The Case of Whittaker Chambers In the fall of 1993, Maria Schmidt, a young Hungarian historian in Budapest, phoned me in New York. She had a question. “Tell me about ‘Alger Hiss’?” I explained as briefly as I could. “You mean that there are people in the United States who still believe that he was telling the truth?” Certainly, I replied, and not least among my fellow professors. “In that case,” she said, “I am going to send you something that I have found.” Schmidt is a historian of contemporary Hungary. She had gained access to the wartime and postwar archives of the Hungarian Communist Party, and there, while combing through communications and reports that passed between Hungarian secret policemen and Communist Party leaders, she had come across the name “Alger Hiss” a number of times. Assuming it to be an alias—the Hiss case does not figure prominently in European history lessons—she was surprised to discover that a man had actually existed by that name (and was at that time still alive).
