MANY MYSTERIES REMAIN in the wake of the life and death of Alger Hiss. One is his relationship to Dean Acheson. On January 25, 1950, the day Hiss was sentenced to prison for lying about passing secrets to the Soviet Union, Harry Truman’s secretary of state declared during a press conference: “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Acheson’s apparently quixotic loyalty to the former State Department official provoked vociferous denunciation: Republican Senator William E. Jenner of Indiana attacked the Truman administration as a “military dictatorship, run by [that] Communist- appeasing, Communist-protecting betrayer of America, Secretary of State Dean Acheson.” Such assaults greatly reduced Acheson’s ability to conduct foreign policy in his remaining years in office.
Most historians today probably accept Hiss’s guilt. What did Acheson think? When the case broke in 1948, Acheson had known Alger Hiss and his brother Donald (a partner at Washington’s prestigious Covington & Burling law firm) for many years. “Donnie” was a good friend, but Acheson was not close to Alger either professionally or personally, considering him “stuffy and rigid,” as George Ball remembered, and guilty of “lacking a sense of humor.” From the fall of 1945 onward, Acheson was privy to mounting evidence that Hiss was a spy, information he may have discounted, aware as he was that J. Edgar Hoover was making bizarre charges that he too (and John J. McCloy, Henry Wallace, and other estimables) were part of “an enormous Soviet espionage ring in Washington.” Yet Acheson must have suspected that charges against Hiss would stick, for as undersecretary of state in 1945 and 1946 he helped insulate Hiss from sensitive discussions in the department. When an outraged Joseph Alsop blustered about writing a column attacking Whittaker Chambers for his accusations against Hiss in 1948, Acheson told him to cool it: “It’s always a mistake to write about anything that is sub judice.” “It was perfectly obvious,” Alsop recalled, “that Dean thought that Hiss was guilty, or had been guilty.”
