Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Robert Stripling took over the questioning.

  MR. STRIPLING: ... I certainly gathered the impression [when] Mr. Chambers walked in this room and you walked over and examined him and asked him to open his mouth, that you were basing your identification purely on what his upper teeth might have looked like. Now, here is a person that you knew for several months at least. You knew him so well that he was a guest in your home.

  MR. HISS: Would you—

  MR. STRIPLING: I would like to complete my statement—that he was a guest in your home, that you gave him an old Ford automobile, and permitted him to use, or you leased him your apartment and in this, a very important confrontation, the only thing that you have to check on is this denture; is that correct? There is nothing else about this man’s features which you could definitely say, “This is the man I knew as George Crosley,” that you have to rely entirely on this denture; is that your position? MR. HISS: Is your preface through? My answer to the question you have asked is this:

  From the time on Wednesday, August 4, 1948, when I was able to get hold of newspapers containing photographs of one Whittaker Chambers, I was struck by a certain familiarity in features. When I testified on August 5th and was shown a photograph by you, Mr. Stripling, there was again some familiarity [in] features. I could not be sure that I had never seen the person whose photograph you showed me. I said I would want to see the person.

  The photographs are rather good photographs of Whittaker Chambers as I see Whittaker Chambers today. I am not given on important occasions to snap judgments or simple, easy statements. I am confident that George Crosley had notably bad teeth. I would not call George Crosley a guest in my house. I have explained the circumstances. If you choose to call him a guest that is your affair.

  MR. STRIPLING: I am willing to strike the word “guest.” He was in your house.

  MR. HISS: I saw him at the time I was seeing hundreds of people. Since then I have seen thousands of people. He meant nothing to me except as one I saw under the circumstances I have described.

  My recollection of George Crosley, if this man had said he was George Crosley, I would have no difficulty in identification. He denied it right here. I would like and asked earlier in this hearing if I could ask some further questions to help in identification. I was denied that.

  MR. STRIPLING: I think you should be permitted—

  MR. HISS: I was denied that right. I am not, therefore, able to take an oath that this man is George Crosley. I have been testifying about George Crosley. Whether he and this man are the same or whether he has means of getting information from George Crosley about my house, I do not know. He may have had his face lifted.

  I was asked if I had any objection to being cross-examined by Hiss. I said: “No.”

  MR. HISS: Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley?

  MR. CHAMBERS: Not to my knowledge.

  MR. HISS: Did you ever sublet an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street38 from me?

  MR. CHAMBERS: No; I did not....

  MR. HISS: Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street?

  MR. CHAMBERS: I most certainly did.

  MR. HISS: You did or did not?

  MR. CHAMBERS: I did.

  MR. HISS: Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?

  I answered very quietly, from the depth of my distress: “Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.”

  MR. HISS: Would you be responsive and continue with your answer?

  MR. CHAMBERS: I do not think it is needed.

  Nixon broke in. “I will help you with the answer, Mr. Hiss. The question, Mr. Chambers, is, as I understand it, that Mr. Hiss cannot understand how you could deny that you were George Crosley and yet admit that you spent time in his apartment. Now would you explain the circumstances... ?”

  MR. CHAMBERS: As I have testified before, I came to Washington as a Communist functionary, a functionary of the American Communist Party. (I pronounced those words very slowly and distinctly, for through them I was telling Hiss that I had not testified about the Soviet apparatus.) I was connected with the underground group of which Mr. Hiss was a member. Mr. Hiss and I became friends to the best of my knowledge. Mr. Hiss himself suggested that I go there (to the apartment), and I gratefully accepted.

  Hiss was shaken by a spasm of anger; this time I do not believe that he was acting. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I don’t need to ask Mr. Whittaker Chambers any more questions. I am now perfectly prepared to identify this man as George Crosley.”

  MR. NIXON: Would you spell that name?

  MR. HISS: C-r-o-s-l-e-y.

  MR. NIXON: You are sure of one “s”?

  MR. HISS: That is my recollection. I have a rather good visual memory (to me, one of the staggering statements of the day), and my recollection of his spelling of his name is Cr-o-s-l-e-y. I don’t think that would change as much as his appearance.

  MR. STRIPLING: You will identify him positively now?

  MR. HISS: I will on the basis of what he has just said positively identify him without further questioning as George Crosley.

  MR. STRIPLING: Will you produce for the committee three people who will testify that they knew him as George Crosley?

  Apparently, Hiss was unprepared for that one. For the first and only time in that hearing or any other, I saw him gag for a moment.

  “I will if it is possible,” he said. “Why is that a question to ask me? I will see what is possible. This occurred in 1935. The only people that I can think of who would have known him as George Crosley with certainty would have been the people who were associated with me in the Nye Committee.

  MR. STRIPLING: Can you name three people whom we can subpoena who can identify him as George Crosley?

  MR. HISS: I am afraid I will have to confer with the individual members. The people, as I recall them, who were on the staff—and they were in and out of Washington constantly—were Mr. Raushenbush. I would like to consult Steve Raushenbush. I don’t know whether Crosley ever called on him.

  MR. NIXON: Where is he now, Mr. Hiss?

  MR. HISS: I don’t know.

  MR. STRIPLING: He is in Washington.

  MR. HISS: Robert Wohlford was one of the investigators. 39

  MR. NIXON: Do you know where he is?

  MR. STRIPLING: Department of Justice.

