![]() ![]() Felix Frankfurter, who arranged for him to work as a clerk for Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court upon graduating in 1929. At Harvard Law School, he became a protege of Prof. He graduated from the Baltimore public schools and Johns Hopkins University and spent his summers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. 11, 1904, Alger Hiss was the product of a certain uneasy gentility, the fourth of five children of an executive in a wholesale dry-goods company who committed suicide when Alger was 2 years old, leaving his children to be raised by their mother and an unmarried aunt. ''It became significant because of the times and it remains significant for what it says about the times.''īorn in Baltimore on Nov. ''The Hiss case reveals in stark terms the national mood at the time it occurred,'' said John Morton Blum, a professor of history emeritus at Yale. Chambers himself once put it, the case became ''a permanent war.'' Hiss's son, until recently a staff writer for The New Yorker, described his family's experience as ''like living inside a fairy tale, with a curse that couldn't be lifted.'' As Mr. Each time, one side or the other has claimed either to have sealed the case for innocence or to have unearthed a long-sought smoking gun. In recent years, scraps of purported evidence have continued to surface: declassified government documents, accounts of the contents of Soviet archives. Hiss was what William Reuben, a friend and the author of one of the dozens of books on the case, called ''an American saint'': an idealistic New Dealer and rising star in the foreign policy establishment whose career was ruined when he was framed, in part to discredit the New Deal. ![]() To still others, many of them on the left, Mr. Hiss had lied, but were inclined to excuse him on the grounds that the times had changed, that steps taken to help the Soviet Union during the rise of Hitler in the 1930's might have been condoned at that time, but looked quite different in the late 1940's after the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, the start of the Cold War and widespread disclosure of Stalin's crimes. Hiss's claim to innocence had become ''one of the long-running lies of modern American history.'' Hiss was a traitor whose case proved beyond doubt the existence of Communist penetration of the Government. Hiss's death, nearly 50 years after he was first publicly accused, followers of the case remained bitterly split over whether he was guilty, innocent or something in between. It was a kind of morality play that severed society along ideological and emotional lines. The case, meanwhile, became a source of obsessive fascination, a tangle of conspiracy theories and lingering doubts that inspired the kind of interest later seen among Kennedy assassination buffs and followers of the O. ![]() He spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name, his reputation seeming to wax and wane with each new turn in the fortunes of Mr. ![]() Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and served 44 months in prison. The evidence was strange and dramatic: microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin, the telltale tracks of an old Woodstock typewriter, a birdwatcher's excited recollection of a rare sighting of a prothonotary warbler. He denied the accusations in a sensational series of Congressional hearings and two trials that mesmerized the public, pitting the slender, self-possessed patrician against his portly, rumpled accuser, Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor and onetime Soviet agent. Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference, played an important role in the founding of the United Nations and left the Government to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss had accompanied President Franklin D. Hiss was accused in 1948 of having been a Communist spy while working in the State Department in the 1930's.īy the time the charge surfaced in the late 1940's, Mr. Nixon to national attention and helped lay the groundwork for McCarthyism, Mr. Alger Hiss, the erudite diplomat and Harvard-trained government lawyer who was convicted of perjury in an espionage case that became one of the great riddles of the Cold War, died yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. ![]()
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