The faithful traitor: Alger Hiss's refusal to recant helped create the myth of his innocence

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Eric Breindel

THE obituaries of Alger Hiss and the commentaries that appeared in the weeks following his mid-November death caused less distress among students of the case than many had expected. Notwithstanding a few silly headlines and some television-disseminated misinformation, the mainstream media -- by and large -- accorded the overwhelming evidence against Hiss appropriate deference.

This evidence, of course, has only mounted in recent years. The Oleg Gordievsky and Pavel Sudoplatov memoirs, documents unearthed in Budapest by the Hungarian scholar Maria Schmidt, an archival finding in Prague by ex-USIA official Herb Romerstein and this writer, and -- importantly -- the newly declassified U.S. intelligence decrypts of wartime NKVD cables (the Venona papers) have combined to deal the myth of Hiss's innocence a series of severe blows.

In this context, it's appropriate to wonder why -- outside the precincts of the hard Left -- the notion of the Hiss case as a "riddle" or "mystery" has any saliency at all.

Why, in other words, is anyone who isn't a formal Hiss partisan prepared even to consider the suggestion that he was anything other than a Soviet spy? Didn't his 1950 federal conviction settle the matter for ordinary citizens? If not, didn't the ensuing thirty years of legal failure after legal failure on the part of Alger Hiss and his lawyers set the issue to rest?

Not entirely.

To be sure, genuine Hiss supporters became increasingly hard to find. And the effort by Hiss acolytes -- Stalinists, Nation-magazine-type fellow travelers, and longstanding personal friends -- to gain wider credence for the notion that the former State Department official was the victim of an FBI frame-up proved altogether unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, representations of the Hiss case as a "mystery" remain common. Informed people still declare themselves "agnostic" as to Hiss's guilt. Just after Hiss's death, for example, even White House National Security Advisor Anthony Lake -- President Clinton's nominee to head the CIA -- responded to a television interview question by explaining that he regards the evidence against Hiss as "inconclusive."

The key factor in this bizarre agnosticism?

Alger Hiss's steadfast refusal to confess.

Americans like things in wrapped packages. The absence of a confession gives rise to confusion; a sense of closure is missing.

Hiss, of course, always insisted on his absolute innocence. And in refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing, he secured for himself a measure of latent support -- or at least agnosticism of the sort professed by Lake. Perhaps unwittingly, Hiss tapped into an ancient American need to see defendants confess their crimes.

Consider the O. J. Simpson affair. Few maintain that Simpson's acquittal on murder charges proved his innocence. Indeed, the ongoing civil trial underscores the fact that the criminal proceeding was, essentially, an exercise in jury nullification. But O.J.'s unwillingness to confess seems to make it difficult -- even for those who recognize the criminal trial as a farce -- simply to accept Simpson's guilt.

A decidedly nonpolitical case, dating to a more distant historical moment, points up the same syndrome. Indeed, a recently released Home Box Office film serves as a reminder that some folks are still committed to denying Bruno Richard Hauptmann's guilt in the Lindbergh case. The kidnap-murder of Charles A. Lindbergh's baby boy took place in 1932. Hauptmann was tried and executed more than sixty years ago. By any standard, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Nevertheless, even when on death row -- faced with a choice between the electric chair and the possibility of commutation in exchange for a confession -- the German-born carpenter insisted on his innocence.

In so doing, Hauptmann spawned a cottage industry of essays, books, plays, and films -- all grounded in the unsupportable suggestion that his execution represented a miscarriage of justice.

From the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg atomic-espionage case all the way to the sordid tale of Cleveland osteopath Sam Sheppard --convicted of killing his wife after a sensational 1954 trial -- the syndrome is constant. No matter how weighty the evidence, the lack of a confession promotes uncertainty.

And so it has been with Alger Hiss.

What accounted for Hiss's steadfast refusal to acknowledge any version of the truth?

Why did he persist in denying all, including the incontrovertible fact that he had, indeed, known Whittaker Chambers well in 1930s Washington.

Why, moreover, did Hiss -- by suing Chambers for slander --initiate the legal proceedings that led to his downfall?

Finally, why didn't Hiss relent -- and come clean for history's sake -- once he had served out his jail term?

In Special Tasks, ex-NKVD (KGB) General Pavel Sudoplatov suggests that Hiss's initial response to Chambers's 1948 accusations reflected the instructions Moscow had given its agents abroad a decade earlier. As a rule, according to Sudoplatov, Soviet agents --if accused or arrested -- were to admit nothing.