![]() Hiss first testified that he had never even known “a man by the name of Whittaker Chambers,” then began grudgingly to equivocate, and finally admitted a slight acquaintance with Chambers, but under a different name and several years earlier than his accuser alleged. ![]() ![]() He had only recently been appointed by John Foster Dulles as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lean and aloof, he was a graduate of Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law School and had been a protégé of Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as well as secretary-general of the conference that drew up the charter of the United Nations. The charge seemed wildly implausible, and the forty-four-year-old Hiss indignantly denied it. Nine years later, on August 3, 1948, Chambers repeated his accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Almost fifty years after Whittaker Chambers first told a government official that Alger Hiss was a Communist, and forty years after Chambers’s charge was finally made public, Hiss has written Recollections of a Life (Seaver Books/Henry Holt), billed by its publisher as “his long-awaited memoir.” No one’s frank memoir would be more welcome many, even among those who believed Hiss innocent, also believe he had been unable to tell the whole story in court.Ĭhambers, a pudgy, rumpled confessed ex-Communist, first tried to warn the White House about Hiss, who was then a minor State Department official, shortly after the Nazi-Soviet pact had been signed in 1939.
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