GENTLEMAN AND A SPY?

He grew up shabby-genteel in Baltimore, Maryland, but he gazes out of a 1945 photograph like one of nature's born aristocrats. The face, at age 41, is lean and boyishly handsome, the hair neatly trimmed; there is a casual elegance about his dress. But the dominant features are the eyes: alert, mischievous, wary, playful, like those of an actor savoring the potential of a new role, a fresh persona. Despite the thousands of words written by and about him, Alger Hiss, who died last week at 92, remains one of the most tantalizing figures of the cold war. His 1949 trial and retrial in a Soviet-espionage case personified the explosive political and class conflicts of the time, serving as the first morality play of the red-baiting era. And the case gave one of its investigators, Congressman Richard Nixon, the national prominence he would later exploit to pursue higher office.

To a dwindling band of zealous believers, Hiss was one of the first victims of anticommunist hysteria, an American Dreyfus. Yet the weight of historical evidence indicates that Hiss was what he steadfastly denied ever being: a member of the communist underground and a Soviet spy. What made his case so intriguing was that his profile seemed at odds with the stereotypical idea of a grubby turncoat. His patrician grace had somehow survived a family life streaked with tragedy. His father, a wholesale grocer, committed suicide when Alger was two; a sister, Mary, also killed herself. Yet Hiss's advancement in life seemed blessed. After graduating with honors from Johns Hopkins University, Hiss at Harvard Law School was befriended by Professor Felix Frankfurter, who arranged for his protege to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hiss worked for law firms in Boston and on Wall Street, and spent a dozen years in government, including stints at the Agriculture, Justice and State departments. By 1945 he was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference; later that year, Hiss served as acting secretary-general at the San Francisco assembly that created the United Nations.

For those who sought them, there were signs that Hiss was more than just a bright young bureaucrat. While working by day on Wall Street, he was active by night in the International Juridical Association, an alleged communist-front lawyers' organization. As early as 1942, the FBI received warnings that Hiss was probably a Soviet agent. The stories became so persistent that late in 1946 officials at State quietly arranged for him to assume the largely ceremonial presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss was serving as head of the Endowment on Aug. 3, 1948, when Whittaker Chambers, a brilliant but controversial senior editor at TIME, reluctantly appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee; one of its members was Nixon, an ambitious young California Republican. Chambers, a portly, rumpled man with a melodramatic style, had been a communist courier but broke with the party in 1938. He told the committee that among the members of a secret communist cell in Washington during the '30s was Hiss.