The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, China fell to the Communists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was trumpeting after subversives. The year was 1949 and the Red Scare was spreading when Alger Hiss went on trial. The confrontation between Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, his accuser, was to become a haunting symbol of the era's fears and suspicions. Conservatives tended to trust Chambers' claims that Hiss had passed secrets to the Soviets; many liberals believed that the poised State Department official with the splendid record of service had been wrongfully and villainously attacked.

In this week's Nation section, TIME re-examines the verdict of guilty reached against Hiss nearly three decades ago. The occasion: the coming publication of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, a book by Historian Allen Weinstein that skillfully and diligently re-creates the struggle between the two contrasting men and brings revealing new insights and documentation to the case.

Appropriately, the reporter who interviewed Weinstein for this week's story was Senior Correspondent James Bell, who covered the Hiss trials for TIME. "I had spent all of 1948 on the campaign trail with Harold Stassen, Harry Truman, Earl Warren and Tom Dewey," recalls Bell. "I was the only member of the Washington bureau who was totally ignorant of the case, and I felt none of the emotion that appeared to grip my colleagues who had covered the Hiss story on Capitol Hill. It was precisely for that reason that I was picked to report the trial." For TIME and Bell, the story posed special problems: Chambers had been a writer and senior editor at TIME (editing back-of-the-book sections and foreign news) from 1939 to 1948, when he resigned. Chief of Correspondents Robert Elson told Bell: "We don't want you to take Chambers' side or the other. Just give it to us fully, accurately and as soon as you can each evening." During the next eight months, Bell sat in on every session of the two perjury trials, scribbling notes so furiously that he developed a set of calluses on his right hand that are still there today. He often turned out 4,000 words an evening, five days a week.

Editor in Chief Henry R. Luce deemed Bell's work so fair and thorough that he donated a bound set of the files to Yale University's Law School Library, where Weinstein later studied them for his book.

Though Bell maintained his evenhandedness in his files, he remembers: "I became convinced during the cross-examination of Hiss in the second trial that he had committed perjury. He quibbled incessantly on irrelevant matters and skimmed quickly over what was relevant -- that, plus the typewriter, the documents and the expert analyses. My perceptions haven't changed over the years; they were reinforced by Weinstein 's book."

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