "Hiss has been lying about his relations with Chambers for nearly 30 years . . . Others who once believed in Alger Hiss may now be persuaded that he stole the documents in question and that Whittaker Chambers told the truth."

Obscure Congressman. Hiss was well-launched on a brilliant career when scandal struck. He had been a student of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks conference that laid the foundation for the United Nations. He went to Yalta with F.D.R. in 1945, specialized in Far Eastern affairs at State, and was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when his world collapsed.

Chambers, a recanted Communist and an admitted former member of a Soviet spy ring, publicly identified Hiss in 1948 as the State Department official who had passed documents to him in 1937 and 1938. Hiss admitted knowing Chambers only after an obscure Congressman, Richard Nixon, brought them face to face at a dramatic executive session of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 (at the time, Chambers was a Senior Editor of TIME). Claiming that he had known Chambers only in 1934 and 1935 as a freelance journalist using another name, Hiss denied the charges and sued for libel, but was convicted of perjury and imprisoned. Chambers' espionage charge against him was never proved.

Weinstein, who has been writing a book on the Hiss case, found that evidence given to him by defense lawyers was more damaging to Hiss than the FBI files. The professor published his conclusions in the current New York Review of Books, in which he reviews Alger Hiss: The True Story, a strong defense of Hiss by John Chabot Smith, a former reporter who also had access to the Hiss defense files. Smith's book on Hiss deals largely with conspiracy theories. He argues implausibly that Chambers was not an ex-Communist but a Walter Mitty-type dreamer who typed the disputed documents himself. If not Chambers, the FBI or someone else may have done Hiss in, Smith concludes.

On the basis of the defense attorneys' files, Weinstein argues that:

P: Experts hired by Hiss's own lawyers concluded that handwriting on copies of stolen State Department documents was that of Hiss and his wife Priscilla.

P: His experts also concluded that the typing of the copies produced by Chambers was identical to samples of Priscilla Hiss's typing, a conclusion likewise reached by the FBI.

P: Defense experts also determined that documents passed on to Chambers were typed, as the FBI claimed, on a Woodstock brand typewriter owned by Hiss.

P: Hiss was aware that the old Woodstock typewriter had been given to the son of a woman who had been the Hiss family maid. Even so, Hiss told the FBI and a federal grand jury that it had probably been sold to a secondhand dealer in Washington.

P: Lee Pressman, a secret but active Communist who recommended Hiss for his first Government job, played a major role in defense efforts to discredit Chambers.

P: Defense lawyers were told that Chambers and two other members of the Washington Communist underground had been in touch with Hiss in 1934, trying to recruit him for espionage. This evidence came from the wife of one of the two other members.

P: Hiss's lawyers had corroboration for Chambers' claim that Hiss had given an automobile to the U.S. Communist Party in 1936.

"The defense's basic problem," Weinstein concludes, "was in keeping the Government and the public from learning about the conclusions of its own experts, which it successfully managed to do at the trial."

Last week Weinstein told TIME: "I wanted to believe that he was innocent. But I am a historian, not an apologist for anyone. I am not making a case for the FBI. I blasted them all along. I want every last piece of evidence I can get. I have tried to examine both sides of the matter. I can live with anything I find because I am not a partisan."

Hiss's rebuttal was immediate--and lame. He accused Weinstein of bias and called his conclusions "childish." But he did not refute most of those conclusions, including Weinstein's contentions--based on a letter that one defense lawyer had written to another in 1948--that Hiss knew that the Woodstock typewriter had been given away to the maid's son. Instead, Hiss merely reiterated an oft-leveled accusation that the typewriter produced at his perjury trial had a serial number (Woodstock N230099) that indicated it was manufactured one year later than the one he had once owned. Insisted Hiss: "I never handed Whittaker Chambers any State Department documents . . . I never engaged in espionage . . . I was never a member of the Communist Party. I was innocent then. I'm innocent now."

Chambers died on his farm in 1961, swearing that he had spoken the truth. Hiss, who is now a salesman and part-time attorney in New York City, doubtless will go to his grave still protesting his innocence. But Whittaker Chambers' story, which stood up under countless assaults during his life, has not been successfully refuted in the 15 years since his death.

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