G. Edward Griffin - The Fearful Master - PDF Archive

Roosevelt had been inclined to protest this absurd agreement, he was up against the
demands of Joe Stalin and the advice of Alger Hiss.
The Dumbarton Oaks Conference was held in 1944 to determine the future form that the
United Nations would take. It was an extremely important meeting since most of the really
critical decisions were made there. This meeting was so hush-hush that the public and
even the press were excluded from the proceedings. Alger Hiss was the executive
secretary of this conference.
Hiss's role at the San Francisco conference, where the United Nations was finally taken
off the drawing board and put on the assembly line, is better known to most Americans.
He was the chief planner and executive of the entire affair. He organized the American
delegation and was the acting secretary-general. Visitor passes bore his signature.
According to the April 16, 1945, issue of Time magazine:
The Secretary-General for the San Francisco Conference was named at
Yalta but announced only last week-- lanky, Harvard trained Alger Hiss,
one of the State Department's brighter young men. Alger Hiss was one
of the Harvard Law School students whose records earned them the
favor of Professor (now justice) Felix Frankfurter and a year as
secretary to the late justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was drafted from
a New York law firm by the New Deal in 1933, joined the State
Department in 1936, accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta. -At
San Francisco, he and his Secretariat of 300 (mostly Americans) will
have the drudging, thankless clerk's job of copying, translating and
publishing, running the thousands of paper-clip and pencil chores of an
international meeting. But Alger Hiss will be an important figure there.
As secretary-general, managing the agenda, he will have a lot to say
behind the scenes about who gets the breaks. 4
Hiss was not only the acting secretary-general at the San Francisco conference, but also
served on the steering and executive committees which were charged with the
responsibility of actually writing the new Charter. 5 In such a position, he undoubted
wielded a tremendous amount of influence on the drafting of the Charter itself. He did not
do it single-handedly, however, as some critics of the United Nations have claimed. For
instance, Andrei Gromyko was asked during a press conference in 1958 whether he
considered it a violation of the Charter for a country to send its forces into the territory of
another. He replied: "Believe me, I sit here as one who helped to draft the UN Charter,
and I had a distinct part in drafting this part of the Charter with my own hands." 6
At the conclusion of the conference Alger Hiss personally carried the freshly written
document back to Washington by plane for Senate ratification. The Charter traveled in a
black water-tight box with a parachute. The master planners were taking no chances.
Knowing that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, the FBI had prepared an extensive
surveillance of his activities during the San Francisco conference. Shortly after Hiss
learned of this through his contacts in the Justice Department, however, the FBI received
orders from the top to cancel its plans. 7
An entire book could be written on the single subject of Alger Hiss and his influence over
the United Nations during its formative phase. But, as important as he was, he was only
one man. Had Hiss never been born, or had he spent his entire life in a monastery, the UN
would still be what it is today, for Hiss was not alone.