Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Bill’s instructions called for immediate action. He gave me to understand that we would both leave for England just as soon as our “covers” and other practical details were taken care of. Whoever was ready first would leave first. But the organization of “covers” is at best a slow business.

  I took this complicated problem at once to J. Peters. That resourceful man foresaw certain difficulties, but none that were insuperable.

  Clearly, the first step was to find me the firm that I would represent in England. It was not long before Peters informed me that he had the perfect “cover” for me. One day, he brought me together at lunch with a short, tweedy, mustached man whom I had noticed lugging his briefcase into John Reed Club meetings during my last months in the open Communist Party. We had met at that time. The man was Maxim Lieber, who managed a small literary agency on Fifth Avenue. Peters formally separated Comrade Lieber from the American Communist Party and relinquished him to work exclusively with the Soviet apparatus. I gave Lieber the underground pseudonym of “Paul.”

  I no longer remember whether Peters or I first explained his role in the English apparatus to Paul, and he now declines to remember anything (before the Grand Jury he pled self-incrimination). But I remember that he was very much pleased with the prospect. He had long wanted to open a London office, but could not afford to. Now he was able happily to combine business and party duty. The Soviet apparatus would pay all expenses of the venture and my salary, which would be given to Paul in New York for regular transmission to me in London. Thus, Paul would get an office and an office manager at no cost to himself. From my Communist writing and editing, Lieber had confidence in my editorial judgment, a confidence that was strengthened as we quickly became friends. Lieber’s apartment on West 47th Street became my unofficial headquarters in New York—soon a necessity, for I was about to move my family to Baltimore.

  The establishment of a courier system proved the most difficult part of the problem. Peters was unable to help. The party had no reliable contacts at that time on boats plying between New York and British ports—at least none that it could dispense with. The problem was solved unexpectedly in other ways.

  A friend introduced me to a young man who was then a college student in New York. Let me call him Joe. Joe was planning to spend his summer vacation working as a seaman in order to organize Communist cells among his fellow crew members. He promptly agreed to get a job on a boat going to England so that he could act as an underground courier. The arrangement was all the better since it kept J. Peters from knowing more about the organization of the English apparatus; he already knew too much.

  Procuring fraudulent birth certificates was no problem at all for Peters. It was at this time that he told me with some complacency how he had systematized that work, which is one of the most important of underground activities. Peters’ system was ghoulishly simple. The head of the underground section of the American Communist Party had organized two teams of researchers. They were Communists. In the Genealogical Division of the New York Public Library, both teams were engaged in studying vital statistics. One team studied the dates of the birth of infants. The other team concentrated on infants’ deaths. The results were compared, and when it was discovered that a baby had died shortly after birth, the name of the dead child and its parents was listed. In the name of the dead child, Peters’ underground apparatus would then write to the Board of Health (enclosing the regular fee) and request a photostat of a birth certificate. The address would be one of the secret letter “drops” that Peters maintained around New York City, and no doubt elsewhere. As a matter of routine, the Board of Health would promptly issue a birth certificate, perfectly in order except that the person it certified had been dead for three or four decades. Using this fraudulent birth certificate, a Communist could then apply for an American passport, which, also as a matter of routine, was promptly issued, for there was almost no way to detect the fraud unless someone with knowledge of it revealed it.

  These birth certificates were one of Peters’ sources of underground revenue. He sold them in bulk to the Soviet apparatuses. Hede Massing has described (in This Deception) how she obtained such papers from him. Peters himself told me that he was trafficking in birth certificates, naturalization papers and other identifying documents with a Soviet agent whom he presently introduced to me as “Richard.” Richard was the Robinson-Rubens of the celebrated international mystery, and the Rubens of Alger Hiss’s handwritten memo to which I have referred earlier.

  For my use in the English operation, Peters procured a birth certificate for one David Breen whose birth coincided roughly with mine. It was not until the second Hiss trial that I learned that David Breen was not the name of a dead child, but that of a living man from whom permission to use his birth certificate had been bought in another of Peters’ operations. The birth certificate and the passport I procured on it, I turned over to the F.B.I. before the first Hiss trial.

  For my wife, Peters procured still another birth certificate, which was never used. But a certificate for my daughter was also necessary. It was a much more difficult problem to solve, since it must also be in the name of Breen. Peters had a little arrangement for just such contingencies. In the city hall at Atlantic City, he had a contact. For a fee, the amount of which I have forgotten, that useful man agreed to enter the name of Ursula Breen (my daughter) in the official register of births, and to issue a birth certificate in that name. One day Peters proudly handed me the birth certificate, now also in the custody of the F.B.I.

  I have reported these details together for the sake of order. Actually, they required many months to complete and were presently interrupted and complicated by Bill’s instructions to assist in organizing a much more difficult and hazardous project—a Soviet underground apparatus in Japan.

