Choose one ... Alan Freed Alger Hiss Berry, Chuck Buddy Holly Chuck Berry Costello, Frank Ellison, Ralph Elvis Presley Estes Kefauver Frank Costello Freed, Alan Hiss, Alger Holly, Buddy Jerry Lee Lewis Kefauver, Estes Lewis, Jerry Lee Presley, Elvis Ralph Ellison

(1904-1996)

The 1949 trial and retrial of Alger Hiss for Soviet espionage captured the imagination of post-World War II America. Hiss's early career as a lawyer was distinguished by exceptional achievement, including becoming the private secretary for Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. At the time of the trial, Hiss was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Whittaker Chambers, a controversial top editor at Time magazine, brought charges to the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss was secretly a communist. Hiss was acquitted during the first trial, but Chambers was able to collect damaging documents, and Hiss was found guilty of perjury in the second trial.

Hiss served 44 months in prison and was barred from practicing law. He wrote a rebuttal of the government's case, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957), and an autobiography, Recollections of a Life (1988). In 1975, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts readmitted him to the bar and restored his right to practice law. Hiss died in 1996 at the age of 92.