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

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Eric Breindel

More to the point, however, is the fact that Hiss's goal was not merely to avoid jail, but to retain his standing in American life.

At this juncture, therefore, a confession would have served no purpose other than to spare the government the effort of prosecuting him. Moreover, admitting guilt would have forced Hiss to deal with the inevitable charge that his wife and brother were also involved in Soviet espionage.

Hiss, in short, had managed to weave an exceedingly tangled web.

The decision to make his own reputation the heart of his defense led Hiss to continue to solicit the support of well-placed friends. And many continued to respond: Acheson provided legal guidance; Justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed testified in court as character witnesses; William Marbury of the Harvard Corporation helped organize the Hiss legal team. And on it went -- from Adlai Stevenson to Eleanor Roosevelt to various personal friends who contributed money, expertise, and even their own reputations to Hiss's vindication effort.

This factor cannot but have played a role in Hiss's decision not to confess. Indeed, after he was released from prison, many of his friends explained their devotion by arguing that he would not have allowed them to invest so heavily on his behalf were he anything other than absolutely innocent.

Beyond this disincentive to coming clean, Hiss -- in his post-prison period -- seems to have come, increasingly, to view himself as an innocent victim.

The concept may seem bizarre. But it need not mean that Hiss -- in the manner of a schizophrenic -- took his own lies entirely at face value.

More likely is that he always deemed himself free of moral guilt. He may well have believed that in extending assistance to Moscow --first the sole bulwark against fascism, later our wartime ally --he had committed no wrong.

This sense that no moral wrong attended his deeds was probably encouraged by the little-noted fact that -- after his release from jail -- Hiss's personal, social, and professional life began to reflect the very political sympathies he had long denied. His second marriage, for example, led him to share the last part of his life with a woman who had long traveled in the ambit of the Communist Party. His lawyers at the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee came from the hard-left world of the National Lawyers Guild, not -- as during his trials -- from Debevoise & Plimpton or Covington & Burling.

In fact, Hiss's final bid for vindication -- an unsuccessful 1982 petition for a writ of coram nobis -- was orchestrated by Victor Rabinowitz, a left-wing lawyer who made no secret of his longtime Communist Party membership.

After jail, in other words, Alger Hiss stopped pretending not to know any Communists. Nathan Witt and John Abt were finally acknowledged as genuine friends, not just nodding acquaintances.

In this context, an acknowledgment of "tactical" dishonesty would have been counter-productive and -- for Hiss -- unimaginable. In the end, Alger Hiss may well have gone to his grave believing that he was guilty of nothing.