Investor's Business Daily, April 5th, 2007
National Security: Leftist academics are determined to rehabilitate the reputation of Alger Hiss, the high-level U.S. diplomat and Soviet spy. Time may have passed, but this case was settled a long time ago.
Was Soviet communism a malevolent global force committed to conquering the world, with Kremlin spies reaching top levels in the U.S. government? Or was it "just another system" used to whip up Red hysteria and McCarthyism?
Leftists here and in Europe scoffed at Ronald Reagan when he called the Soviets an evil empire, but he was vindicated by communism's collapse. Similarly, the American left began its vendetta against Richard Nixon when in 1948 he exposed the high-ranking State Department official Hiss as a Russian agent; Nixon too was vindicated when the so-called Venona communications from the Soviet archives were opened in 1995, incriminating Hiss.
Last week, New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War held a conference in which a Russian historian, who supposedly has scoured the Kremlin's records, found nothing implicating Hiss.
But while both Hiss' son and former Nation editor and Hiss supporter Victor Navasky both spoke, scholars who accept Hiss' clear guilt were strangely absent.
NYU's new center has also tried to reopen the Rosenbergs nuclear spying case and has glorified Americans who fought for the left in the Spanish Civil War. This is clearly one "Center" not a bit "for the United States."
The evidence against Hiss is overwhelming:
Reformed communist spy Whittaker Chambers, who spied with Hiss, produced the "Pumpkin Papers" of State Department documents from the late 1930s that only Hiss had access to, all typed on Hiss' typewriter.
A March 30, 1945, communique from the USSR's Washington spy chief to Moscow reports that agent "ALES" is attending the post-war Yalta conference, then traveling to Moscow. As adviser to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Hiss did exactly that. Former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler calls the evidence of the identity of ALES as Hiss "exceptionally solid."
The late Democratic Sen. Pat Moynihan, who chaired a panel on government secrecy in the 1990s, said the U.S. government "had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told."
Serious academics know Hiss' guilt from the evidence. Left-wing activists posing as scholars want to reopen the case for one reason: to discredit the U.S. Shame on them.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
