You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
'Who is the greatest liar in American history—Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers?' The Hiss–Chambers controversy of the late 1940s, one of the most dramatic trials in American history, put 'a generation on trial'. Chambers claimed that Hiss had been his close friend and Communist colleague and accused him of relaying secret State Department documents to the party. Hiss brought a suit for libel. In preliminary proceedings, Chambers produced documents which Hiss claimed were fabricated. Hiss was indicted and, after two trials, convicted of perjury (he denied committing espionage) and sentenced to prison.
There was nothing in Hiss's background to anticipate it. He was cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School, law clerk and friend to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Assistant to Secretary of State Stettinius at Yalta, and President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was the brilliant and fair-haired boy of the Democratic Party. During the course of the trial, Justice Felix Frankfurter and other distinguished public figures, former associates and friends, testified on behalf of Hiss as to the excellence of his integrity and veracity.
Chambers was the antithetical figure: a character out of Dostoevsky, a sensitive poet and writer, member of the Communist Party, editor of New Masses, senior editor of Time magazine. He became the hero of the House Committee on unAmerican Activity.
No less than eight books have been written about the controversy, including one by each of the antagonists. Richard Nixon, then a Representative, in his Six Crises calls it his first. At the time of Chambers' death in 1961, Nixon said that Witness, Chambers' autobiography written after the trial in 1952, should be 'required reading for every American who is concerned about the threat of communism'.
If the historical deterimants of the controversy are cloudy, Zeligs suggests that the psychic determinants are clear—and at least as important. In carrying