No one who has, even once, lived close to the making of history can ever again suppose that it is made the way the history books tell it. With rare exceptions, such books are like photographs. They catch a surface image. Often as not, they distort it. The secret forces working behind and below the historical surface they seldom catch.
—Whittaker Chambers, Witness , 1952

You have not come back from hell with empty hands.
—André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers, 1952

Nearly half a century has passed since the fateful day in January 1950 when a jury in a Federal court in New York City found Alger Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury. That verdict effectively confirmed the charge brought by Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, his former comrade in a Soviet espionage apparatus in the 1930s, had betrayed his country as a Communist spy while serving as a high official in the U.S.State Department. Hiss, who had been with President Roosevelt at Yalta, had participated in the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and was president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace when Chambers first publicly identified himself as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in August 1948, went to jail as a convicted felon. Yet for the remaining forty-six years of his life—he died in November 1996 at the age of ninety-two—this once highly respected member of the liberal establishment continued to insist upon his innocence.