A lean, tight-lipped man in a neat brown suit presented himself in Federal Judge Henry Goddard's Manhattan courtroom. The judge said briefly: "You are surrendering to the marshal?" Said the lean man: "Yes, sir." A deputy marshal led Alger Hiss away to a detention cell.
Behind him was a bright, strange and blasted career, begun with great promise: he had been law clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, lawyer in the New Deal, an assistant in the State Department, and, for a moment of front-page eminence, secretary general to the San Francisco founding convention of the United Nations. But he had never been so noteworthy in his public life as he had in his ultimate disgrace, when ex-Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers exposed Hiss's treason.
Inextricably caught, defended by credulous friends (Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed testified for him as character witnesses), he had fought his accuser with every legal weapon. He denied conspiring with Chambers, denied stealing State Department secrets for the Russians. The evidence was too overwhelming. Although one jury disagreed, a second convicted him of perjury. In January 1950, he heard the judge pass sentence of five years. (He will be eligible for parole after serving 20 months.)
Last week 46-year-old Alger Hiss walked through the bleak ruin of his life. His wife Priscilla was not with him. From Judge Goddard's paneled courtroom he went downstairs to the courthouse garage, handcuffed to Edward Jones, a petty mail thief. A crowd of photographers surrounded him, to catch this final incident. A deputy marshal asked him if he minded. The mail thief hid his face, but Alger Hiss said calmly: "If this is what you want, it's all right with me." Then he was loaded into a prison van with Jones and half a dozen other run-of-the-mill prisoners—on his way to a federal prison.