GENTLEMAN AND A SPY?

By John Elson

He grew up shabby-genteel in Baltimore, Maryland, but he gazes out of a 1945 photograph like one of nature's born aristocrats. The face, at age 41, is lean and boyishly handsome, the hair neatly trimmed; there is a casual elegance about his dress. But the dominant features are the eyes: alert, mischievous, wary, playful, like those of an actor savoring the potential of a new role, a fresh persona. Despite the thousands of words written by and about him, Alger Hiss, who died last week at 92, remains one of the most tantalizing figures of the cold war. His 1949 trial and retrial in a Soviet-espionage case personified the explosive political and class conflicts of the time, serving as the first morality play of the red-baiting era. And the case gave one of its investigators, Congressman Richard Nixon, the national prominence he would later exploit to pursue higher office.

To a dwindling band of zealous believers, Hiss was one of the first victims of anticommunist hysteria, an American Dreyfus. Yet the weight of historical evidence indicates that Hiss was what he steadfastly denied ever being: a member of the communist underground and a Soviet spy. What made his case so intriguing was that his profile seemed at odds with the stereotypical idea of a grubby turncoat. His patrician grace had somehow survived a family life streaked with tragedy. His father, a wholesale grocer, committed suicide when Alger was two; a sister, Mary, also killed herself. Yet Hiss's advancement in life seemed blessed. After graduating with honors from Johns Hopkins University, Hiss at Harvard Law School was befriended by Professor Felix Frankfurter, who arranged for his protege to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hiss worked for law firms in Boston and on Wall Street, and spent a dozen years in government, including stints at the Agriculture, Justice and State departments. By 1945 he was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference; later that year, Hiss served as acting secretary-general at the San Francisco assembly that created the United Nations.

For those who sought them, there were signs that Hiss was more than just a bright young bureaucrat. While working by day on Wall Street, he was active by night in the International Juridical Association, an alleged communist-front lawyers' organization. As early as 1942, the FBI received warnings that Hiss was probably a Soviet agent. The stories became so persistent that late in 1946 officials at State quietly arranged for him to assume the largely ceremonial presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss was serving as head of the Endowment on Aug. 3, 1948, when Whittaker Chambers, a brilliant but controversial senior editor at TIME, reluctantly appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee; one of its members was Nixon, an ambitious young California Republican. Chambers, a portly, rumpled man with a melodramatic style, had been a communist courier but broke with the party in 1938. He told the committee that among the members of a secret communist cell in Washington during the '30s was Hiss.

Summoned as a witness, Hiss denied he had ever been a communist or had known Chambers. When Nixon arranged a meeting of the two men in a New York City hotel room on Aug. 17, Chambers repeated his charges, and Hiss his denials. Then, bizarrely, Hiss asked Chambers to open his mouth. After peering at his accuser's discolored teeth, Hiss allowed that he might have briefly known Chambers in 1934 as a free-lance journalist named George Crosley. That was a damaging admission. Only a close friend could have known Chambers as Crosley, which was the pseudonym he had used in writing homoerotic verse during the '20s. Chambers subsequently produced 65 pages of State Department cables, along with four memos in Hiss's handwriting. Later, with two HUAC aides as witnesses, Chambers dramatically dug up several rolls of microfilm he had hidden in a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm; they contained confidential State Department documents. All this material, Chambers said, had been given to him by Hiss to pass along to the Soviets.

Because the statute of limitations on espionage had run out, Hiss was charged with perjury. His first trial ended in a hung jury. Hiss was found guilty at a second exhausting trial, and eventually served 44 months at the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Barred as a felon from practicing law, he worked as a stationery sales- man after his 1954 release and assisted the loyalists who sought new evidence that might overturn his conviction. That never happened, although the Massachusetts Supreme Court restored his right to practice law in 1975. Hiss's two memoirs, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957) and Recollections of a Life (1988), dryly record his side of the story but provide few clues to his motives or mind-set.

Hiss believed his vindication had finally come in 1992 when, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a Russian general in charge of intelligence archives declared that they contained no evidence Hiss had ever been a spy. He subsequently recanted his assertion, however. And four years after, researchers digging through U.S. intelligence documents found intercepts of Soviet transmissions that suggested an American known as "Ales," perhaps Hiss, had been spying on the U.S. during that era.

To Chambers, Hiss's stoic intransigence was actually persuasive evidence. Chambers thought it indirect proof that Hiss was a communist, through and through. For how could a man sustain himself in the vale of so much tragedy unless he was driven by some inner faith, even a perverted one?