In 1948, Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, appeared headed for even greater responsibility. Tall and handsome and with an impeccable WASP pedigree, he had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, advanced in the State Department during World War II, and served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta conference. There was talk of Hiss's becoming secretary of state. But then, on a sultry day that summer, his life fell apart.

Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine, identified Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a former member of the same secret communist cell that Chambers himself had belonged to before breaking with the movement. The episode caused an immediate sensation. Chambers was rumpled, squat, and little-known. His charges against a pillar of the liberal establishment stunned Hiss's friends.

In denying the charges, Hiss filed a slander suit against Chambers. But Chambers, who had originally tried to protect Hiss (whom he viewed as a friend) had to go one step further. He produced, from a scooped-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm, microfilm that he said Hiss had given him. The microfilm contained classified information that Chambers said Hiss had photographed from State Department files, to be turned over to the Soviets. The case dragged on through two trials. Finally, in 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury, the statute of limitations having run out on espionage.