1904- . US diplomat and liberal Democrat, a
former State Department official,
controversially imprisoned 1950 for allegedly
having spied for the USSR. Hiss, president of
the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and one of President Roosevelt's
advisers at the 1945 Yalta Conference, was
accused 1948 by a former Soviet agent,
Whittaker Chambers (1901-61), of having
passed information to the USSR during the
period 1926-37. He was convicted of perjury
for swearing before the House Un-American
Activities Committee that he had not spied
for the USSR (under the statute of
limitations he could not be tried for the
original crime). Richard Nixon was a
prominent member of the committee, which
inspired the subsequent anticommunist
witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy. There
are doubts about the justice of Hiss's
conviction.