I've been putting off writing about Alger Hiss because many books have been written on the subject, and because it touches on so many areas of history that it really isn't a subject for a normal blog post.

But what's a normal blog post?

Anyway, during the discussion of the president's remarks on Yalta, Jonah Goldberg touched an important (if now largely obscure) historical point:

One of the many layers to the controversy is the fact that Alger Hiss, the proven Communist spy — once beloved by liberals everywhere — was an advisor to FDR at the conference. How much of a role he played remains hotly debated. But only fools and Communist sympathizers would today disagree with the statement that he played too much of a role.

Alger Hiss has become an American unperson. High schools teach little or nothing about him.

Here's Wikipedia's shameful entry:

Whether Hiss was a Communist or a spy for the Soviets remains unproven. Proponents on either side of the discussion will of course characterize the case differently, with liberals charging Hiss was victimized by a prosecutorial vendetta and that the charges against Hiss were actually an attempt to discredit the United Nations, and conservatives charging that the Hiss case proved that FDR hired traitors and spies for high ranking positions in his administration.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/hissvenona.html

http://www.deanesmay.com/archives/004618.html

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/haynes-venona.html

http://www4.desales.edu/~smk0/ftr/ftr-112996.html

It was so clear, though, to the political and media elite, e.g., George Bernard Shaw, John Dos Passos, Felix Frankfurter, Dean Acheson, etc., that, in the words of Thomas Sowell, "the tall, trim, cool and well-dressed Hiss was so obviously 'one of us' -- and the portly, rumpled and pedestrian-looking Chambers 'one of them' -- that Hiss' innocence was taken for granted."

The New York Times' Janny Scott has an excellent overview.

Interestingly, anti-Nixon historian Stanley Kutler thinks Hiss was guilty.

http://www.ratherbiased.com/cold_war.htm
http://www.opinioneditorials.com/contributors/glandrith_20040916.html
Refusing to acknowledge what is obvious and established is exactly what Alger Hiss did. Hiss was a high ranking official in the State Department of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. He was also a communist spy. The evidence was overwhelming and interestingly enough also involved a typewriter. Yet, Hiss denied to his death that he was a spy. Because of his denials, even decades later, loopy apologists continue defending Hiss -- despite KGB papers that list the information he stole, his contacts, and what he was paid by the communists. Had Hiss admitted the obvious, no one would defend him. Rather is following the Hiss strategy of denying what is plainly obvious so as to leave the debate at least partly open.

Much more at Tech Central Station:

But what is interesting today about this case, in light of the current flap over CBS and Dan Rather, is that as the Hiss case unfolded, liberals displayed a skepticism concerning the authenticity of the evidence that bordered on the irrational. Hiss's own testimony, when confronted with the fact that the duplicated State Department documents in question were definitely typed on his family-owned Woodstock typewriter, was to say that he had no idea how Chambers could have entered his home secretly and typed the documents. Liberals believed this preposterous "explanation," and many still do with a religious fervor that remains amazing.

At first, it appeared that the microfilmed documents retrieved from the hollowed-out pumpkin at Chambers' Maryland farm could not be genuine because Kodak's initial investigation declared that the film they were shot on was not manufactured prior to 1945. That appeared to be a death blow to Chambers' accusation that he received them from Hiss much earlier. Subsequently, Kodak corrected itself and said that the film was available in 1938, and the documents were probably photographed at that time. All the documents were from the office that Hiss worked in during that time period at State.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss

Years later John Dean, in his book Blind Ambition, asserted that he was informed that Nixon at one point in his Presidency told Charles Colson, "The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case." Colson denied ever having such a conversation with Nixon, and it has never been found in Nixon's tapes, despite his having recorded nearly every conversation in the oval office while he was president.