The Witness and the Spy | Hiss, Chambers, and the Rosenbergs

It is August 3, 1948, and a former Communist Party member named Whittaker Chambers walks into a House committee room in Washington, D.C., and says something that no one in the room ever expected to hear. Alger Hiss is a spy. Hiss was not some offhand bureaucrat. He had helped organize the United Nations and attended Yalta. He had been, for much of the 1940s, one of the most respected foreign policy figures in the American government: Harvard-educated, polished, and credentialed, exactly the kind of man that postwar Washington was built by. The question of who was telling the truth would consume the country for years and leave damage that ran in both directions.Join us every Monday for episodes and discussions and on Thursdays for pop quizzes and Sketches in History!