Can the persecution of a US State Department official by Richard Nixon be relevant today?
Alger Hiss was a protégé of the Franklin D Roosevelt administration in the 30's and 40's. Hiss was part of the Yalta Conference where FDR, Churchill, and Stalin discussed the future of post-war Europe and planned Hitler’s defeat. Hiss was instrumental in the development of the United Nations where he helped hold Stalin’s ambitions in check by reducing the Soviet Union’s votes in the new assembly from its desired 16 votes to just 3 (adding Belarus and the Ukraine to Russia).
In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, an apparent Soviet spy and editor of Time magazine, accused Alger Hiss of being a Soviet agent. Chambers proved himself to be a questionable witness and the evidence was sketchy. Wikipedia does a pretty good job at fleshing this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Richard Nixon made his name through the persecution of Alger Hiss and the McCarthy hearings followed. One of the darkest times in American history originated with the prosecution of a high level Democratic official by Republican operatives based on sketchy evidence.
Now The Guardian is reporting that Soviet files clear Alger Hiss: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Kai Bird, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, states that Hiss should be cleared in favor of the real spy: Wilder Foote. From The Guardian:
Hiss was accused of feeding secrets to the Soviet military intelligence agency GRU under the code name Ales. But Bird told a symposium at New York University last week that there was fresh evidence to suggest that Ales was another US official named Wilder Foote.
Bird claimed to have identified nine possible suspects among the US State Department officials present at the Allied leaders' Yalta conference in 1945. A process of elimination based on their subsequent travels to Moscow and Mexico City excluded eight of them, including Hiss. 'It left only one man standing: Wilder Foote,' Bird said.
The key, according to Bird, was that Ales's contact at the Soviet embassy in Washington knew that Hiss had returned from Mexico City, whereas Ales is known to have remained there. That information was in a secret Soviet cable that was intercepted and decoded by US intelligence agencies and is now part of the so-called Venona Papers, a collection of such documents made public several years ago. Bird said more research would be required to prove that Foote was Ales but that 'he fits the itinerary in every way, and Hiss simply does not'.
Wilder Foote was a member of a prominent Massachusetts family with roots in colonial times. Genealogies of the family are freely available: http://oasis.harvard.edu:10080/...
It seems apparent to me that a chosen son was protected and a Young Urban Professional was thrown to the wolves because he was a Dem and it could lend a black-eye to Dems everywhere... for years.
The so-called betrayal by Alger Hiss was used as a red-baiting tactic against Dems up until the end of the cold war. With Nixon in office, and later Reagan, the weakness of Dems in the face of an overwhelming Soviet threat became the prime foreign policy argument for the Republicans: ‘The Dems were weak against the Communists!’; ‘The Dems let our defenses decay in the face of overwhelming Soviet opposition’; ‘The Missile Imbalance was created by liberal opposition to nuclear technology’; ‘US submarine technology was falling behind.’; ‘Our tanks suck, theirs rock!’. I remember those (paraphrased) arguments, and worse, as a child/teenager.
Notice the parallels between the methods the Republicans used then and those they use now? Now we have the attacks on the UN following the same pattern. The Republicans didn't dare confront Hiss about the UN during the war when he had FDR's protection. But now they attach the UN to Dem weakness in order to de-legitimize the institutions of international cooperation which Hiss proposed. UN food programs are equated to socialism by right-wing talk toads. Black helicopters fly the skies of Republican hysteria!
But, what if Alger Hiss was just an ordinary idealist working for a better tomorrow?
What if Alger Hiss was set upon by craven opportunists who sought to save a ‘protected son’ while giving a black eye to their opponents?
What if the heroes go to jail and those who put them there use them as examples to demonize all others who follow in heroic footsteps?
What if wrong is never righted?
What if the 'chosen sons' become President?!