Alger Hiss should remind us to say as little as possible

Alger Hiss is covered in The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder.

I dimly remembered the Alger Hiss case as a prelude to McCarthyism, but the case turns out to be a compelling example of what not to do.

Hiss was almost certainly guilty of working for the Soviets, but he couldn’t have been prosecuted for that due to a five-year statute of limitations on treason/espionage (at the rate that Robert Mueller’s investigation is going, let’s hope that this is extended for Donald Trump!). From the course notes:

In the 46 years that Alger Hiss lived after his perjury conviction, he
never departed from his claim of innocence. But he and his supporters
found their case weakened in the mid-1990s with the release of the
Venona cables, intercepted communications sent to Moscow by Soviet
agents in the United States. The intercepted cables suggested that Hiss
was a Soviet agent who had supported the Communist cause at the
1945 Yalta Conference.

Hiss would have gotten away with everything if he hadn’t denied via letter and then via testimony in Congress that he was a working Communist. He claimed never to have met Whittaker Chambers, a guy who told Richard Nixon that Hiss and his wife were birdwatchers and “had once been excited to spot a prothonotary warbler.”

A turning point in the investigation came when Richard Nixon asked,
“What hobby, if any, do you have, Mr. Hiss?” Hiss answered that his
hobbies were “tennis and amateur ornithology.” Congressman John
McDowell jumped in: “Did you ever see a prothonotary warbler?” Hiss
fell into the trap. He answered enthusiastically, “I have—right here
on the Potomac. Do you know that place?” This response convinced
previously skeptical committee members that Chambers had been
telling the truth.

Hiss then went so far as to sue Chambers for slander and discovery in that case revealed “65 typewritten copies of State Department documents, and five strips of microfilm featuring photographs of State and Navy Department documents.” Chambers had actually been trying to spare his former friend and Communist comrade Hiss from a lot of embarrassment.

From the course notes:

The confrontation between Chambers and Hiss initiated a polarization
of the political left and the political right. Chambers saw the world as
a battle between godless Communists and Christian anticommunists,
between darkness and light. Liberals largely rejected this division as
arrogant and overly simplistic.

I’m not sure that we can attribute today’s political divisions to the struggles against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. For one thing, a larger percentage of the U.S. economy is centrally planned than the Russian or Chinese economies.

But the Hiss case certainly shows the virtues of keeping quiet about past misdeeds! (The course also covers the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, which never would have happened if Wilde hadn’t first sued a friend’s father for libel in the form of a note calling him “a posing sodomite.”)