The Last Word (Alger Hiss)

Ever since Whittaker Chambers named Alger Hiss as a key Soviet agent in the State Department, there has been a running battle between the incontrovertible evidence of his guilt and a rolling barrage from people who have come to his defense even as the scope of his activities for the Soviets is increasingly documented.

The standard explanation for this phenomenon has been that defenders of Hiss were tarnished by blind support of the former Soviet Union and fearful of anti-Communists. In addition, it was held, all this was motivated by a belief that the charges against Hiss were a red herring and aimed really at Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats in general or the New Deal. There is an element of truth in that, but it does not cover all the facts.

As one who can claim, in all modesty, to be among the most informed on the Hiss case, I have continued my research through the years, examining and re-examining what today has been reinforced by the Venona intercepts of communications between the Soviet apparat in the U.S. and the Moscow Center. The mounting evidence has made the defense of Hiss a study in futility. But it has not explained why his defenders continue to argue his innocence.

A statement that Hiss made while in prison, which no one then took seriously, looms large today in understanding the case. "If the old man were alive," he said, "none of this would have happened." Strangely enough, this statement never was repeated by Hiss and was not picked up by his defenders. There is, moreover, strong reason to believe that Hiss was warned not to repeat it. For the "old man" was none other than Roosevelt himself, and to justify Hiss' statement would open up other questions about the record of FDR's administration, which establishment historians would prefer that we forget.

But let's look at the record. In sworn testimony, Ambassador William Bullitt told of having been informed in 1938 by French Premier Édouard Daladier that two men in the U.S. federal government named Hiss were Soviet agents [a reference both to Alger and his brother, Donald]. Bullitt told a Senate committee, after the trial and conviction of Alger Hiss, that he had passed this information on to the State Department at its highest levels. What he did not say, as he confided to me and to Alice Roosevelt Longworth at the time of his testimony, was that he also took this information directly to FDR.

In August 1939, after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Chambers, in a dramatic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle, disclosed that a Soviet espionage cell was operating in the State and Treasury departments that included Hiss and Harry Dexter White, the svengali to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

Berle was at the White House the following day to convey this information to FDR. The president coldly told Berle to perform an anatomically impossible act, and both Hiss and White remained at their posts — Hiss rising in the State Department to the critical post of director of the Office of Special Political Affairs and White becoming assistant secretary of the Treasury. Despite these warnings, FDR took Hiss as a top adviser to Yalta at a conference in which the ailing president gave hegemony over Eastern Europe to Josef Stalin. After the Yalta conference, Hiss went on to Moscow to be honored by Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov, a trip approved by FDR.

Much of this pro-Soviet tilt has been carefully brushed aside as the work of Roosevelt intimate Harry Hopkins, who as administrator of Lend-Lease supplied the Soviets with hundreds of pounds of the uranium they needed for making their atom bomb. Hopkins since has been exposed by the Venona intercepts and by the reports of top KGB officials after the collapse of the Soviet Union as an "agent of influence." There is not the slightest doubt that the "old man" was fully aware of what Hiss was up to, and this ties into what we know today about FDR's thinking and operations.

Since the death of Roosevelt, we have learned much through the opening of confidential records and from the words of some who were close to him. FDR was perhaps the greatest politician ever to sit in the Oval Office, but not the most astute. Having double-crossed Winston Churchill, who was not averse at attempting to return the favor, he believed he also could lead Stalin by the nose. That Hiss and others were agents of Stalin did not trouble him. He was smarter than Stalin and he fondly believed that his seeming blindness to Hiss' role would fool and disarm the Kremlin. But Stalin and Hiss knew better, and so did Molotov.

When Hiss was exposed, the great fear of FDR's supporters and champions was that the true story of the relationship would become known, and that is why the wagons were circled. Justice Felix Frankfurter testified for Hiss in the first trial. Berle lied about what Chambers had told him in 1939 and about his own experience with FDR. (That lie was exploded when his notes of the meeting were introduced in evidence in 1950.) Bullitt kept quiet about what he told FDR. Sen. Herbert Lehman (D-N.Y.) knew the score, and his family brokerage firm subsidized a viciously propagandistic book by a British peer to whitewash Hiss. President Harry Truman, though he was fully aware of Hiss' perfidy, dismissed the case as a red herring.

Hiss had a point when he regretted that the "old man" was not around to defend him. That he had been a Soviet spy long before FDR gave his tacit approval made no difference to Roosevelt.

conservatives in general, will not pay the long-term political price of consistently pursuing long-term goals and objectives to eventually prevail, in the legislatures, in the courts, or in the executive branches of the States, or the Nation!

Exactly right IMO. Nixon was forced into the Democrats' socialist regulatory agenda by a Democrat Congress. He could only get what he wanted by signing legislation they wanted. The same thing happened to Reagan when he re-built the military. His famous "deficits," however, created by massive social spending by Democrats in Congress, came back to bite the Dems. With the budget so deep in deficit they were't able to spend like drunken sailors for quite a few years.

Conservatives (if the term truly has any meaning) lose over and over because they can't agree on what day it is and because they never stay focused on maintaining a veto-proof Republican majority in Congress. We can't advance a real agenda even with a Republican President because we have to make too many side deals with Democrats, even in matters having to do with the very survival of the nation. Don't listen to what Dasch-hole says, watch what he and his henchmen do!

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