Innumerable echoes can be found in movies, novels, plays and speeches. The American public became sensitised to the threat of Communism from within, and the stage was thus set for McCarthyism.Ī book on the Hiss case has issued from the presses roughly every two or three months for the sixty-one years since Chambers first took the stand. Hiss deployed the full force of the Establishment to defend his innocence, but after two trials Chambers was vindicated and Hiss sent to prison for perjury. Over the course of 1949, Americans followed the case obsessively as it unfolded through the newspapers, radio, and television, which for the first time provided direct coverage of congressional hearings. How strangely the Marxist ideal and the dream of Horatio Alger blended into the motives of his treason. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers – obese, troubled, scruffy, mumbling into the microphone of the House Un-American Activities Committee as he struggled to reconcile himself to his past life as a secret agent – accused a charming, articulate and successful former State Department official, Alger Hiss, of passing secret documents to the Soviets. It was as if Alger Hiss had dedicated himself to fulfilling, along with his dream of a New Humanity, the other dream his father had passed on to him with his first namefrom rags to riches. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.The Hiss–Chambers affair marked the point where the Cold War came home to America. Nixon, then an unknown, first-term congressman from California, became nationally famous for his pursuit of Alger Hiss, and 20 years later, in 1968, was elected president. Newspapers of the time routinely called it the trial of the century. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post–World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. Alger Hiss that made front-page headlines year after year in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the Left and the Right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post–Cold War era. In 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury, stemming from his testimony before a grand jury that he had never given a Communist courier. Alger Hiss was a prominent State Department analyst accused of spying for the Soviet Union and working to favorably dispose American foreign policy towards the. In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. After practicing law for a bit, Hiss accepted a position working for the State Department as an aid to the Assistant Secretary of State. He attended Harvard Law School and clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers's shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948-that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. Alger Hiss (1904-1996) was a lawyer and former government official who spied for the Soviet Union he was convicted of perjury in 1950. Alger Hiss, 92, the former State Department official whose 1950 perjury conviction for lying to a grand jury about communist espionage activity became one of the most celebrated and dramatic. At the time of his case, Alger Hiss was a young man with a promising career in law and politics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |