Alger Hiss, Symbol Of His Times

A memorial service will be held at noon on Thursday, Dec. 5, at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan for Alger Hiss, who died at Lenox Hill Hospital on Friday at the age of 92.

Mr. Hiss was a resident of Manhattan and a longtime homeowner in East Hampton. He and Isabel Johnson began spending summers here in about 1960, renting at first and buying a house in 1963.

Although the couple lived quietly, the recognition that this was THE Mr. Hiss, the diplomat accused of being a spy and the defendant in two notorious trials that heightened the public's fear of Communist infiltration into government, astonished neighbors and tradespeople, at least on first encounter. More often than not, the East Hamptoners the couple met became friends.

For many years the Hisses lived in a house with a view of Accabonac Harbor on Old Stone Highway in Springs. They later moved to a modest house on Cooper Lane in East Hampton, across from Cedar Lawn Cemetery.

Mr. Hiss once observed that cemeteries were good habitats for birds, a subject of which he had broad knowledge. He also had a remarkable ability to enjoy situations that others might find depressing. Even when he was in prison, he told The East Hampton Star in 1993, he had been buoyed by the sight of a red-breasted grosbeak in the prison yard.

His son, Tony Hiss of Manhattan, a former writer for The New Yorker who now is a visiting scholar at the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University, said his father was drawn to East Hampton by friends, such as the late writer A.J. Liebling, and because it was reminiscent of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he had spent "heavenly summers as a kid."

It was there that his interest in bird life was nurtured, Tony Hiss said, reporting that his father had been an early friend of the late ornithologist and illustrator Roger Tory Peterson.

Mr. Hiss's circle of friends widened after the couple moved to Cooper Lane. Acquaintances, learning that he was losing his sight, visited to read aloud to him. Among the regulars were Samuel Friedman of Amagansett and B.H. Friedman, the late Sheila Natasha Friedman, and Suzanne Goell of East Hampton.

Although Mr. Hiss had been largely bedridden during the last two years of his life, Mrs. Goell said his "intellect was undiminished." When the news of the world grew repetitive, she said, she could always get him to tell her something interesting about birds. Others were said to have read aloud such weighty tomes as "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

A measure of the man can be found in the consistency with which those who knew him spoke of his intelligence, courtliness, and warmth. Some used the word "noble" to describe him, marveling at his restraint in dealing with the accusations that swirled around him throughout his life. He never ceased to maintain his innocence.

Friends also tell analogous stories about Mr. Hiss's fascination with and remarkable ability to remember the young. Tim Horan recalled this week that Mr. Hiss had met a young woman at the Horans' Bridgehampton house who had just finished her first year of law school. She told him she had a summer job with Kaye Scholer Fierman Hays & Handler, a major Manhattan firm.

A year later, Mr. Horan said, Mr. Hiss was greeted by the same girl, who called out "Hi, Alger" from across a room. Virtually sightless, he identified the voice and replied, Mr. Horan said, "Donna, you must tell me how you enjoyed the work at Kaye Scholer, and your second year at Columbia."

Alger Hiss was born on Nov. 11, 1904, in Baltimore, the son of Mary and Charles Alger Hiss. He attended Baltimore public schools, Johns Hopkins University, and the Harvard University School of Law, where he became a protege of Felix Frankfurter, who taught at Harvard Law before becoming a Supreme Court Justice. When Mr. Hiss graduated, Professor Frankfurter arranged for him to clerk for the then elderly Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His law school years and association with Justice Holmes informed the rest of his life.

Mr. Hiss began his career in Washington in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1933. He later became director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in the State Department. He also served as counsel for a Federal investigation into the munitions industry.

Toward the end of World War II, as an adviser to President Roosevelt, he took part in the Yalta Conference, which redivided Europe, and got to know such giants as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. He was among those who drafted the United Na tions charter and, in 1946, was chief adviser to the U.S. delegation at the first General Assembly. He left government that year to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The charges against him surfaced in 1948. Convicted of perjury in 1950, he served 44 months in Lewisburg (Pa.) Penitentiary, where he worked in a storeroom and became an unofficial arbitrator of disputes among Italian-American racketeers. One of his "colleagues" from that time read to him during his last years.

