ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 16, 1996 TAG: 9611180061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: Associated Press
HE WAS A RISING STAR in the postwar establishment. But espionage charges, for which he never was tried, tainted the rest of his life.
Alger Hiss, the patrician public servant who fell from grace in a Communist spy scandal that propelled Richard Nixon to higher office, died Friday. He was 92.
Hiss died after a long illness, just four days after his birthday, said Lenox Hill Hospital spokeswoman Jean Brett.
Writer Tony Hiss praised his father Friday for courageously standing up for American principles. He said, ``other people, whose vision was clouded by Cold War passions, couldn't see the truth of the man.''
Hiss' life can be neatly broken into two parts. The first was a stellar rise - a brilliant academic career, clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a series of important posts in the New Deal and in foreign policy establishment.
Then, on Aug. 3, 1948, a rumpled magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers alleged that 10 years earlier, Hiss had given him State Department secrets, which Chambers passed to the Soviet Union.
At the end of the investigations and trials that followed, after spectacular developments involving microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin and an ancient typewriter, Hiss was convicted of two counts of perjury and imprisoned for three years and eight months.
He spent the rest of his life working for vindication, in courts of law and in the court of public opinion.
Hiss proclaimed that it had come finally in 1992, at age 87, when a Russian general in charge of Soviet intelligence archives declared that Hiss had never been a spy, but rather a victim of Cold War hysteria and the McCarthy Red-hunting era.
Gen. Dmitry A. Volkogonov later qualified his statement, saying that while he had found no evidence against Hiss in KGB files, he couldn't speak for other Soviet intelligence agencies, and many documents had been destroyed.
During the decades of controversy, such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. backed Chambers and felt justice was served by jailing Hiss. Hiss defenders included Supreme Court Justices William Douglas and Abe Fortas and Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Hiss' establishment credentials were impeccable: He attended Johns Hopkins, where he was Phi Beta Kappa, and Harvard Law, where he was a member of the law review. At Harvard, he attracted the attention of Felix Frankfurter, at whose recommendation Hiss served a year as Holmes' law clerk.
After three years in private law practice in Boston, Hiss joined the New Deal - first as an official with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and then as a Senate legal assistant and as a Justice Department attorney.
At the Dumbarton Oaks meeting to lay the groundwork for the United Nations, Hiss was executive secretary. In February 1945, he was a delegate to the Yalta Conference, where President Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin settled the map of postwar Europe. At the San Francisco Conference that adopted the U.N. Charter, Hiss was secretary-general.
He left government at the end of 1946 to take the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Enter Whittaker Chambers. A senior editor at Time magazine, Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of a Communist underground that operated in Washington in the 1930s. And during that time, he shuttled U.S. government secrets to Soviet spies.
Chambers said that in 1937 and 1938, Hiss was a Communist who betrayed his country by giving him documents to give to the Soviets.
First-term U.S. Rep. Richard Nixon pressed the case and drew his first national publicity. Nixon later told intimates that he would never have been in a position to run for president if not for his pursuit of Hiss.
``If the American people knew the real nature of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil,'' Nixon said.
Hiss denied it all. But Chambers took investigators to his Maryland farm and produced a hollow pumpkin. Inside, they found microfilmed State Department documents - the ones Chambers said he received from Hiss.
There was no trial for spying because the statute of limitations had expired. Hiss' first jury deadlocked on perjury charges. At a second trial in 1950, Hiss was found guilty of lying to the grand jury when he denied giving Chambers the documents and said he had not seen him after the first of 1937.
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Hiss. color.by CNB