Alger Hiss was not the only Hiss accused by Whittaker Chambers of having had Communist Party ties in the 1930s. According to Chambers, Donald Hiss, Alger's younger brother by two years, was both a Party member and active in the Communist underground. Chambers, however, never charged Donald Hiss with espionage, and for that reason his accusations against Donald Hiss have never received the same level of attention and scrutiny as his more sensational charges against Alger Hiss.
 
But while the Donald Hiss-Chambers dispute has attracted only minor interest from most historians of the case, it is of major importance in assessing Chambers' general accuracy as a witness, because it offers an independent opportunity to check his allegations against the factual record. Such an opportunity became generally available for the first time in 2005, when the FBI posted 354 pages from Donald Hiss's FBI file on its Freedom of Information Act Reading Room Web page. The files make clear that the FBI was never able to confirm any of Chambers' charges against Donald Hiss - indeed, the head of the FBI's Washington, D.C. field office wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on January 29, 1952 after nearly a decade of FBI investigations that Chambers' allegations were "unsubstantiated," and he therefore recommended that no more security investigations on Donald Hiss be conducted.

    The Charges Against Donald Hiss

It must have seemed to Donald Hiss that he was forever traveling in his brother's footsteps. He followed Alger both to Johns Hopkins University and to Harvard University Law School. He then succeeded his brother in the honor of serving a year as secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes before himself entering the New Deal.

Oddly, the one place where Donald Hiss actually preceded Alger was in the 1939 notes of Adolf Berle, the first written record of allegations by Whittaker Chambers about those he claimed had been active with him in the Communist Party. On August 9, 1939, Chambers and Isaac Don Levine, an anti-communist journalist, visited the home of Berle, who was then an Assistant Secretary of State. The penultimate entry of Berle's notes of the conversation contains this reference:

     Donald Hiss
     (Phillippine Advisor)
     Member of C.P. with Pressman & Witt -
     Labor Dep't. - Asst. to Frances Perkins -
     Party wanted him there - to send him as arbitrator in Bridges trial -
     Brought along by brother -

In subsequent interviews with the FBI and in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a federal grand jury in New York, and at Alger Hiss's perjury trials in 1948 and 1949, Chambers repeated the substance of these charges - and in some instances amplified them. For example, before HUAC on August 7, 1948, Chambers said he had collected party dues from Donald, who knew him only as Carl. Regarding the Bridges case, he explained that when Donald was with the Labor Department in the late 1930s, the Communist Party wanted him to insert himself into a deportation case against Harry Bridges, a leftist, Australian-born labor leader on the West Coast docks. At that time, Chambers testified, Donald also had an opportunity to enter the State Department as legal adviser to the Philippine section. Chambers said the Party decided that Donald should go to the Phillippines rather than work on the Bridges case, and that Donald, while he disagreed with the Party's thinking, eventually submitted to Party discipline and took the State Department job.

In his own sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, the very same New York grand jury that indicted his brother, and at Alger Hiss's second perjury trial, Donald Hiss, like his brother, specifically denied each of Chambers’ charges. He swore that he had never been a member of the Communist Party or the so-called Ware Group (supposedly a secret Communist Party "study group"); that he had never met Chambers "by the name of Chambers, Carl or any other name"; and that the Party had nothing to do with his work for the Labor Department or for the Department of State.

“If I am lying,” Donald Hiss added in testimony before HUAC, “I should go to jail.” But unlike his brother, Donald Hiss was never indicted. In fact, after testifying on direct examination for the defense at his brother’s second perjury trial, he was barely cross-examined by prosecutor Thomas Murphy, who seemed unwilling to challenge his strong denials.

The FBI files on Donald Hiss, which can now be downloaded from the FBI's Web site, perhaps show the reason why. According to the documents, the Bureau knew that Chambers was wrong about the Bridges case. Nor could they find any evidence to support his other allegations.

When asked before the grand jury on December 9, 1948 about his connection to the Bridges case, Donald Hiss testified that in September 1937 he was working for the Department of Labor as an assistant solicitor. While returning from a trip to the West Coast that month, he received a cable from his boss, Labor Department Solicitor General Gerard D. Reilly, asking him to contact the Department, but because Hiss was then aboard a ship heading through the Canal Zone, he had been unable to reach Reilly by phone.

