Opposite of noteworthy1/18/2024 ![]() ![]() But recent statements on the Diplomatic History electronic discussion list, H-DIPLO, by Julius Kobyakov (October 16 and December 17, 2003), deputy director of the KGB's American desk during the 1980s, and by Amy Knight (January 16 and March 2, 2004), discredit the latest essay asserting Hiss's guilt. Each faction views the other as "in denial," to cite the title of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's 2003 input to the affray. Charges and countercharges of spurious translation, shoddy scholarship, data manipulation, archival distortion, and parti pris selectivity pervade the scholarly arena. Some contend that Venona confirms Hiss's guilt others hold that it demonstrates the opposite. Continuing controversies stem from the release in 1996 of the "Venona" messages-Soviet cablegrams covertly monitored by the U.S. ![]() Within weeks, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his eponymous era with a speech invoking Alger Hiss as typifying a State Department still "thoroughly infested with Communists." Richard Nixon, Hiss's chief nemesis on HUAC, rose to fame and eventually to the presidency on the campaign slogan "Twenty Years of Treason." His career ruined, Hiss died in 1996 maintaining his innocence to the end. Indicted for perjury, Hiss was tried twice and sentenced in 1950 (the first trial had resulted in a hung jury) to five years in prison. Chambers then led HUAC investigators to a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm, where he had put rolls of film that he said Hiss had given to him for transmittal to Moscow. When Hiss sued Chambers for libel, Chambers elaborated on his allegations and claimed Hiss had engaged in espionage, producing copies of State Department documents allegedly typed by Hiss's wife to support his charge. Chambers later repeated the allegation on the popular radio program, Meet the Press. In August 1948, Time magazine editor and ex-Communist courier Whittaker Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former State Department official, had been a Communist in the 1930s. But historians and other scholars can take some comfort in a recent legal decision stemming from one of the most famous of Cold War controversies-the notorious Hiss-Chambers spy case. Academe in America appears to be more and more besieged. Fear of litigation threatens scientific publication in peer-reviewed journals lawyers representing the Association of Medical Publishers in a pending libel suit warn that even the thought of legal action may deter editors from printing anything to which anyone might take exception. Scholarly publication is increasingly beleaguered by a resumption of a Cold War type of climate that erodes freedom of speech and the press. Academic liberty has been seriously jeopardized of late, notably in the wake of 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act. ![]()
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