On June 2, 1949, Stevenson privately gave a sworn deposition as a character witness for Alger Hiss, a former State Department official who was later found to be a spy for the Soviet Union. Stevenson had infrequently worked with Hiss, first in the legal division of the AAA in 1933, and then in 1945, 1946, and 1947 on various United Nations projects, but he was not a close friend or associate of him. In the deposition, Stevenson testified that the reputation of Hiss for integrity, loyalty, and veracity was good. In 1950 Hiss was found guilty of perjury on the spying charges. Stevenson's deposition, according to his biographer Porter McKeever, would later be used in the 1952 presidential campaign by Senators Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon to "inflame public opinion and attack Adlai as 'soft on communism'." In the 1952 campaign, Senator Nixon would claim that Stevenson's "defense of Hiss" reflected such "poor judgment" on his part that "doubt was cast about Adlai's capacity to govern." In a 1952 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Stevenson responded to a question about his deposition for Hiss by saying "I'm a Lawyer. I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities...particularly of lawyers, is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly, and it will be a very unhappy day for Anglo-Saxon justice when a man, even in public life, is too timid to state what he knows and what he has heard about a defendant in a Criminal trial for fear that defendant might later be convicted. That would to me be the ultimate timidity."