I was 9 when Alger got to Lewisburg and 13 when he got out. The first time my mother and I went to Lewisburg, knowing nothing about prisons except The New Yorker cartoons of men in stripes, I was so unsure of what to expect I handed the guard at the desk inside the front gate a bunch of wildflowers that I had just picked. He did not look pleased. We were allowed one visit a month for two hours and one hug to say hello and one to say goodbye with no physical contact in between. Alger could send home three handwritten letters a week. He wrote me funny stories about an imaginary boy, who, I can see now, was even worse than I was at things like swimming and basketball. Rereading them now 45 years later, I can see what extraordinary lengths he went to be a good dad, at a distance.
When we finally went to take him home, his lawyer was driving a brand-new cherry red Chevy convertible, so he could publicly thumb his nose at the inaccurate accusations of communism. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized a helicopter buzzing overhead was not in tribute to him; the director of the prison bureau had been afraid that someone might try to assassinate him when he was released. The chopper was carrying sharpshooters.
When I was a young writer at Time magazine right after the war, Whittaker Chambers was my editor. Every now and then, he made allusions or dropped hints about people he had known in the Communist Party. Once, long before the case broke, I wandered into his office, and he looked up from a newspaper. “Alger Hiss,” he said, pointing to a story he had been reading. It referred to some news that Hiss had made in his role as general secretary of the United Nations’ founding conference. “He is a communist, you know.” “Oh really?” I asked. “Yes,” said Chambers, “and he keeps getting these important jobs. But that’s a long story.”
The name Alger Hiss meant nothing to me, and I let it pass. That is, until 1948, when Chambers, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee–a platform for a young California congressman named Richard Nixon–formally accused Hiss of spying for Moscow. During the furor that followed, I rarely spoke to Chambers–he left the magazine–but I joined endless debates over Hiss’s guilt or innocence. The case itself became a litmus case for the domestic cold war. Hiss was an impeccable character with impeccable Establishment credentials, and Chambers came across as a rather dubious figure. But I would declare, defiantly and somewhat defensively, that I was a friend of Chambers, and that I believed him. The statement was usually greeted with mockery, if people thought I was merely stupid; or anger, if people thought I was as evil as Chambers himself.