  VIII

  While the preparations for the English apparatus were being made, I was in and out of Washington. Bill never at any time showed much interest in my connections there. There the initiative came from J. Peters. But Bill was willing to have me pull together the rudiments of an apparatus, which, he said, I could later turn over to somebody else, or which might prove of use in the English venture. Above all, he wanted to get me out of New York City, while we were waiting for the English project to take shape. No doubt, he felt that too many people there knew me. With that in mind, too, he permitted me, in the summer of 1934, to move my family to Baltimore.

  At first, I had thought of moving them to Washington. But that city was crowded (the New Deal was in full swing) and rents were high. Moreover, it was better organization to have my family in a city where I was not active as a Communist. I had noticed an apartment-to-rent sign in a window at 903 St. Paul Street—an old brick building with Baltimore’s traditional white stone steps. It was the headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. That seemed to me a properly sober address for an underground worker. Under the name “Lloyd Cantwell” I rented the apartment. I bought just enough second-hand furniture to furnish it scantily. If the good woman who superintended the house for the W.C.T.U. looked somewhat askance, she said nothing.

  The house superintendent urged my wife to hire a colored girl to help her with our child. Almost everybody in Baltimore had colored help. We had never faced such a problem before. For me, as a Communist, it raised several questions. The first question was whether or not it was right for anybody to employ servants at all. The answer was, of course, that a servant is a worker like any other, and workers live by working. Much more serious was another question: how could we in conscience pay the shockingly low wages paid in those days to such help as we had in mind? To pay more might cause comment and even trouble. I decided that we would pay a little more. Then, what should our conduct be toward Negroes whom I, as a Communist, insisted on treating in every way as equals? That was a point on which I could give no ground. Even at the risk of widespread gossip (for a tremendous grapevine exists among Negroes), I insisted that I must act as a Communist and that
we would take our meals at the same table with the maid, and in all other ways treat her as someone who worked with us, rather than for us. I maintained that, while news of our peculiar conduct might spread quickly among Negroes, they would cover up for us, both for their own protection and for ours, and that no hint of what we were doing would be whispered outside colored circles.

  To those who wonder what the appeal of Communism is, this episode may be worth pondering upon. At least, it is thought-provoking to note the impact of Communism wherever it coincides with humanity and compassion, especially when the outside world denies them. Note, too, the long-range effect of the refusal of a Communist (myself, in this case) to compromise a basic issue.

  When Edith Murray first sat down to table with us—and we were the first white people who had ever asked her to sit at the same table with them—she showed fear, then embarrassment. I will not presume to say what her final feeling was. In any case, what we had to give her was not a place at our table. What we had to give her was something that belonged to her by right, but which had been taken from her, and which we were merely giving back. It was her human dignity. Thus, by insisting on acting as Communists must, we found ourselves unwittingly acting as Christians should. I submit that that cuts to the heart of one aspect of the Communist appeal.

  And, to me, it bears on a meaning of Edith Murray’s testimony in the second Hiss trial, which was lost on the world (the world saw only the legal meaning), but was not lost on me. Throughout those two long trials until then, few voices, except my wife’s, had been raised publicly to say even once that Whittaker Chambers was not an inveterately evil man. Then, at the very end of the second Hiss trial, there was put on the stand that slight, simple and plain-spoken colored woman, who had sometimes sat at table with my wife and me. For the first time, she did what the whole world would not do—she gave me back my human dignity. “Oh. no,” she said in answer to some derisive question by Hiss’s lawyer, “Mr. Cantwell (myself) was a good man.” It moved me deeply, few things in the Hiss Case moved me more, for Edith Murray is a good woman.

  IX

  With the arrival of my family in Baltimore, there began a development of a kind that is not favored in underground work. Alger Hiss became our personal friend in a way that made my relationship with him unlike my relationship with any others in the underground. Organizationally, this was made possible by the fact that I was expecting to go abroad at any moment. Therefore, I relaxed the underground procedures by bringing Hiss and his wife to visit us in Baltimore one night. Another factor entered in, too. His personal connection with us rescued Hiss from his underground isolation. There was a stimulation in driving to Baltimore to visit a hidden family whose address only he knew, in parking his old Ford roadster in the shadows of a side street and walking slowly (to make sure there were no observers) to the house behind whose completely ordinary front was an outpost of the international underground. No one was more amused than Alger by the thought of the W.C.T.U. as an underground “cover.”

  The Hisses took an instant liking to my wife. She was transparently sincere, forthright, gentle, warm. They knew that she was an American, but with her dark complexion and bobbed black hair, she looked enough like a Russian to carry out the illusion of Carl’s foreignness and to give point to the name Lise (pronounced Leeza) which they always called her. Where Priscilla Hiss was brittle and tense, Lise was mature and calm. She knew the revolutionary answers, but she was more given to talking about the care of her child, so that Priscilla Hiss found in my wife someone to whom she could talk without self-consciousness about her own young son, to whom she was devoted, but who, as the child of her first marriage, was a little out of place in her second marriage. In that strange friendship, the fact that both couples were firmly and happily married drew us together. And our family life obviously centered about our child. The Hisses at that time had no child of their own, though they deeply desired one.

