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Alleged Russian spy Mariia Butina was arrested just a few days short of the 70th anniversary of the last major accusation of Russian infiltration in Americas political system: when on Aug. 3, 1948, Time editor and ex-communist Whittaker Chambers publicly accused former high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet agent.

Rattled Democrats, including President Harry Truman, handled the fallout poorly, hesitating to distance themselves from Hiss and unwittingly feeding a conservative narrative that they were soft on communism.

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Republicans are now having their own Alger Hiss moment. Butinas alleged efforts to ingratiate herself with conservative movement organizations and the Republican Party shows that Russias interest in Trump is not an operation focused on one man. As explained in the Justice Department affidavit, in October 2016 Butina reported to her Russian mentor that Republicans are for us and Democrats against. This is not just about one seductive spy, or even one president; its about how intertwined Russia and the Republican Party are becoming, and whether the Republican Party is willing and able to disentangle itself.

Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, for falsely denying in his 1948 congressional testimony that he gave Chambers confidential State Department documents to be delivered to the Soviets. He served 44 months in prison, then spent the next 42 years maintaining his innocence, ever after intercepts declassified just before his death strongly indicated Hiss was a Soviet agent for years.

Shortly before his fall, Hiss had risen high enough in the State Department to serve as the acting secretary-general of the United Nations, during the 1945 San Francisco conference that finalized the international organizations charter. When rumors of his Soviet ties prompted his resignation at the end of 1946, his reputation remained strong enough for a Republican, John Foster Dulles, to engineer a smooth transition into the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His guilt, while hotly debated for decades, left a lingering stain on the Democratic Party and on liberalism, making it difficult for the party to win the public trust on matters both foreign and domestic. If Republicans handle their Alger Hiss moment as awkwardly as Democrats did, they face a similar fate.

Why was Hiss such a touchstone for the Cold War era? Because for much of the left, he was an honorable man who served 14 years in three government departments during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, only to be smeared in a wave of anti-communist hysteria. For the right, he was proof that communists were crawling throughout our government and that liberal Democrats should be suspected of harboring secret, anti-American agendas. As Chambers wrote in Witness, when he fingered Hiss and aimed at Communism, he also struck out at the forces of that great socialist revolution, which in the name of liberalism has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades. Once Hiss served time even though he was never convicted of espionage the right had the upper hand in the argument.

The case marked the beginning of the post-World War II ideological fault lines that would shape American politics during the Cold War. The dueling testimonies of Chambers and Hiss to the House Un-American Activities Committee riveted the nation. The relentless pursuit of Hiss made a young congressman from California Richard Nixon a rock star in his party before there were rock stars. Days after Hisss conviction in 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy infamously took the anti-communist crusade to the next level, waving a long list of names he dubiously claimed were Communist Party members working in the State Department.

The Truman administration was blindsided, though it shouldnt have been. The FBI had been investigating Hiss in 1945 and 1946, and then-Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes and Under Secretary Dean Acheson were fully aware (though Truman may have not been). That scrutiny led to Hisss quiet resignation. And yet, Truman condemned the 1948 hearings as a red herring that was serving no useful purpose and slandering a lot of people that don't deserve it. After the conviction, Acheson, now secretary of state, remained loyal to his longtime friend. Whatever the outcome of any appeal I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss, said Acheson, citing the Gospel of Matthew for good measure (I was in prison and ye came unto me.) All Truman would offer was a less dramatic no comment.

Their posture was politically devastating, especially since the Hiss case overlapped with the communist takeover of China. Truman and Acheson lost China, conservative Republicans thundered. One Republican senator even speculated that Hiss had shaped the State Departments China policy.

The 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, suffered as well. In 1949 he had given a deposition for the perjury trial in which he said Hiss had a good reputation and that he hadnt heard any speculation of communist sympathies. The Republican vice-presidential nominee, the newly famous Nixon, hammered Stevenson for bad judgment. The man at the top of the ticket, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, campaigned with McCarthy and charged that communism had poisoned two whole decades of our national life. Stevenson won just nine states.

The cruel irony was that Truman and Acheson were no softies when it came to communism. They were the architects of the anti-communist, quasi-militaristic containment strategy after World War II, a policy both credited for ultimately winning the Cold War and maligned for goading the U.S. into the messy Korean and Vietnam wars hardly evidence of communist control of the State Department.

The Truman administration received little contemporaneous credit for containment at the time, thanks to the triumph of Mao in China and the unpopularity of the inconclusive Korean War. Theres not much Truman and Acheson could have done about those events (short of staying out of Korea and allowing it to follow Chinas lead) but they could have taken the Hiss scandal far more seriously.

Acheson was blinded by friendship. Truman genuinely believed there was little to it, not just Hiss but the whole, in his words, communist bugaboo. A year and a half before the Hiss revelations, Truman had already been pressured to install a loyalty program for federal employees, which vetted three million people through 1951. Several thousand resigned, but no one was indicted for spying.

