Hiss In History

This is an abridged version of remarks Victor Navasky delivered at the "Alger Hiss and History" conference at New York University on April 5, 2007. We have also published the full text of the speech.

In 1951 literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, "It is time, many of us feel, to forget the whole business: the prison doors have closed [on Alger Hiss]; let us consider the question also closed."

For the next fifty-five years commentators, critics, journalists and historians proclaimed the case closed--most recently (i.e., ten years ago) with the release of the Venona decrypts, including one said to be "the final nail in Hiss's coffin": Venona cable 1822, which contained a twenty-five-years-after-the-fact footnote saying that a Soviet agent code-named ALES was "probably Alger Hiss."

This is the gazillionth "final" nail in Hiss's coffin, but no matter. Over the years the pendulum of the Hiss case has swung this way and that with only one certainty: This is a case that will not die. It will not go away. The cold war is over, but the symbolic cold war lives on. In early April New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War sponsored a daylong conference on "Alger Hiss and History," and events before, during and, presumably, after the conference help explain why.

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