Upon his return to Washington, he was finally able to speak to Reilly, who told him that the Justice Department wanted him to investigate certain individuals who had given affidavits in the Bridges hearings, then underway in California.

That November, Hiss received an offer from Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Sayre to join the State Department. Hiss testified that Reilly tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. Hiss entered State on February 1, 1938.

Two months later, Hiss recalled, Reilly got in touch with him about an upcoming hearing in the Bridges case. Reilly told him that he was going to recommend to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins that Hiss act as the hearing officer. Hiss stated - contrary to Chambers' claim - that he wasn’t eager to get involved in the case. He had told Reilly, he said, that it was "an idiotic idea," that he was 31 years old with no reputation as a lawyer, and that due to the tremendous publicity the case had already received, the department needed someone with a real reputation to oversee it. Hiss never did work on the case.

With the possibility that Donald Hiss, like his brother, might be indicted on perjury charges, the FBI investigated Hiss's account "thoroughly," according to one document. The key FBI interview was conducted with Reilly on February 7, 1949. In that session, Reilly's version of events surrounding the Bridges affair supported Hiss's. He said it was his decision alone to ask Hiss to oversee the case - the Communist Party had nothing to do with it. FBI agents also examined Hiss's personnel file and interviewed other officials with knowledge of the situation. Afterward, they concluded that Chambers' allegations were no longer worth pursuing.

That wasn't the only determination the FBI made regarding Donald Hiss. Agents conducted dozens of interviews, sifted his personal files, installed a mail cover and other types of surveillance in search of any evidence to support Chambers' testimony that Hiss had been a member of the Communist Party and had also joined the Party's underground. There was none. It was after a review of Hiss's file on January 29, 1952 for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, that the head of the FBI's Washington, D.C. field office called Chambers' allegations "unsubstantiated" and recommended that no more security investigations on Donald Hiss be conducted.

  Some Possible Explanations

 Still, a mystery remains. How did Whittaker Chambers come to have any information at all - even distorted and innacurate information - about Donald Hiss and Harry Bridges, since the discussions about Hiss's involvement in the case occurred nearly a year after Alger Hiss swore he had broken off contact with Chambers? Donald Hiss testified he didn't think he had ever mentioned Reilly's offer to his brother. "I have lain awake at nights trying to figure out how he could have gotten any information along those lines," he said. "As I understand his testimony, the information is wrong. I know he did not get it from me."

There is at least one intriguing possibility - still speculative - which might also suggest how Chambers was able to get the State Department documents used to convict Alger Hiss. Donald Hiss said Reilly had sent a memorandum to Frances Perkins, then Secretary of Labor, suggesting several people as potential candidates to be hearing officer. One of names on the list was Donald Hiss’s. This occurred in the spring of 1938. Donald Hiss said that Francis Sayre, Alger Hiss's State Department boss at the time, might also have been brought into the discussion, since Donald Hiss was also working for Sayre. So it was possible, Donald Hiss said, that Sayre also received a memorandum on the subject.

If Sayre did get a Bridges memo, it would have reached his office around the same time as other documents that Chambers collected from Sayre’s office and produced ten years later as evidence against Alger Hiss. (That batch of documents - later called the "Baltimore Documents" - all bore were dates between January 5 and April 1, 1938.)

But if Alger Hiss didn’t hand these State Department papers over to Chambers, how did they reach him? A 1969 interview with Ella Winter, a journalist and former acquaintance of Chambers, provides a possible answer. Speaking to John Lowenthal, an attorney and author, she recalled that, in the 1930s, Chambers had once asked her to steal documents for him. According to Winters, Chambers said that taking State Department documents was an easy matter. All she had to do was make an appointment with an official (he suggested someone in the Trade Agreements section, where several of the documents used as evidence against Alger Hiss originated). If during the conversation the man got up use the bathroom, she could scoop up any documents sitting on his desk.

Winter refused but never forgot the request. If Chambers indeed ever personally employed this technique - and if it worked - it might explain both how he found out about Donald Hiss and the Bridges case and how documents from Alger Hiss's office came into his possession.