So me and the women came over—words to be written rather high, I think, on that monument which is headed: “... and thy neighbor as thyself.”
I had hoped that the nation might come to understand what I was trying to do. I had thought that it might take twenty or thirty years, perhaps late in my children’s lives. Now I thought: “It is wonderful. It is past belief. But the nation is going to understand. For Paul Morelock and the Reese women are America.”
IX
I went back to my office at Time, shut the door and continued my reading for the last of Life’s essays on the History of Western Civilization—that on the revolutionary year, 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto.32
From the beginning, I had resolved not to read any news stories about my testimony, or to listen to radio broadcasts. I needed all the strength I could command for my purpose. The press and radio din could only deflect and diffuse it. My news quarantine was strictly kept. I seldom broke it until well into the second Hiss trial. I never broke it without regretting it. In this way, I was spared much of the harassment that I must have suffered had I read the press or listened to the radio. Only one or two of the most egregious attacks by great public figures reached me, and then softened at second hand. Some of the most shocking slanders did not come to my ears until comparatively late in the Hiss Case when the whole world was abuzz with them.
This censorship was as necessary to my morale as any censorship in wartime. But it often resulted in my knowing less about current developments in the Hiss Case than almost anybody else knew. Thus, it happened that, on August 5, 1948, I did not know that Alger Hiss was testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
The first inkling I had of it came while I was working at my desk. The telephone rang. Louis J. Russell, then the Committee’s assistant chief (now its chief) investigator, was at the other end of the wire. “Are you sure,” he asked me in a voice in which I caught the unmistakable note of desperation, “are you sure you are right about Alger Hiss?” I said: “Yes, of course.” “Are you sure,” he persisted, “you couldn’t have mistaken him for somebody else?” I said: “Of course, I haven’t mistaken him.” “Well,” said Russell, “Alger Hiss testified just now that he does not know you and never set eyes on you.” I said: “If necessary, I will go down to Washington and testify all over again.” I could probably have said nothing more frightening at the moment.
What stunned me as I stared at my desk, and was to puzzle me for some time to come, was a simple question: “How did Alger Hiss, in face of the facts that we both knew, and under the eyes of some 150 million people, suppose that he could possibly get away with it?”
I did not know a number of things. I did not know that Hiss had already denied that he was a Communist to the former Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, to John Foster Dulles, his sponsor at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, and to the F.B.I. I did not know that, six months before, he had denied the same fact under oath to the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York (the Grand Jury that later indicted him). I did not know, I could not have dreamed, of the immense scope and power of Hiss’s political alliances and his social connections, which cut across all party lines and ran from the Supreme Court to the Religious Society of Friends, from governors of states and instructors in college faculties to the staff members of liberal magazines. In the decade since I had last seen him, he had used his career, and, in particular, his identification with the cause of peace through his part in organizing the United Nations, to put down roots that made him one with the matted forest floor of American upper class, enlightened middle class, liberal and official life. His roots could not be disturbed without disturbing all the roots on all sides of him.
Perhaps it was providential, too, that I did not know those facts at that time, for knowledge of them could only have defeated me in advance. The discrepancy between our strength was too staggering. I stood almost alone. Soon I seemed to stand even more alone than I could have believed possible. For my most powerful friends, and those who might naturally be expected to help me, in the day of decision were distinguished chiefly by the virtue of prudence. It was some time before I knew who my real friends were.
X
My puny plight was as nothing compared to that of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hiss’s testimony had been sweepingly convincing. The crowd in the Ways and Means Committee room, including many newsmen, had attended with rapt sympathy. Hiss was a voluntary witness before the Committee and his manner combined, in very tactful proportions, well-bred outrage and well-phrased bafflement. His candor was disarming. Even his occasional sarcastic barbs did not transgress the limits of patience of an innocent man unjustly accused.
Under questioning, Hiss’s impeccable career had unfolded. It began with a popular touch: “I was educated in the public schools of Baltimore.” Then came high school, Baltimore City College. A soaring set in: preparatory school in Massachusetts, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Law School. “My first employment in the Federal Government was immediately after my graduation from law school when I served as a secretary to one of the Associate Justices of the United States Supreme Court.” “The Justice was Oliver Wendell Holmes.” “I then went into private practice in Boston and New York ... and came to Washington at the request of Government officials ... as an assistant general counsel to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.” “A Senate Committee, known as the Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry ... formally requested the Department of Agriculture to lend my services to that committee in its investigations as their counsel.” “When I left the Senate Committee, I was next employed in the office of the Solicitor General of the United States, at my request, Mr. Nixon.” “While I was still in the Solicitor General’s office ... Mr. Francis B. Sayre, then the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Trade Agreements, asked me to come to his office as his assistant to supervise the preparation within the Department of State of the constitutional arguments on the Trade Agreement Acts. I did so.... ” “I am the president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace.”
There was the culmination of Yalta. Mr. Mundt: Did you draft, or participate in drafting, parts of the Yalta Agreement? Mr. Hiss: I think it is accurate and not an immodest statement to say that I did to some extent, yes.
