held hearings in which Whittaker Chambers not only said that he himself was a Communist but that there was a Communist group in the government in the late thirties and that Alger Hiss was a member of it. Hiss denied the accusation and denied under oath that he had ever even known Chambers. His friends rallied round. Dean Acheson, then a law partner of Hiss’s brother, Donald, helped with the early legal planning; William Marbury, a prominent Baltimore attorney and a very old and close personal friend, sent a note to Donald Hiss, who had been similarly accused: “If you and Alger are party
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