An April 5 Style article said that Alger Hiss was never indicted on espionage charges. The reason, it should have added, was that the statute of limitations had run out.
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Stepping Out Of the Shadows
Timothy Hobson in the bedroom of his childhood home in Georgetown, where he was recuperating with a broken leg at the time his stepfather, Alger Hiss, left, allegedly was passing along state secrets there.
(By Carol Guzy -- The Washington Post)
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The latest round in a decades-long debate unfolds today in New York, where experts on the case will hash out its details and its historic significance.
For Hobson and his brother, however, it is a far more personal issue. A retired surgeon who lives in California, Hobson has recorded interviews for various oral history projects, including on the Web site established by his brother. But Hobson views his public appearance today as a kind of graduation from the shadows of the Hiss case.
"It's part of my eulogy for Alger," says Hobson, who was 3 years old when Hiss became his stepfather. Hiss died in 1996 at the age of 92. Hobson's biological father, Thayer Hobson, who became president of the William Morrow publishing company, died in 1967. Priscilla Fansler Hobson Hiss, Timothy Hobson and Tony Hiss's mother, died in 1984.
Yes, Hobson wants to vindicate Alger Hiss. But he also wants to vindicate himself -- the young man, by then in his 20s, who was deemed by Hiss defense attorneys as a liability on the witness stand. They feared prosecutors would skewer him because he'd received an undesirable discharge from the U.S. Navy for being gay.
Hobson, who went on to marry, raise four children and live a life both gay and straight, is still bitter.
"I was available, but they didn't have the guts to put me on" the witness stand, he says. "And it would have made a difference. I'm convinced it would have made a difference."
And yet, his are the recollections of a 10-year-old, which is why historian G. Edward White says, "I discount the story" of Hobson's observations from 30th Street.
White, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, is the author of "Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy." White also will be speaking at the Hiss conference today.
"I've never met Tony Hiss, and I've never met Timothy Hobson, and I'm just fascinated to be able to meet them," he says.
White believes that Hiss's sons have become "dupes."
"That is to say, they have such strong reasons to want to believe in their father's innocence, that their father essentially duped them at an early age into participating in this campaign."
But Tony Hiss, a visiting scholar at NYU, responds that his father was against him writing his first book about the case, "Laughing Last."