  Up until the very end, it was a friendship that existed on two incongruous levels. One was the level of conspiracy, which made my friendship with Hiss possible in the first place by throwing us together and holding us together for more than four years in the tight, exclusive secrecy of the underground. The second level seemed to have nothing to do with the first. It was the easy, gay, carefree association of two literate, very happy, fun-loving middle-class families.

  For it was much more a friendship of families than of individuals, and on the Hiss side entirely so. Alger and Priscilla Hiss could scarcely be thought of separately. In all the time that I knew them, I almost never met them except together. Alger and Pross was one name, and so was Hilly and Pross (as they called one another). On the level of conspiracy, Alger dealt exclusively with Carl. But on the human level, Carl and Lise were as much a bracket as Alger and Pross.

  People have sometimes asked me: What did you talk about when you were together? I have to stop and think. What did we talk about? We talked about everything. We were never together without talking. But, except for our talk about underground activity, what we said was completely without forethought, particular meaning or importance—the spontaneous surface talk of people among whom there exist, not only fierce convictions taken for granted, but intangible compatibilities of temperament, an instinctive feeling as to what is serious and what is absurd about people, things and life. People are truly friends when they love even one another’s foibles as a necessary part of the pattern of character. We knew one another’s weaknesses and could laugh freely at them as something amusing because endearing.

  For our friendship was almost entirely one of character and not of the mind. Despite his acknowledged ability in the legal field, which I was not competent to explore with him, Alger Hiss is not a highly mental man. Compared to the minds I had grown up with at Columbia, free-ranging, witty and deeply informed (one has only to think of Clifton Fadiman or Meyer Schapiro), Alger was a little on the stuffy side. Ideas for their own sake did not interest him at all. His mind had come to rest in the doctrines of Marx and Lenin, and even then applied itself wholly to current politics and seldom, that I can remember, to history or to theory.

  I cannot remember Alger Hiss ever drawing my attention to a book except certain books about birds. At the time it appeared, I gave the Hisses a copy of Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh. They read it dutifully as a study in the conflict of an oppressed minority (the Armenians) with the Turks, which echoed the Nazi-Jewish situation in Germany. Man’s Fate, Malraux’ novel about the Chinese revolution, excited me tremendously. The Hisses bore my enthusiasm with good-natured patience. But Alger showed interest chiefly in Malraux’ treatment of the psychology of the terrorist. The only book I can ever recall their praising was, rather curiously, Helen Waddell’s account of the Goliards, of which Priscilla gave me her copy. They liked it, I think, because the wandering scholars were a note of dissent in the conformity of the Middle Ages.

  I particularly remember Alger’s opinion of Shakespeare. In 1936 or 1937, Maurice Evans played Richard II in Baltimore. It was the first time that my wife or I had ever seen Shakespeare acted. We were deeply impressed, not only by the new life the play took on for us on the stage, and the new texture given the verse by Evans’ elocutionary style, but by the aliveness of the politics of the play. During the opening scenes, my wife whispered to me with awe: “It’s just like the Cominternl”

  A day or so later, I was trying to convey some of that to Alger. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, somewhat less graciously than usual, “I just don’t like Shakespeare—platitudes in blank verse.” He quoted some Polonius, and I realized, for the first time and with great interest, that he disliked Shakespeare because the platitudes were all that impinged on his mind.

  So great a gap in the temper of minds might have been expected to set us apart. On the contrary. To me such blind spots as Alger’s were another amusing foible, and, in any case, I do not particularly care to be surrounded by literary friends. The bond that cemented his friendship and mine went much
deeper than any similarities or dissimilarities of mind. It was a profound, tacit esteem of character, increasing as our Communist activity tested us in common. It is only necessary to recall how, in the days when faith divided us, each of us, in his different way, bore himself in the ordeal of the Hiss Case, to understand why we should have been friends in the days when faith knit us. Each of us sensed in the other an unyielding purpose about those things which we held to be decisive, and a resourcefulness and play of imagination in action, which, among the Communists we knew, I sensed to the same degree only in Harold Ware. No other Communist but Alger Hiss understood so quietly, or accepted with so little fuss or question the fact that the revolutionist cannot change the course of history without taking upon himself the crimes of history. That is why I said of him in a broadcast, shortly after the second Hiss trial, “I cannot hate even an enemy who shares with me the conviction that that life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to dare all and die at any moment.” The recognition that, as Communists, we shared that same force of purpose was the deepest bond between us. On Hiss’s part, that bond snapped the moment that I broke with the Communist Party and my political purpose changed. On my part, it persisted, despite that change, because I cannot feel solely in political terms. I feel also in human terms.

  All of us shared another more elusive, but very real bond. That was the mutual simplicity of our tastes, which reflected not merely a point of view, like our political opinions, but was an almost organic reaction to the life around us. It was expressed in a profound sense that labor in itself is one of the highest goods, in a profound suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure as an end in life, amounting to an antipathy and merging with a deep distaste, and distrust of materialism in its commonest forms of success and comfort. It is not at all chance that both the Chamberses and the Hisses, arriving over very different routes, should at last have found their way into the community of Quakers. For the simplicity inherent in the Quaker way of life must make an authentic appeal to the Hisses.