It was history speaking through one of its personifications. Mr. Hiss: My best recollection, without consulting the actual records is that the text of what is now article 27 of the Charter was drafted in the Department of State in the early winter of 1944, before the Yalta Conference, ( and ) was dispatched by the President of the United States to the Prime Minister of Great Britain and to Marshal Stalin for their agreement, and represented the proposal made by the United States at the Yalta Conference, and was accepted by the other two after some discussion. I did participate in the Department of State in the drafting of the messages I have referred to that President Roosevelt sent in, I think, December, 1944, prior to the Yalta Conference.”
Nevertheless, it had also been necessary to put certain questions about Whittaker Chambers.
MR. MUNDT: I want to say, for one member of the committee, that it is extremely puzzling that a man who is senior editor of Time magazine, by the name of Whittaker Chambers, whom I had never seen until a day or two ago, and whom you say you have never seen—
MR. HISS: As far as I know, I have never seen him.
MR. MUNDT :—should come before this committee and discuss the Communist apparatus working in Washington, which he says is transmitting secrets to the Russian Government,33 and he lists a group of seven people—Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer, John Abt, Harold Ware, Alger Hiss and Donald Hiss—
MR. HISS: That is eight.
MR. MUNDT: There seems to be no question about the subversive connections of the six others than the Hiss brothers, and I wonder what possible motive a man who edits Time magazine would have for mentioning Donald Hiss and Alger Hiss in connection with those other
six.
MR. HISS: So do I, Mr. Chairman. I have no possible understanding of what could have motivated him. There are many possible motives I assume, but I am unable to understand it.
“You say,” Mr. Stripling presently asked, “you have never seen Mr. Chambers?”
MR. HISS: The name means absolutely nothing to me, Mr. Stripling.
The witness was then shown a photograph of Whittaker Chambers taken in 1934 or 1935, and asked if he had ever known “an individual who resembles this picture.” Hiss did not answer directly.
MR. HISS: I would much rather see the individual. I have looked at all the pictures I was able to get hold of in, I think it was, yesterday’s paper which had the pictures. If this is a picture of Mr. Chambers, he is not particularly unusual-looking. He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the chairman of this committee. (Laughter)
MR. MUNDT: I hope you are wrong in that.
MR. HISS: I didn’t mean to be facetious, but very seriously, I would not want to take oath that I had never seen that man. I would like to see him and then I think that I would be better able to tell whether I had ever seen him. Is he here today?
MR. MUNDT : Not to my knowledge.
MR. HISS: I hoped he would be.
(It should be observed, parenthetically, that Alger Hiss was one of the only four people in the Hiss Case who ever failed to recognize me. Even Lee Pressman, who claimed to have seen me only once, briefly, in his office in 1936, had no difficulty in recognizing me. The reason was, of course, that I did not look markedly different in 1948 from what I had looked like in 1938.)
It had also been necessary to ask questions about Hiss’s connections with the other members of the Ware Group. It turned out that, in one way or another, he had known all of them, with one exception, though he had scarcely seen them, he said, in recent years. The exception was Victor Perlo, who was deeply embedded in Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony. With Witt, Pressman and Collins, Hiss had gone to Harvard. Collins he had known since boyhood. With Witt, Pressman, Abt, Kramer and even Harold Ware Hiss had worked in the Government. But he could not remember that Henry Collins had ever lived in St. Matthews Court (“Can anyone locate the place?” he was presently to ask), and he could not remember when he had last seen Charles Kramer (also deeply embedded in Miss Bentley’s testimony).
MR. STRIPLING: When did you last see Charles Kramer?
MR. HISS: I couldn’t be sure. I have probably seen him on the street. He is a rather distinctive-looking person. Do you know him?
MR. STRIPLING: I know him.
MR. HISS: He has reddish hair, very distinctive....
Hiss also knew Lauchlin Currie, Harold Glasser (“officially, and I think only officially” ) and Harry Dexter White.
It developed, though no one seemed to take much note of the fact at the time, that the witness had been asked about his Communist sympathies before. That had been in 1946, “shortly after I came back from London where I had been at the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations.” Secretary of State Byrnes had called Alger Hiss into his office. “He said that several members of Congress were preparing to make statements on the floor of Congress that I was a Communist. He asked me if I were, and I said I was not. He said, ‘This is a very serious matter. I think all the stories center from the F.B.I.... I think you would be well advised to go directly to the F.B.I. and offer yourself for a very full inquiry and investigation: He also said he thought it would be sensible for me to go to the top man, and I agreed.”
But J. Edgar Hoover was not in town. Hiss was “courteously received by his second in command. I think it was Mr. Tamm in those days.” He had offered himself “for any inquiry.” “They said did I have any statement to make? I said I was glad to make any statement upon any subject they suggested, and they had no specific one initially.”
