{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Chapter 37: What did not come out in court?","description":"Whittaker Chambers This Podcast, the second to last, is the longest one.  The Hiss-Chambers Case did not die.  Many new facts were discovered, the majority of them harmful to Hiss, starting in the 1970s.  The Freedom of Information Act led the US government (after a lawsuit) to produce about 40,000 pages of paper, mostly from the FBI.  Hiss made the files of his defense counsel available to researchers.  One wonders if he knew what was in there, some of it was so damaging to him.  Most damaging in these and other files is powerful evidence that Hiss and his wife knew that the office typewriter they had had in the late 1930s was a Woodstock and that they had given it to The Catlett Kids, but they both denied such knowledge to the FBI, the Grand Jury (under oath), and even to their own \u2018A List\u2019 attorneys, William Marbury and Edward McLean.  Other sources of information that opened late were the papers of Alger Hiss\u2019s brother Donald; a recollection of a fellow convict who spoke with Hiss in prison; the observations of a psychologist who testified for Hiss at the second trial (not Dr. Binger); the memoir of a document expert whom Chester Lane hired to help Hiss\u2019s Forgery by Typewriter argument; and even the memories of a female Bucks County, Pennsylvania, novelist who bumped into Chambers and The Ware Group during a brief residence in Washington in 1934.  Finally, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, several security agencies of former Communist dictatorships have briefly opened their files, all of them damaging to Hiss.  No wonder this second to last Podcast is the longest one.   FURTHER RESEARCH    The FOIA Documents are best summarized in Weinstein at 300-14 (\u201cThe Woodstock Cover-Up\u201d \u2014 a coverup by the Hisses, not the FBI), 399-435 (\u201cRumors and Whispers:  The Pursuit of Evidence\u201d), 625-30 (\u201cThe Motion for a New Trial\u201d), 632-34 (\u201cThe \u2018Faked\u2019 or \u2018Substituted\u2019 Woodstock: Hover and the FBI\u201d), and 641-45 (\u201cThe Double Agent:  Horace Schmahl, Mystery Man\u201d). Other post-trials evidence is recounted in Gary Wills\u2019 \u201cLead Time:  A Journalist\u2019s Education\u201d at 61-62 (Doubleday 1983); Elinor Langer, \u201cJosephine Herbst\u201d at 151-58, 268-76 (Northeastern Univ. Press 1984); and Donald B. Doud,\u201d Witness to Forgery:  Memoir of a Forensic Document Examiner\u201d at 34-66 (Orchard Knoll Publishers 2009).  The best summaries of the documents from \u2018behind the Iron Curtain\u2019 are the chapter titled \u201cAlger Hiss:Case Closed\u201d in John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, & Alexander Vassiliev, \u201cSpies:  The Rise & Fall of the KGB in America\u201d at 1-31 (Yale University Press 2009); and Eduard Mark, \u201cIn Re Alger Hiss:  A Final Verdict from the Archives of the KGB,\u201d 1 Journal of Cold War Studies at 26 (2009).   Hiss\u2019s briefs and some supporting documents in his last run at the courts (in the 1970s, claiming prosecutorial misconduct) are reproduced in Edith Tiger (Ed.), \u201cIn Re Alger Hiss\u201d (two volumes) (Farrar Straus Giroux 1979) (Chambers\u2019 handwritten account of his homosexual activities, which he gave to the FBI, is in Volume I at 258-66.). For my skeptical reaction to some of Hiss\u2019s claims, see pages 221-28 of my paper \u201cHow Alger Hiss Was Framed: The Latest Theory,\u201d available at https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3868165.   Questions:  Is there now reasonable doubt that Hiss was guilty of the offenses charged, and of a good deal more?  Or am I missing something?  Certainly, if Hiss is in fact innocent, he is one of the most wronged persons in our history!     If The Prosecution in Hiss trials did not play fair, should any tears be shed for Hiss if he was still up to his neck in spying for the Soviet Union and setting the stage for Joe McCarthy?  What motive would a female Bucks County novelist have to lie and place Chambers and Hiss together in The Ware Group in Washington in the mid-30s?  Isn\u2019t she as unlikely to be taking orders from J. Edgar Hoover as Chambers\u2019 best friend Professor Meyer Schapiro, a Jewish socialist art history professor at Columbia?  In light of the fact that all the typewriter experts Hiss\u2019s counsel hired reached the same conclusion as the FBI expert Feehan, is it likely that Hiss knew he was lying all the years he was claiming Forgery by Typewriter?  Or might he have forgotten and convinced himself that he was actually innocent?  Have you never known anyone who had such favorable delusions about his or her bad conduct long ago?   Consider all the people who have to be lying, all the experts who have to be wrong,  and all the documents that have to be forged and planted in dozens of different places in different continents over several decades if Hiss is innocent.  How likely is that? ","author_name":"A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case","author_url":"https:\/\/berresford.libsyn.com\/","html":"