Alger Hiss testifying before Congress in 1948. Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

Although the details of the case would be lost on him (don’t forget, presidential aides had to explain the historical rudiments of Pearl Harbor when Tropical Storm Donald made landfall in Hawaii), Trump’s assault on democracy and the Bill of Rights has its antecedents in the 1949 persecution of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was sent to a federal penitentiary for forty-four months for denying under oath that he had seen Whittaker Chambers after January 1, 1937.

Hiss’s conviction, less than a month later, led to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 proclamation that he had in his hand the names of 205 Communist subversives buried deep within the State Department. The Hiss case also assured Richard Nixon’s political ascendency—Nixon was a young member of Congress when Hiss was ensnared by the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC)—and he rode Hiss’s conviction to the vice-presidency and later the presidency on the assertion that there were probably many Communists hiding under innocent American beds.

Then in 1984, after Ronald Reagan became the corporate sponsor in the White House of an angry right-wing agenda, the celluloid president conferred political sainthood upon the same Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s nemesis and accuser who leveraged histrionics, lies, prosecutorial misconduct, and FBI duplicity to attack Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (In the 1930s Hiss had been with FDR in the Agriculture Department and later went with him to Yalta.)

Reagan wasn’t the only president to deify the creepy Chambers (when he worked at Time magazine, Chambers kept a loaded gun in his desk). In 2001, the dark circle that schemed George W. Bush into the presidency held a secret, almost voodoo-like ceremony in the White House to celebrate the centenary of Chambers’ birth, to make the point that his underground journey from Communist errand boy to conservative icon was the inspirational story of America itself.

Finally, in 2017 and then again in 2025, when Trump restored his rackets to American politics, the legacies of the Hiss case and the subsequent McCarthy era of witch-hunting were re-inshrined in the White House. The consigliere who instilled in Trump the idea of American politics as a hate-crime was the Army-McCarthy hearing chief counsel, Roy Cohn Esq., who also railroaded Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the gas chamber. Cohn was not one of the prosecutors who sent Hiss up the river, except in spirit, but if you are looking for a connection between McCarthyite injustice and Trump’s current assault on individual freedom, Cohn is one of the lynchpins.

In the same way, an understanding of the Hiss case, distant as it is in our political memory, is crucial to understanding the extent to which the modern Republican Party sees its mission to conduct government as one endless show trial (now with Trump as the only judge and juror).

By good fortune, the University Press of Kansas has just published Jeff Kisseloff’s excellent Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, which is both a fresh examination of the campaign to clear Hiss’s name and overturn his convictions, and a deep dive into the Hiss archives and related papers. Unlike many previous writers on the subject, Kisseloff has run down every suspicion and lead, consulting the trial transcripts, the grand jury testimony, the vast FBI files on the case, and the many papers and documents he was able to study during his fifty years as a Hiss researcher. (His rebuttal of the theory that Priscilla Hiss typed the so-called Baltimore documents is a masterclass in investigative journalism.)

The result isn’t so much a blockbuster as a calm recitation of the facts in the case, along with profiles of the major players (many of whom Kisseloff met), and descriptions of the trials that are trenchant and often humorous. Here, for example, is how he describes the first public testimony that Chambers gave against Hiss, which gives an excellent example of the extent to which Richard Nixon and his HUAC accomplices used their Hiss allegations to form the basis of the broad political attack on the New Deal (just in time for the 1948 presidential election):

It was Nixon’s unique theory that if Hiss was lying about his relationship with Chambers, then he must also be lying when he denied being a Communist. Since Hiss said he didn’t know anyone “by the name” of Chambers, the committee could pretend he was denying that he had known him, which Nixon and Mandel knew to be untrue.

According to Chambers, Mandel came up with the plan to call Chambers before the committee again, but this time in executive session. They would ask him questions about the Hisses’ home furnishings or their hobbies with the intention of proving that Chambers had known them. The committee would then subpoena Hiss and ask him the same questions, so he would inadvertently confirm Chambers’s story. While technically this proved nothing, since Hiss had known Chambers, the opening was there for HUAC to leak Chambers’s testimony and Hiss’s testimony selectively to give a false impression that Chambers was telling the truth and Hiss wasn’t.

Chambers testified on August 7 for four hours of friendly questioning about the Hisses and still botched most of it. His testimony about the Hisses was so frequently and incredibly wrong that it was clear he hardly knew them. If one were to follow Nixon’s reasoning, that would have meant that Hiss was not a Communist.

But from that early hearing, the suspicion has lingered that Hiss might have “done something” for the Russians.

For those too young to recognize the name Alger Hiss, let me provide a libretto to the case that divided American politics after World War II and the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945.

Born in 1904, Hiss grew up in Baltimore and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His father’s death when Alger was age two created a void in his childhood. Still, Hiss managed to attend Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, and after graduating he was chosen to clerk for the legendary justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In the Depression of the 1930s, Hiss answered the New Deal’s call to service , and from 1933 to 1947 he occupied positions of increasing responsibility in the Agriculture, Justice, and State departments and on the Nye committee—always with the goal of promoting Franklin Roosevelt’s policies.

Hiss’s accusers would later say he was a closet Communist in the 1930s, but no evidence of that exists. He was a New Deal Democrat who wanted to alleviate the widespread unemployment of the Depression, but his tastes in literature ran to Victor Hugo, not Karl Marx, and his persona was that of a Harvard-trained civil servant ready to throw downfield blocks for the causes of the New Deal. This, to be sure, made him enemies around Washington, including the likes of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and the wealthy investor Bernard Baruch. Kisseloff writes:

In the fifteen years between 1933 and 1948, beginning with Fuller, Alger earned the enmity of five influential people, Leonore Fuller, Ray Murphy, James Byrnes, Ben Mandel, and John Cronin, all of whom contributed to his downfall. Fuller’s comments were still a prominent part of the FBI’s case.

When World War II broke out on December 7, 1941, Hiss was assigned to the Far Eastern division of the State Department, where he was among those (including most of the U.S. government) who missed the warning signs of a pending Japanese attack on American outposts.

During the war years, his responsibilities shifted to international organizations, including the nascent United Nations, and it was Hiss who was the secretary of its first meeting in San Francisco in April 1945. Before that, he was a junior aide in the presidential delegation that met Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta (but he was more a notetaker than someone whispering in FDR’s ear).

Later on, when the American........

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