Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars

Abstract Chapter four included a comment Whittaker Chambers made when Hiss was released from prison, declared his innocence, and announced his campaign for vindication. Chambers predicted that all Hiss needed to do was to continue to maintain that he had been a victim and a scapegoat, and that sooner or later one respectable inhabitant of Hartford, Connecticut (or any other American city), would say to another respectable inhabitant, “[r]eally, I don’t see how Alger Hiss would brazen it out that way unless he were innocent.” At that point, Chambers said, the Communist Party would have achieved “victory.”