The Alger Hiss Trials(英)

ted States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition."

　　The lasting influence of Whittaker Chambers on American politics came not just from the hearings and the subsequent perjury trial. In 1952, Chambers published a remarkable autobiography, Witness, that even so different a person as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. would call one of the greatest of all American autobiographies. Sidney Hook, reviewing Witness in the New York Times wrote, "It throws more light on the conspiratorial and religious character of modern Communism, on the tangled complex of motives which led men and women of goodwill to immolate themselves on the altar of a fancied historical necessity, than all of the hundred great books of the past combined." Ronald Reagan credited Chambers's book as leading to his own transformation from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican. Throughout his political career, Reagan made repeated references to Chambers in his speeches. Reagan said Chambers sparked "the counterrevolution of the intellectuals" and that Chambers's story "represents a generation's disenchantment with statism and its return to eternal truths and fundamental values." On March 26, 1984, Chambers (who died in 1961) posthumously received from President Reagan the nation's highest honor, the Medal of Freedom.

　　Alger Hiss, in the forty-six years he lived after his perjury conviction, never departed from his claim of innocence. Even after the release in the mid-1990s of the Venona cables, intercepted communications from Soviet agents in the United States to Moscow that seem to identify Hiss ("ALES") as a Soviet agent who continued to support the Communism cause through his work at the 1945 Yalta Conference, many of Hiss's supporters remained unpersuaded of his guilt. Writing in the New York Observer in 2001, Ron Rosenbaum offered a theory for what Leslie Fiedler called "the half-deliberate blindness of so many decent people." Rosenbaum noted that Hiss's supporters often cite as a reason for their belief in his innocence the very fact that Hiss continued to insist upon his innocence and encourage "generations of researchers, volunteers, and true believers……to devote a good part of their lives to him and his cause." Rosenbaum offered this summary of their

central argument: "You don't think that he would have gotten all these people to work on the case if he wasn't innocent?" Rosenbaum's own explanation for Hiss's refusal to admit guilt was quite different. Rosenbaum saw Hiss as "proud" of having maintained his innocence, even if it meant "stringing along his well-meaning defenders," because he still believed the cover-up of his work for the Soviets was "a principled necessity.

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