History for the day

History.com deals with the ancient issue of Alger Hiss today:

Born 11 November 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland and died 15 November 1996 in New York City, Hiss (photo) was a former State Department official who was convicted in January of 1950 of perjury concerning his dealings with Whittaker Chambers, who accused him of membership in a Communist espionage ring. His case, which came at a time of growing apprehension about the domestic influence of Communism, seemed to lend substance to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's sensational charges of Communist infiltration into the State Department. It also brought to national attention Richard M. Nixon, then a representative from California, who was prominent in the investigation that led to the indictment of Hiss.
Hiss was a graduate of Johns Hopkins University (BA, 1926; Phi Beta Kappa) and of Harvard Law School (1926–29) and was law clerk from 1929 to 1930 to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1933 he entered government service in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration and served successively in the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State. He attended the Yalta Conference in 1945 as an adviser to Roosevelt, and later served as temporary secretary-general of the United Nations during the San Francisco Conference. In 1946 he was elected president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a position he held until 1949.
In 1948, Chambers, a self-professed former courier for a Communist underground “apparatus” in Washington, D.C., accused Hiss of having been a member of the same “apparatus” before World War Two. Hiss denied the charge, which was originally made before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Chambers repeated the charge publicly, away from the House committee chamber where his words were protected by congressional immunity, Hiss sued him for slander. On 6 December 1948, the House committee released sworn testimony that Hiss had provided Chambers with certain classified State Department papers for transmission to a Soviet agent. Hiss promptly denied the accusation “without qualification”. In a federal grand-jury investigation of the case, both Chambers and Hiss testified; and Hiss was indicted on 15 December on two charges of perjury, specifically charging that Hiss lied both when he denied that he had given any documents to Chambers and when he testified that he did not talk to Chambers after 1 January 1937. Arraigned, Hiss pleaded not guilty. Hiss' first trial in 1949 ended in a hung jury. In the second trial, which ended early in 1950, he was found guilty. At both trials Chambers' sanity was a prominent issue. After serving more than three years of a five-year prison sentence, Hiss was released in 1954, still asserting his innocence. During the following decades the issue of Hiss' guilt was kept open by outspoken defenders, principally from the American political left, who consistently maintained that he had been unjustly convicted.
In 1992, Hiss asked Russian officials to check the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union for information pertaining to the case. Later that year General Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a historian and chairman of the Russian government's military intelligence archives, announced that a comprehensive search had revealed no evidence that Hiss had been involved in a Soviet spy ring. Many scholars, however, doubted that any search could divulge all the secrets of the complex Soviet intelligence operation—Volkogonov's search did not include Soviet military intelligence files—and therefore felt that the question of Hiss' innocence remained unresolved. In 1996 the release of secret Soviet cables that had been intercepted by American intelligence during World War Two provided strong evidence for Hiss' guilt.