He was 25, an honor graduate of Johns Hopkins University and a graduate cum laude of Harvard Law School, where he had been a favorite student of Professor Felix Frankfurter. The year was 1929, and he had won the coveted apprenticeship job of law-clerking for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He married Priscilla Fansler Hobson, 26, a Quaker a divorcee and the mother of a three-year-old son.
In 1933, after practicing law in Boston, he got a job as an attorney in Henry Wallace's Department of Agriculture. He attracted attention by his personal charm and professional skill, served as an assistant on the Nye Committee, which was investigating the arms manufacturers of World War I, and a year later got a job in the Department of State, serving under Assistant Secretary Francis B. Sayre.
By 1939 he appeared to be well along the road to success, untouched by suspicion of any kind. That was the year Hitler and Stalin made the pact that touched off World War II. Five days after that event, Whittaker Chambers, then a contributing editor of TIME, made a trip to Washington.
The Berle Notes. From 1925 to April 1938, Chambers had been a Communist, a writer of radical literature, an editor of the Communist Daily Worker. He had also been what was then vaguely known as a Communist courier. Abandoning the party in revulsion and despair, he became a determined enemy of Communism. At that critical moment in history he was alarmed at the presence in the U.S. Government of certain men whom he knew to be Reds. He had made his trip to Washington at the urging of a friend, to pass on a warning to Adolf A. Berle Jr., Assistant Secretary of State.
Nine years later, Berle was to testify as to what Chambers had told him. He quoted Chambers as saying that the men he had in mind were not necessarily members of the Communist Party, nor was there any question of espionage. They were merely sympathizers who might be expected to use their positions to help the Soviet cause.
Notes made by Berle after the interview, however, somewhat contradicted Berle's memory: Berle's notes, made public at the Hiss trial, indicated that Chambers had charged that at least three former Government attorneys—Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt and John Abt—were members of an "underground group." Among other items in Berle's notes was the line: "Plans for two super-battleships secured in 1937—who gave—." Also from Berle's notes: "Donald Hiss [brother of Alger], member of C.P. with Pressman and Witt . . ." and—"Alger Hiss, Ass't. to Sayre—C.P.—1937. Member of Underground Com.—Active."
Unequivocal Endorsements. Berle, as he later explained, decided that the Chambers evidence was pretty thin. In 1941 he checked on the Hiss brothers by inquiring of their friend Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson and their old mentor Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Both of them, Berle said, gave the Hisses their unequivocal endorsements. Acheson was to testify that his endorsement had only covered Donald Hiss, who was his executive assistant; but he added that Alger Hiss and he were "friends and remain friends."