TWO GHOSTS, FROM BALTIMORE & WESTMINISTER, ALGER HISS RETURNS Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers "have returned" -- not in the dramatic Gen. Douglas MacArthur statement as he waded ashore at the 1945 recapture of the Philippines -- but through a haunting journey of son Tony Hiss and stepson Timothy Hobson, now 65 and 80 years old.

In a recent narrative of the 1930's era, by Washington Post writer Lynne Duke, Hiss and Hobson track through the rooms of Alger Hiss' Georgetown rowhouse . It was in that home of Alger and wife Priscilla , where alleged acts of espionage were committed by the passing of stolen documents/secrets from the State Department where Hiss was a rising star. The recepient of those state secrets was Whitaker Chambers, then a spy for Stalin's Soviet Union.

It was in 1937 when a teen-age Tim Hobson was recovering from a childhood leg injury in the bedroom near where the documents' exchanges took place. 70 years later, in this year of 2007 and supported by his half-brother Tony Hiss, Hobson denies hearing any plots or secret discussions between Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. Tony Hiss has written and spoken the same denials of evidence , as part of a conspiracy of stolen documents given to Russia.

The Maryland ghosts have returned from the 1948 highly public investigation of Chambers' charges, by the House Un-American Activities Committee --- or have they? For me, a part of that drama revolves around personal memory:

My parents attended Friends School and knew Alger Hiss and his brother Donald as classmates there. My father, a McDonogh School teacher and farm director, knew Chambers as small farm owner in Westminster where he enjoyed weekend escapes from senior editor responsibilities at Time Magazine's New York offices.
I knew Chambers' two kids -- John and Ellen -- as 4 H Club friends when we exhibited cattle at the annual Md. State Fair. In 1948, a traditionally quiet arrival at the fairgrounds was transformed to a public event, as they and their mother were mobbed by photographers in what had always been a routine unloading of Jersey calves from the Chambers farm truck.

These personal memories were one small part of a national drama where a senior government official, who sat at President Roosevelt's side during the 1945 Yalta conference, was suddenly accused of being a Communist spy by a former co-conspirator who had transferred his anger to the Soviet Union in the postwar anti-Communist era. After a Bolton Hill childhood,Johns Hopkins education and rise in New Deal government service, Alger Hiss found himself as a launching pad for the career of an unknown California Congressman Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who drove the House Un-American Activities Committee to determine that Hiss had lied: a decision that lead to perjury conviction by a New York court .

There will always be disagreements as to who lied, who told the truth . Those disagreements will continue as long as history is told . But , one fact is clear : these 2 Maryland ghosts -- Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers -- have and will continue to return.

Labels: Alger Hiss, Nixon, Whittaker Chambers

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