As hundreds of scientists from around the world were conscripted in the Manhattan Project during the thick of Word War II, the best and brightest were passed along to the top-secret research site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secrets of the world’s first atom bomb would soon be unlocked.
After the project disbanded in 1946, however, Fuchs switched sides and spent the next two years passing secrets to Soviets that included a method for refining uranium and diagrams for the construction of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was projecting that the Soviets would be incapable of going nuclear until the mid-1950s. When the USSR conducted their first successful atomic test in 1949, a stunned President Truman initially declared that the explosion must have been an “accident.”
America during the red scare was a very different place. The main fears of the day were not the goings on of the Middle East or the walls between countries; rather, people feared the loyalties of their own neighbors. As the Cold War with Russia emerged at the end of World War II, the lure of communistic thought sent shivers down the spines of patriotic Americans. Everywhere one looked someone was being accused of socialist ties, communist sentiments and worst of all, spying for the Russians. One of the most highlighted cases from the post war period was that of Alger Hiss.
Born in Baltimore in 1904, Hiss studied law at John Hopkins and Harvard and began a promising career as law clerk for the prestigious Oliver Wendell Holmes. From this esteemed beginning, Hiss went on to hold a number of positions in the Roosevelt Administration. America in the 1930s was a nation of unrest and uncertainty about the viability and longevity of the capitalist system. The stock market crash of 1929 coupled with the Dust Bowl in the mid west, left many searching for alternative ideologies.
One of these searchers was Whittaker Chambers. Chambers came from a broken Philadelphia home and in 1924 began to see the failure of his home life as an analogy for the failure of the capitalist system. In 1925, he became a devout Marxists and joined the communist party. Later, Chambers would defect from the party and become one of its biggest enemies.
As Chambers affirmed his commitment to the Communist ideology, Hiss held a number of important offices in the United States government. Work with the department of Agriculture and State Department led Hiss to serve as Roosevelt’s assistant during the Yalta Conference in 1945 and Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations. In 1949, Hiss left public office to work towards international peace as the president of the Carnegie Endowment. A rich and diverse career would have been Hiss legacy if Chambers and his associates hadn’t made him the target of an FBI espionage investigation.
Whittaker Chambers was a writer and editor who while working for TIME magazine confessed to being a communist during the 1930s before the House on Un American Activities. He chose to point to Hiss as a fellow believer who had worked actively in the party from 1933 to 1938. The FBI and NSA investigated the State department during the time Hiss served and found what they believed to be evidence of Hiss disloyalty.
After two grand jury trials, the first resulting in a hung jury, Hiss was sentence to five years in prison after being found guilty of spying for the Russians. Documents from the Yalta conference in 1945 indicated a Russian American spy was with FDR at the conference. This coupled with Chambers’ accusation was enough to put Hiss away for five years and destroy the reputation of one of America’s dedicated civil servants. Hiss tried to prove his innocence throughout his life, suing both Chambers for libel and the United States government fort wrongful imprisonment.
It would take until 1992 for Russian documents that showed Hiss had no involvement with espionage to surface. Hiss passed away just four years later in 1996. And even after his death and the lack of material evidence, historians still remain divided on the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss.
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The trial set the precedent for many things to come including by some accounts, the McCarthy era, the election of Richard Nixon, the founding principals of the modern conservative movement and even the election of Ronald Reagan. The story of Alger Hiss does show the gravity of accusation and the means by which fear of other ideologies can be carried to extremes. | |||||||||||
There are few moments in American history when the whole world is watching. But on July 20, 1969 it would have been difficult to look away. All television and radios were tuned into the historic broadcast as the commentator for the NASA space program described the events leading up to the moment that Neil Armstrong became the first human being to stand on the moon. At minimum, 500 million tuned into history. 
Fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would be mostly quiet during the broadcast and it is Armstrong that remains the most notable member of the shuttle crew. After the historic words were spoken, Aldrin and Armstrong collected rocks from the moon’s surface and Collins enjoyed the vastness of space from above. Four decades after that day, people still look to that day as a sign of human accomplishment and a symbol of humanity’s capability. But the moon landing represented other things as well: a dead president’s dream, a blow in the cold war and the victory of the space race. 
John F. Kennedy had remarked in 1961 that putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade was a real possibility. Unfortunately, it would be Richard Nixon who spoke with the astronauts as they floated in their tin can and not JFK. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas as his car drove down the street in front of a happy cheering crowd.
The Soviet Union was determined to show its might and eagerness to progress actually becoming the first nation to put a man into space. Because of the tension between the two nations, The Soviet Union’s small victory became a mighty blow against America’s ambitions for the stars. The determination with which both countries pursued space flight became known as the space race. Armstrong’s footsteps on the moon’s surface represented America’s victory in the pursuit of progress. The Soviet Union’s space efforts after the moon landing were less than notable. Whereas in America, the desire to send both man and machine into the solar system continues. 
