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Chambers' sensational charge: he and Hiss had once worked hand in glove for a Communist spy ring operating in Washington during...
Chambers' startling statements touched off an impassioned and bitter national debate. At first, public sentiment favored Hiss, for the case seemed to turn solely on the word of a confessed Communist agent determined to destroy a man who had been the trusted colleague of such officials as the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg and former Secretaries of State Cordell Hull, Edward Stettinius and James Byrnes. Most of the U.S. was still reluctant to believe that Communism could have penetrated the Federal Government. Then, bit by bit-as if hesitating to reveal the extent of the conspiracy and his own involvement...
Secrecy & Mystery. But the effect of the Chambers-Hiss case was not confined to the sentencing of one man and the vindication of another. During the hearings, President Harry Truman charged that the whole affair was a Republican-plotted "red herring"-and his quip became a political boomerang, evidence that the Democrats were "soft on Communism." Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, insisted stubbornly that he would not "turn his back on Alger Hiss"-and came under political attack that seriously curbed his effectiveness. A young California Congressman named Richard Nixon became a national figure by prying information...
...Chambers later told his story, he soon met Communist Alger Hiss and his wife, and the two men began a friendship as close "as a man ever makes in his life." At one point the Chamberses even shared a house with the Hisses on P Street. In 1936, on party orders, Hiss began feeding classified material to Chambers. "He would bring home a briefcase containing documents from the State Department," explained Chambers. "I would then take the documents to Baltimore to be photographed, returning them to Alger Hiss late the same night or the next morning...
...Jump. In 1938 Chambers quit the party because, he explained, his Communist faith in mankind had been replaced by a religious faith in God as the only force that could reform society. Ever the careful conspirator hedging against the future, Chambers gathered together documents, memos in Hiss's handwriting and microfilm, and gave them to his wife's nephew for safekeeping. Then he and his family fled in terror from Washington and the Communist Party. In 1939, moved by the Russo-German pact that opened the floodgates of World War II, Chambers disclosed the existence...