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

THE obituaries of Alger Hiss and the commentaries that appeared in the weeks following his mid-November death caused less distress among students of the case than many had expected. Notwithstanding a few silly headlines and some television-disseminated misinformation, the mainstream media -- by and large -- accorded the overwhelming evidence against Hiss appropriate deference.

This evidence, of course, has only mounted in recent years. The Oleg Gordievsky and Pavel Sudoplatov memoirs, documents unearthed in Budapest by the Hungarian scholar Maria Schmidt, an archival finding in Prague by ex-USIA official Herb Romerstein and this writer, and -- importantly -- the newly declassified U.S. intelligence decrypts of wartime NKVD cables (the Venona papers) have combined to deal the myth of Hiss's innocence a series of severe blows.

In this context, it's appropriate to wonder why -- outside the precincts of the hard Left -- the notion of the Hiss case as a "riddle" or "mystery" has any saliency at all.

Why, in other words, is anyone who isn't a formal Hiss partisan prepared even to consider the suggestion that he was anything other than a Soviet spy? Didn't his 1950 federal conviction settle the matter for ordinary citizens? If not, didn't the ensuing thirty years of legal failure after legal failure on the part of Alger Hiss and his lawyers set the issue to rest?

Not entirely.

To be sure, genuine Hiss supporters became increasingly hard to find. And the effort by Hiss acolytes -- Stalinists, Nation-magazine-type fellow travelers, and longstanding personal friends -- to gain wider credence for the notion that the former State Department official was the victim of an FBI frame-up proved altogether unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, representations of the Hiss case as a "mystery" remain common. Informed people still declare themselves "agnostic" as to Hiss's guilt. Just after Hiss's death, for example, even White House National Security Advisor Anthony Lake -- President Clinton's nominee to head the CIA -- responded to a television interview question by explaining that he regards the evidence against Hiss as "inconclusive."

The key factor in this bizarre agnosticism?

Alger Hiss's steadfast refusal to confess.

Americans like things in wrapped packages. The absence of a confession gives rise to confusion; a sense of closure is missing.

Hiss, of course, always insisted on his absolute innocence. And in refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing, he secured for himself a measure of latent support -- or at least agnosticism of the sort professed by Lake. Perhaps unwittingly, Hiss tapped into an ancient American need to see defendants confess their crimes.

Consider the O. J. Simpson affair. Few maintain that Simpson's acquittal on murder charges proved his innocence. Indeed, the ongoing civil trial underscores the fact that the criminal proceeding was, essentially, an exercise in jury nullification. But O.J.'s unwillingness to confess seems to make it difficult -- even for those who recognize the criminal trial as a farce -- simply to accept Simpson's guilt.

A decidedly nonpolitical case, dating to a more distant historical moment, points up the same syndrome. Indeed, a recently released Home Box Office film serves as a reminder that some folks are still committed to denying Bruno Richard Hauptmann's guilt in the Lindbergh case. The kidnap-murder of Charles A. Lindbergh's baby boy took place in 1932. Hauptmann was tried and executed more than sixty years ago. By any standard, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Nevertheless, even when on death row -- faced with a choice between the electric chair and the possibility of commutation in exchange for a confession -- the German-born carpenter insisted on his innocence.

In so doing, Hauptmann spawned a cottage industry of essays, books, plays, and films -- all grounded in the unsupportable suggestion that his execution represented a miscarriage of justice.

From the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg atomic-espionage case all the way to the sordid tale of Cleveland osteopath Sam Sheppard --convicted of killing his wife after a sensational 1954 trial -- the syndrome is constant. No matter how weighty the evidence, the lack of a confession promotes uncertainty.

And so it has been with Alger Hiss.

What accounted for Hiss's steadfast refusal to acknowledge any version of the truth?

Why did he persist in denying all, including the incontrovertible fact that he had, indeed, known Whittaker Chambers well in 1930s Washington.

Why, moreover, did Hiss -- by suing Chambers for slander --initiate the legal proceedings that led to his downfall?

Finally, why didn't Hiss relent -- and come clean for history's sake -- once he had served out his jail term?

In Special Tasks, ex-NKVD (KGB) General Pavel Sudoplatov suggests that Hiss's initial response to Chambers's 1948 accusations reflected the instructions Moscow had given its agents abroad a decade earlier. As a rule, according to Sudoplatov, Soviet agents --if accused or arrested -- were to admit nothing.

But it isn't necessary simply to rely on Sudoplatov's speculation in order to understand Hiss's conduct.

The Venona cables demonstrate that Hiss was working with Soviet intelligence as late as 1945. In addition, material from newly opened State Department files indicates that he was still active on Moscow's behalf the following year -- i.e., until he left government. Hiss, therefore, had reason to expect that he would have been warned by the Soviets if an accuser armed with hard evidence had surfaced. Such a warning would probably have prompted him to behave with greater caution.

