A career bureaucrat who worked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and also for U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, notably at the Yalta conference. He served in several federal US bureaus, including the U.S. State Department.
Former US Communist party member and former Soviet spy, then Time magazine journalist, Whittaker Chambers, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, accused Hiss of spying for Russia. Faced with a federal grand jury investigation, Hiss denied all charges. Though he was not convicted of spying, he was convicted of perjury in 1950 and imprisoned for 5 years.
After release from prison in 1954, Hiss tried to clear his name. Requests for FBI and State Department files were unsuccessful. In the 1990s, Hiss was able to contact Russian general and historian Dimitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who looked (somewhat casually) into the Soviet archives. Volkogonov subsequently reported that no evidence of espionage by Hiss was found in any Soviet files.
Seen by many as unjustly convicted, Hiss became a symbol of Republican witch hunts in the 1950s. Nixon's bulldog behavior during this case, which involved his secret use of FBI information, foreshadowed his later naughty doings.