That wasnt good enough in the wake of the Hiss conviction. In retrospect, Truman and Acheson would have had far more credibility and perhaps could have even blunted McCarthys witch hunt if they had expressed their own outrage after the Chambers allegations and renewed their vows to eradicate any communist traces in government.

Fast forward to today. We have evidence of a Russian spy infiltrating the conservative movement and the Republican Party in order to influence U.S. politics and foreign policy. We have copious evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election to help elect a Republican president, who has proceeded to frequently parrot the Putin line.

Surely, our conservative elder statesmen, who for years crowed about Hiss, wouldnt repeat the same mistakes as Trumans Democrats. Right?

If anyone should have learned political lessons from the Alger Hiss affair, it should have been the fervently anti-Russia yet pro-Trump conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt. One of his radio show trademarks is asking first-time liberal guests whether they believe Hiss was a communist and a spy. If guests say no or dodge the question, unable to allow Hisss culpability to complicate the liberal narrative of a 1950s sullied by McCarthyism, Hewitt shreds their credibility.

Hewitt, like most Republican officeholders and conservative media figures, expressed disappointment at Trumps performance in Helsinki, but treated the president as if he had goofed rather than actively pursued a strategy of closer ties with Putin. Every presidency has a worst day. I hope and pray yesterday was that, Hewitt tweeted. On air, he lamented that Trump got played and conceded, I thought he could handle Putin, and I was wrong.

Hewitt notably drew a connection between the Hiss and Butina cases, posting on Twitter that Butina is not a one-off. But hes not dwelling on it. He offered no scolding of Butinas conservative abettors. And he proceeded to criticize the latest indictments issued by the special counsel of 12 Russian officers for being issued just before Trump traveled to Helsinki, echoing his on-air guest Alan Dershowitzs opinion that the Justice Department is inappropriately interfering with foreign policy. If one were genuinely horrified by Trumps foreign policy agenda, interference with it would not be ones top concern. (Its also worth noting that, according to Bloomberg, the DOJ gave Trump the option of having the indictments made public after the summit, and he chose to do so beforehand.)

Other prominent Republicans also stopped well short of determined outrage in the face of increased Russian infiltration and influence. The typical Republican reaction on Capitol Hill was to welcome Trumps grudging, not-so-credible walkback from a few of his Helsinki comments. On the Butina case, we mostly hear silence from conservatives including from Butinas main mark, the NRA though Fox News host Tucker Carlson spent three minutes with the Washington Examiners Byron York downplaying the charges. And some fringe right-wing voices are even thanking Russians for their participation in American politics; they saved us from Hillary Clinton after all. (One exception on the Right: Daily Beast columnist and my The DMZ podcast co-host Matt Lewis, who explored why conservatives have become vulnerable to being duped.)

Even among Putin critics, flirtations with Russia dont enrage conservatives today the way they did 70 years ago because we are not presently in a titanic struggle between communism and capitalism that seems to threaten the American way of life. Of course, at the time when Hiss and a handful of others lower in the Roosevelt administration were part of the communist underground in the 1930s, the Cold War had not yet begun, and during World War II, America and the Soviet Union were allies of convenience.

Chambers biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, suggested Hiss and others functioned less as moles than as ideological freelancers trimming the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union These were not dual loyalties; they were negotiable loyalties. Another prominent New Dealer fingered by Chambers as a Soviet informant, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, was described by historian Stephen Schlesinger as someone who wanted to help the Russians but did not regard the actions he took as constituting espionage. However, their actions looked much different when they came to light after World War II ended and the Iron Curtain came down.

Conservatives who have reveled in the history of Alger Hiss should be acutely aware of the risks inherent to guilt-by-Russian-association, and should be doing everything in their power to fully sever those associations. Granted, this is easier said than done. The contemporary figure who most closely parallels Hiss is not Butina, but Trump. Butina is a Russian who can easily be cast aside. But polling still suggests that rank-and-file Republicans are unfazed by Trumps ties to Russia the vast majority of Republicans approved of Trumps performance in Helsinki. For a Republican officeholder to vociferously attack Trump as a Putin ally is to risk losing office in a Republican primary.

But conservatives have long lionized Chambers for being a brave truth-teller. They may wish to re-read his memoir, which begins with his pessimistic belief that by leaving the Communist Party, he was leaving the winning world for the losing world. Still, it was better to die, if necessary, rather than to live under Communism.

Soviet communism is dead. But Putinism lives, and is all too often echoed by Trump and his loyalists. Republicans have a choice to make: Repeat the mistakes made by Alger Hiss defenders out of short-term political expediency, or live up to the honorable example set by Whittaker Chambers, even if it means taking the chance of joining the losing world.

Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show The DMZ.

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