But Chambers -- the sole public witness against Hiss -- had defected from the Communist underground nearly a decade earlier. Neither Hiss nor the Soviets could have known that Chambers had recognized as early as 1938 that he might some day need a "life-preserver." This realization had caused him to retain incriminating documents.

Bearing in mind Hiss's initial inability to know that Chambers could document his accusations, it is possible to see a certain logic animating Hiss's conduct.

In retrospect, it is rather as if Alger Hiss had found himself on a moving train. One lie, inevitably, led to the next. And, in the light of his personal circumstances -- which differed markedly from those of others named by Chambers -- it is hard to identify a specific moment at which Hiss might plausibly have yelled: "Stop!"

At the time, admittedly, Hiss's behavior baffled his friends and sympathizers. Dean Acheson, for example -- a genuine friend soon to be named Harry Truman's Secretary of State -- professed faith in Hiss's integrity but conceded to a congressional committee that his former State Department colleague had handled himself foolishly, if only as a lawyer. The context of this hearing makes it plain that Acheson was referring specifically to Hiss's claim never even to have had a social relationship with Whittaker Chambers. (During this congressional appearance, Acheson hinted at his personal view of the case, refusing to dismiss out of hand the suggestion that Hiss was "covering up for his wife." In fact, when a congressman asked for his assessment of this interpretation, Acheson -- a longtime Hiss mentor -- noted only that the "theory has been expressed." He refused to cast doubt on it.)

At roughly the same time, Hiss was subjected to similar criticism from a different quarter. According to the Hiss defense files, Harold Rosenwald -- the Hiss lawyer charged with securing information from the world of the Communist Party -- was told by a prominent CP attorney that his client's conduct had been impossibly reckless. Rosenwald, who was searching for dirt on Chambers, received this critique from Carol Weiss King, a well-known Communist lawyer. Mrs. King believed that in denying everything, Hiss was courting disaster (as she may well have had reason to know).

But here, attention to Hiss's 1948 circumstances helps explain the posture he assumed.

Unlike most of those named as Communists by Chambers -- Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, John Abt, Henry Collins, and others -- Hiss, who had been serving for more than a year as president of the Carnegie Endowment, had worked hard to cultivate an ultra-establishment persona. By contrast, Pressman & Co. --although silent, publicly, on the question of Communist Party membership --were widely recognized as fellow travelers and/or Party members. These men, therefore, were in a position to take the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and resume their lives without missing a beat.

Not so Alger Hiss.

In fact, Hiss probably felt he had no alternative but to deny Chambers's accusations. A failure to do so would have forced him to abandon his establishment niche in American life.

As for Hiss's challenge to Chambers that the latter repeat his charges outside the protected confines of a congressional hearing room -- and thereby risk a slander suit -- this wasn't merely a manifestation of ill-considered bravado.

When Chambers made his accusations, Hiss encouraged friends to rally to his defense; many did so. Some in this group actually urged Hiss to issue the slander challenge. And when he tarried before following through on it, a few began to express second thoughts about his innocence.

In addition, it may well have seemed to Hiss that the Carnegie Endowment board was in need of a special measure of reassurance. (Hiss, after all, was still hoping to keep his job.)

At this point, recall, Chambers had accused Hiss of Communist Party membership -- nothing more. It was during the discovery phase of the slander suit that Chambers produced the "Pumpkin Papers" microfilm, typed copies of State Department documents, and notes written in Hiss's own hand.

Suddenly, Alger Hiss was in very deep. The process had turned upside down. The slander suit was moot. And eventually, Hiss was indicted for perjury by a New York grand jury probing Soviet espionage. In a short time, he had become the defendant, rather than the plaintiff.

In a 1950 examination of the implications of the Hiss case, Leslie Fiedler -- a leading liberal anti-Communist intellectual --grapples with Hiss's failure to confess. In Fiedler's view: "It is difficult to say what factor is most decisive in cutting Hiss off from the great privilege of confession; opportunism or perverted idealism, moral obtuseness or the habit of Machiavellianism, they are all inextricably linked."

Fiedler's assessment of Hiss's character -- and character flaws --seems very much on target. But in dealing with the confession issue, Fiedler fails to recognize that Hiss had, early on, dug himself into a hole -- a hole into which he sank deeper with each passing day.

By telling lies, Fiedler argues, Hiss caused "the whole point of this case" to be lost "in a maze of irrelevant data: the signature on the transfer of a car, the date a typewriter was repaired . . ."

Fair enough -- save for the fact that Hiss undoubtedly saw rescuing himself as an important, if not the "whole," point of the episode. For this reason, Hiss -- by his own lights -- was never actually in a position to provide the response Fiedler wanted him to deliver.

The latter would have had Hiss proclaim: "Yes, I did these things --things it is now even possible to call treason -- not for money or prestige, but out of a higher allegiance than patriotism." Fiedler suggests that Hiss -- had he taken this route -- "need not even have gone to prison."

This proposition doesn't stand up under scrutiny. Back then -- as today -- espionage convictions tended to lead to jail terms.

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.