INVESTIGATIONS: The Confrontation

As the congressional investigations of Communism went into their third week, one fact stood out in everyone's mind: someone was lying in his teeth. The someone was either handsome, 43-year-old Alger Hiss, until 1947 a top official in the State Department, or ex-Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers, now a senior editor of TIME. By week's end, it was clear that on one vital point it was not Whittaker Chambers who was lying.

Chambers had testified that, in the early 1930s, he had been a close friend or Alger Hiss in a Communist elite corps,...