National Affairs 1950: U.S. Army In Retreat in Korea

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In silence, the eight women and four men filed into the jury box. From his seat, Alger Hiss looked at each one, his lips set in a tight smile. None returned his look. Priscilla Hiss fingered her handbag, stared straight ahead.

The court clerk spoke in the courtroom hush: "Madam Foreman, have you and the members of the jury agreed on a verdict?"

"I have," said Mrs. Ada Condell self-consciously.

"How say you?"

"I find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second count," said Mrs. Condell.

Hiss's face paled. His wife's cheek twitched. The eyes of a young defense attorney filled with sudden tears, and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Patient old Federal Judge Henry Warren Goddard told the jury: "I think you have . . . rendered a just verdict." Sur rounded by swarming newsmen, the defendant walked out of the courtroom and into the cruel light of flash bulbs.

Thus came Alger Hiss, 45, to the bitter day of reckoning. He had been found guilty of perjury. But implicit in the charge was Hiss's conviction for a far deeper crime that, because of the statute of limitations, justice could not reach. The verdict branded Hiss a spy.

Few men had seemed more surely marked for success. Handsome, popular, effortlessly brilliant, Alger Hiss had sat at Franklin Roosevelt's shoulder. Only the narrowly vindictive greeted the verdict with a sense of jubilation. A brilliant but weak man had proved unworthy of the great trust placed in him. By the jury's verdict he was marked as a man who, having dedicated himself to Communism under a warped sense of idealism, went on making of his whole life an intricate, calculated lie.

MANNERS & MORALS The Vanishing Nickel The New York State Public Service Commission threw the once ubiquitous U.S. nickel for another fall. The commission told the New York Telephone Co. that it might raise its basic coin-box charge to lOc. New Jersey, California, Washington and Oregon companies had asked for the same boost.