On Aug. 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, then an editor at Time magazine, stunned official Washington by accusing Alger Hiss, a former Assistant Secretary of State and the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of being a member of a communist cell that had infiltrated the United States government in the 1930s and was secretly working on behalf of the Soviet Union. Chambers twice before had attempted to warn the Roosevelt administration about the nature and extent of communist infiltration of the government, but each time the President chose to ignore the allegations.
Chambers named Hiss and others as communists in dramatic testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “Almost exactly nine years ago,” he stated, “... two days after Hitler and Stalin signed their pact, I went to Washington and reported to the authorities what I knew about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists. For years, international Communism, of which the United States Communist Party is an integral part, had been in a state of undeclared war with this Republic.” He regarded his action then as an “act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat.”
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