Stepping Out Of the Shadows

The fall of Alger Hiss was among the most spectacular of its day: a New Deal liberal who some believe could have become secretary of state, who sat with President Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference during World War II and then led the United Nations' founding conference in 1945, suddenly accused of being a Communist who passed secrets to the Soviets for several years.

"I have never been, nor am I now a member of the Communist Party," Hiss told the FBI in 1947.

The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hiss, launching the career of Richard M. Nixon, a committee member who pressed hard for Hiss's indictment, records would later show. The case was fodder for conservatives bent on portraying liberals as soft on Communism and therefore unpatriotic -- not an unfamiliar template for political combat in the modern era.

It also opened a deep fissure within American liberalism that reverberates to this day.

"Was it going to be the liberalism of the Franklin Roosevelt stripe, the New Deal vision of a communitarian society that takes care of its own and the poor, or was it going to be sort of a neo-liberalism that stood up to the Communists and turned its back on the New Deal vision?" says Kai Bird, who, with Martin J. Sherwin, authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer."

At today's conference, Bird is to present a paper he wrote with Svetlana A. Chervonnaya, a Russian scholar, titled "Who Was Ales?" The paper will raise doubts about National Security Agency cables that emerged in the 1990s and seemed to confirm Hiss's guilt. Known as the Venona cables, they are among the many documents -- Soviet records, U.S. grand jury testimony, records of the House committee -- that have emerged in the decades since Hiss's conviction and that scholars have dissected for clues on the case.

One of the Venona cables mentions a Soviet agent named "Ales," and a note on the cable reads, "Probably Alger Hiss." That is what Bird is questioning. Tony Hiss and Hobson are excited about Bird's finding, though Bird made it clear in an interview that he wasn't trying to make a case one way or the other.

"It's quite possible that Hiss could be guilty of what Chambers accused him of and be part of a Communist cell, and it could also be true that Hiss was not Ales," Bird says.

Michael Nash, co-director of NYU's Center for the United States and the Cold War, which is sponsoring today's conference, had hoped it would look at the big picture, at how the Hiss case shaped public discourse on Communism and anti-Communism as the nation moved from Roosevelt to Sen. Joe McCarthy's redbaiting campaign.

But alas, Nash fears otherwise, saying, "Even though we were trying to avoid this debate about guilt or innocence, we can't." The conference has been "dragged back to it."

Indeed, Hiss and Hobson are hopeful about what may come out of this latest round of debate.

Hiss says that Hobson is proof that Chambers was lying, because Hobson was laid up in that 30th Street bedroom "during the exact period that supposedly Whittaker Chambers was coming over every week or 10 days, that Dad was bringing home documents, that Mom was staying up late and typing them. And none of it happened. Just didn't happen."

Hobson confirms that he once said of his parents "that he loved them but he didn't love them enough to lie for them," as Hiss recollects.

Hobson says he had been a loner who did not adjust well to adolescence, noting of his parents, "I grew up in spite of them, not with them."

Still, he's driven to keep pushing -- against time, even -- for vindication.

"If I can in any way provide some of the support that I was unable to provide 50, 60 years ago, I am pleased to be able to try and put that oar in the ocean, so to speak," Hobson says.

It may not happen in his lifetime, he admits. But at least in this lifetime he believes he can make amends. Though it wasn't his fault that he wasn't allowed to testify, he says, "this is a way to atone a bit for the fact that I failed him as a son when he could have used me."

In the end, that may be the most vexing legacy of the Alger Hiss case: sons left fearing they may fail to change the Hiss legacy.