American Notes LANDMARKS

The scene is central to the iconography of the cold war: one December day in 1948 on his Westminster, Md., farm, Whittaker Chambers retrieved from a hollowed-out pumpkin a microfilm that implicated former State Department Official Alger Hiss in the passing of Government secrets to the Soviets. Last week Interior Secretary Donald Hodel proposed that Chambers' farm be listed in the National Register of Historic Places. White House Speechwriter Anthony Dolan had relayed to Hodel a conversation with President Reagan during which the President quoted from memory long passages of Chambers' 1952 autobiography, Witness.

In memoirs to be published in May, Hiss, 83, who served 44 months in prison on a perjury conviction as a result of the microfilm evidence, excoriates Chambers as a "psychopath . . . the perfect pawn" of an opportunistic young Congressman then serving on the House Un-American Activities Committee: Richard Nixon.