1904-
Alleged Spy for the Soviet Union

A Career in Government.

To many, Alger Hiss is a symbol of cold-war tensions and anticommunism run amok in the late 1940s and 1950s. As a highly placed State Department official, who also had access to secret documents pertaining to American national security, Hiss had represented the United States in some of the most crucial meetings of the post—World War II era. He had accompanied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in 1945; helped create the United Nations, serving as temporary secretary-general at the San Francisco Conference later that year; and served as principal adviser to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.

Accused and Tried.

On 3 August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and former Communist, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and testified that in the 1930s he had been...