In 1947 agents of the F.B.I. had again called upon Alger Hiss. This time they asked him if he was a Communist. They asked him a number of questions “not unlike the points Mr. Chambers testified to.” Among other names they asked him about was that of Whittaker Chambers. “I remember very distinctly because I had never heard the name Whittaker Chambers.”
Then the public hearing swung around to Yalta. Again, the gulf between Alger Hiss, the privy counselor of the great President, and Alger Hiss, the gratuitously injured witness before the unpopular Committee, yawned embarrassingly vast.
Amidst the thanks of his inquisitors, the witness stepped down. Frieridly newsmen crowded around him.
As spectacle, it had been superb. It might have succeeded, too, but for one fact—the fact that is never foreseen. One of the Committee members was a man with one of those direct minds which has an inner ear for the ring of truth. As Richard Nixon, a lawyer and a birthright Quaker, listened to the looping sentences and the rich vocables, marshaled like troops for an assault, the thought passed through his mind: “It is a little too mouthy.” He noticed, too, that Alger Hiss never said that he did not know me; he always said that he did not know a man named Whittaker Chambers. And at the very beginning of the hearing, the Congressman had had a puzzling fencing bout with the witness—puzzling because Hiss’s evasiveness was so obstinate and, apparently, so unmotivated.
Hiss had testified that “Government officials” had “requested” him to come to Washington in 1933. What officials? Nixon asked—his first question in the Hiss Case. Judge Jerome Frank, said Hiss.
MR. NIXON: You said it in the plural? Was he the only one then?
MR. HISS: There were some others. Is it necessary? There are so many witnesses who use names rather loosely before your committee, and I would rather limit myself.
MR. NIXON: You made the statement—
MR. HISS: The statement is correct.
MR. NIXON : I don’t question its correctness, but you indicated that several Government officials requested you to come here and you have issued a categorical denial to certain statements that were made by Mr. Chambers concerning people that you were associated with in Government. I think it would make your case much stronger if you would indicate what Government officials.
MR. HISS: Mr. Nixon, regardless of whether it strengthens my case or not, I would prefer, unless you insist, not to mention any names in my testimony that I don’t feel are absolutely necessary. If you insist on a direct answer to your question, I will comply.
MR. NIXON: I would like to have a direct answer to the question.
MR. HISS: Another official of the Government of the United States who strongly urged me to come to Washington after I had told Judge Frank I did not think I could financially afford to do so—and I am answering this only because you ask it—was Justice Felix Frankfurter.
Why the long struggle to elicit that name?
XI
When Alger Hiss stepped down from the witness stand on August 5th, after his flat denial that he had been a Communist, one of two conclusions seemed certain: 1) from unfathomable motives, I had committed perjury in making the charge; 2) it was a case of mistaken identity; I had mistaken Alger Hiss for someone else.
Hiss had also left a definite impression on the public mind (which much of the press and most of the radio did little to diminish) that he had never set eyes on me in his life; that the photographs of me that were showed him were those of a complete stranger. Actually, as Nixon’s ear had caught, Hiss had been extremely careful not to make any definite statement at all on that point. He had used his practiced legal sinuousness to avoid a firm yes or no when asked to identify me.
Within a fortnight, Hiss would begin to feel his way along the lines of a reverse tactic which would lead him to identify me positively, in a snap of the fingers, as someone he knew quite well —though under another name.
But on August 5th, by flat denials and by drawing the toga of his official career about him, Hiss had made the Committee look like the gullible victim of a vulgar impostor—myself.
Gladly, the Committee turned its back on Alger Hiss and filed into
its chambers. It severally stood or sat for a moment in attitudes of mute gloom. Then a member said: “We’re ruined.” It was one of history’s moments of high irony. For a decade, the Committee (first as the Dies Committee and then as the House Committee on Un-American Activities) had been trying to hack off the Gorgon head of Communist conspiracy, which it had never quite succeeded in locating. Now, almost casually, the snaky mass had been set down on the congressmen’s collective desk. It was terrifying. It petrified most of them.
Their terror was justified. It was an election year, and the seat of every member of the Committee was at stake. Moreover, the hostile clamor in the press and from public personages, together with other pressures, had battered the Committee into a state bordering on anxiety neurosis. The Committee’s instinctive reaction was to get away as fast as possible from the monstrous challenge that had been set down before it. Someone proposed that the Committee drop the Hiss-Chambers controversy at once and switch to some subject sensational enough to distract public attention from its unnerving blunder.
That was the first decisive moment of the Hiss Case. If that small group of harassed congressmen had then acted out of their fears and dropped the Case, it is probable that the forces which for years had kept the Communist conspiracy in Government from public knowledge would have continued to be successful in concealing it. Alger Hiss would have remained at the head of the Carnegie Endowment, exerting great influence in public affairs through his position and ramified connections. With him, the whole secret Communist front would have stood more unassailable than ever because the shattered sally against it had ended in ridicule and rout. Elizabeth Bentley’s charges would almost certainly have been buried in the debris.
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