Alger Hiss Biography
(Diplomat)
Birthday: November 11, 1904 (Scorpio)
Born In: Baltimore, Maryland, United States
An erudite diplomat, lawyer and Harvard educated protege of U.S. Supreme Court justices like Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Alger Hiss made his name in government administration and policymaking in President Roosevelt’s New Deal. He then played an instrumental role in the history-making Yalta Conference -- a meeting between the heads of the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Republic to decide on post war scenario of Germany, and Europe in general. In the two months between April and June 1945 that Hiss served as Secretary-General of the ‘United Nations Conference on International Organization’, he played an integral role in the drafting of the UN Charter. A year later, he left his comfortable government job to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’ -- a non-profit, non-partisan policymaking, private organization that boasts of research centres all around the world today. However, his career and reputation were forever tarnished by Whittaker Chambers’ who alleged Hiss of being a Communist spy working for the Soviet Union during the late 1940s. He was eventually convicted of perjury and had to serve jail time. Known as the ‘Hiss case’ it grabbed national attention and even propelled Richard Nixon’s political career from an obscure young senator to that of America’s 37th President.