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Hiss, who asked him to comfort an old man. Chambers’s memoir, Witness, was published in 1952, and became a national best-seller. Chambers still brooded about the future and not just Communism, but liberalism, as the enemy. Sidney Hook, reviewing Witness, noted of Chambers, “He recklessly lumps Socialists, progressives, liberals, and men of good will together with the Communists. All are bound according to him by the same faith; but only the Communists have the gumption and the guts to live by it and pay the price ... The logic by which he now classifies liberals and humanists with the Communists is not unlike the logic by which, when a Communist, he classified them as Fascists.”
    Hiss’s conviction darkened an already bleak period, exacerbating the growing political division over the issue of domestic subversion. Even before the Hiss case Yalta was an issue, a magic word for the Republicans, uttered recklessly in the l946 congressional campaigns, a free and easy chance to attack Roosevelt and the New Deal. Republicans claimed the agreement was the work of a tough andtreacherous Stalin, who duped an exhausted and desperately ill Roosevelt, and that it was filled with secret accords and that we had sold out a free Poland. The reality had been quite different; if anyone had been for the Yalta agreements, it had been the American military, whose top brass was in no way convinced that the atomic bomb would work. Fearing that more than a million Americans might be lost in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, the Joint Chiefs had supposedly pressured Roosevelt to get the Russians to come into the war against Japan.
    But now Yalta was an even more powerful and divisive word, a synonym in the new political lexicon for “betrayal.” For Alger Hiss had been at Yalta, albeit, as diplomat Chip Bohlen noted, in a rather minor capacity. That didn’t matter. Hiss was soon elevated to a position as a principal architect of the Yalta accords. “The Alger Hiss group,” in the words of Senator William Jenner, one of the more rabid of the right-wing Republicans, “engineered the Yalta sell-out.” To Joseph McCarthy, Yalta and Hiss were something that he could readily seize on: “We know that at Yalta we were betrayed. We know that since Yalta, the leaders of this Government, by design or ignorance, have continued to betray us ... We also know that the same men who betrayed America are still leading America. The traitors must no longer lead the betrayed.”
    At Dean Acheson’s confirmation hearings for secretary of state in January 1949, many of the questions seemed to be about Acheson’s relationship with Hiss and Hiss’s role at Yalta. Finally, Senator Tom Connally, one of Acheson’s supporters, said, “It seems that the only argument some persons can present is to holler about Alger Hiss, and then refer to Yalta. They seem to have to dig up something about the dead President of the United States, and then go back to Yalta.”
    Their main target was now Acheson. When Hiss was convicted of perjury, Acheson knew he would be asked about his onetime associate. Feeling that his own beliefs concerning loyalty and obligation were at stake, Acheson thought of what he would say long before the question was asked. He was the son of an Episcopal bishop, and he believed honor had to be placed above political expediency. There were times when a man had to be counted. He chose his words carefully. “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” he told a reporter from the Herald Tribune. Pressed further, Acheson said to look in their Bible for Matthew 25:36, a passage in which Christ called upon His followers to understand that anyone who turns his back on someone in trouble turns his back on Him:“Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.” Later he explained that he was following “Christ’s words setting forth compassion as the highest of Christian duties.” His words were