After his release from prison, Mr. Hiss worked for a time selling women's barrettes. In 1960, he found a job as a salesman of office supplies and printing. He was readmitted to the bar in Massachusetts in 1975, the year he retired, but a petition to be readmitted to the New York bar failed.

Asked this week how it was possible for her husband to have retained his faith in the legal system, Mrs. Hiss said, "It was because he was so thoroughly a lawyer."

Mr. Hiss once said Justice Holmes was responsible for teaching him "a deeper sense of democracy." That, and "being a printing salesman and my time in Lewisburg gave me greater respect for my fellow man," he told Alexandra Shelley, who wrote about him for The Star in 1993.

In his books, "In the Court of Public Opinion," published in 1957, and "Reflections of a Life," published in 1988, Mr. Hiss described his belief during the trials and a libel action he brought against his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, that he could not be found guilty. He died without the official exoneration he expected.

Mr. Hiss witnessed the rise and fall, and rise again, of the man who built his political career on the Hiss case, Richard M. Nixon. He also lived to see the Medal of Freedom given posthumously by President Reagan to Mr. Chambers.

At his death the media leaned toward the view that Alger Hiss had liv ed a lie. Among his most persuasive detractors are the columnists Wil liam F. Buckley Jr. and George F. Will and Allan Weinstein, a historian who wrote "Perjury: The Hiss-Cham bers Case" after five years of in vestigation.

The New York Times followed a comprehensive obituary with an Op-Ed piece two days later by Sam Tanenhaus, the author of a forthcoming Chambers biography. "All evidence shows that the private Hiss was a Soviet agent," he wrote, "probably through World War II, who secretly undermined the policies he was sworn to uphold."

Among those who believed Mr. Hiss, particularly that J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had targeted him in an attempt to discredit the New Deal and had trumped up the evidence, are Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, John Lowenthal, an attorney who made a documentary film about the case, and, reportedly, George Kennan, the former U.S. Ambassador. In addition to the documentary, a mini-series on the case, "Concealed Enemies," was shown on television's "American Playhouse" in 1984.

The controversial Hiss case, one of the most written-about in this century, is not apt to disappear from view very soon. Last year, a novel, "The Last Pumpkin Paper," by Bob Oeste, was published by Random House. Mr. Hiss's supporters say it describes the case with clarity. Another recent book is a Scholastic Press publication for students, "You Be the Judge." It includes chapters on both Mr. Chambers and Mr. Hiss.

Victor Rabinowitz, a noted civil rights attorney who is also a longtime East Hampton homeowner, represented Mr. Hiss in the late '70s and early '80s in an attempt to get a new trial. Material obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed, Mr. Hiss contended that the trials had been unfair, in particular that the crucial typewriter in the case, an old Woodstock submitted in evidence by the prosecution, was a fake.

"We were unable to present the evidence at court," Mr. Rabinowitz said this week. "We were not given an opportunity to prove the typewriter was manufactured" by the F.B.I. The typewriter was pivotal in convincing jurors of Mr. Hiss's guilt.

Mr. Hiss's supporters also say the "pumpkin papers," microfilm found in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Mr. Chambers's Maryland farm, were not of a "classified" nature but involved agricultural trade with Germany and a report about fire extinguishers on a destroyer-escort.

The attempt to reopen the case was carried to the Supreme Court, which refused to consider it in 1983. It was Mr. Hiss's last legal effort in his own behalf.

Mr. Hiss was hospitalized at Lenox Hill in Manhattan on Oct. 13, and his death on Nov. 15 was attributed to cardiopulmonary complications as a result of emphysema. He is survived by his wife, who plans now to sell the East Hampton house, by Tony Hiss, the son of his first marriage to Priscilla Hiss, and by a grandson, Jacob. Also surviving is a stepson, Dr. Timothy Hobson of San Francisco.

Mr. Hiss's books will go to Harvard Law School, and the family has suggested contributions in his memory to the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in Manhattan.

Commenting on Mr. Hiss's life, Ronnie Chalif, a Water Mill resident and longtime friend, called it "an American tragedy. . . . When you think that a man of peace, which he really was, instead became the symbol of such divisiveness."