  MR. HISS: I don’t remember the name of the very efficient secretary to Mr. Raushenbush. Miss Elsie Gullender, I think her name was. Do you know the whereabouts of Miss Elsie Gullender?...

  It was unlikely that anyone in the room would know of Miss Gullender’s whereabouts, the more so since she was dead. Neither Mr. Raushenbush nor Mr. Wohlforth, it soon developed, had ever heard of George Crosley, nor had any of the newsmen who swarmed about the munitions investigation and of whom Crosley was supposed to be one.

  Hiss was asked if he had had any idea that George Crosley was a Communist or if we had ever discussed politics.

  MR. HISS: ... May I just state for the record that it was not the habit in Washington in those days, when particularly if a member of the press called on you, to ask him before you had further conversation whether or not he was a Communist. It was a quite different atmosphere in Washington then than today. I had no reason to suspect George Crosley of being a Communist. It never occurred to me that he might be or whether that was of any significance to me if he was.... I would like to say that to come here and discover that the ass under the lion’s skin is Crosley. I don’t know why your committee didn’t pursue this careful method of interrogation at an earlier date before all the publicity....

  MC DOWELL: Well, now, Mr. Hiss, you positively identify—

  MR. HISS: Positively on the basis of his own statement that he was in my apartment at the time when I say he was there. I have no further question at all. If he had lost both eyes and take
n his nose off, I would be sure.

  I was asked to identify Alger Hiss. I said: “Positive identification.”

  “At this point,” says the official record, “Mr. Hiss arose and walked in the direction of Mr. Chambers.” In fact, Mr. Hiss advanced with fists clenched upon Mr. Chambers, who, perfectly certain that this was another act (for even lawyers do not think of saying things for the record when they are overcome with rage), sat quietly where he was on the couch.

  MR. HISS: May I say for the record at this point, that I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee without their being privileged for suit for libel. I challenge you to do it, and I hope you will do it damned quickly.

  Louis J. Russell, the committee’s assistant chief investigator, laid a restraining hand very gently on Alger Hiss’s arm. Hiss by then had paused. “I am not going to touch him,” he said. “You are touching me.”

  MR. RUSSELL: Please sit down, Mr. Hiss.

  MR. HISS: I will sit down when the chairman asks me. Mr. Russell, when the chairman asks me to sit down—

  MR. RUSSELL: I want no disturbance.

  MR. HISS: I don’t—

  MR. MC DOWELL: Sit down, please.

  MR. HISS: You know who started this.

  During the remainder of the hearing, Robert Stripling made the telling point. “I am concerned,” he said to Hiss, “with the statement you made before the Committee of Congress in the presence of quite a few hundred people that you didn’t even know this person. You led the public and the press to believe that you didn’t know such a person.” “You are fully aware,” he added, “that the public was led to believe that you had never seen, heard, or laid eyes upon an individual who is this individual, and now you do know him.”

  MR. HISS: ... I did not say that I have never seen this man. I said, so far as I know I have never seen Whittaker Chambers.

  MR. STRIPLING: Never laid eyes on him.

  MR. HISS: I wouldn’t have been able to identify him for certain today without his own assistance.

  MR. STRIPLING: You are willing to waive the dentures?

  Thus, a fortnight after the Case began, Alger Hiss, by an operation itself a good deal like a dental extraction, was brought to admit that, indeed, he knew me perfectly well. The hearing closed with a decision to hold a public confrontation in Washington on August 25th. Subpoenas were issued to Hiss and me at once.

  “Thank you,” said Chairman McDowell to Hiss as he was leaving. Said Hiss: “I don’t reciprocate.” Mr. McDowell: “Italicize that in the record.”

  When Hiss and Dollard had finally stalked out of the room, everyone was silent for a moment. Stripling turned to me. Completely deadpan, but in his broadest Texas brogue, he drawled: “Ha-ya, Mistah Crawz-li?”

  It was after reading the transcript of this hearing that Thomas F. Murphy, the Government’s prosecutor in the Hiss trials, ceased to have any doubt at all that Hiss was lying.

  “The jury might well have believed,” says the decision in which, two years later, the judges of the appellate court denied Hiss’s appeal to set aside his conviction, “that the appellant (Alger Hiss) had been less than frank in his belated recognition of Mr. Chambers....”

  XX

  I am aware, as I recall three years later the scene that I have just described, how much my feeling has changed, not necessarily for the better, under the pressure of experience. It is what always happens to people, struggle against it as they will, in a prolonged war. Now, as I go over the details, the feeling uppermost in my mind is a resentment close to anger, though it is a detached and impersonal anger. Above all, it is a sense of chill amusement at the preposterousness of the scene as human behavior. I felt resentment and I was aware of the comic by-play at that time, too. But then both feelings were overweighed by my sense of the human disaster of which I was a part and an agent.

  At the time, nothing in the hearing at the Commodore Hotel appalled me like the moment when Hiss was asked to produce three witnesses who had known George Crosley, and realized that he could not do so, while across his face for an instant flitted an expression that meant that he felt he was trapped. As a man, I prayed that he would not be trapped. But in a historical sense, I knew that he must be trapped. So I was rent.

  A devout Catholic woman once asked me what was in my mind as I sat there while Hiss insulted me. I said that I would rather not answer then, but that some day I would tell her. Through my mind as I watched that moment of fleeting panic on Alger Hiss’s face, passed two lines of Kipling’s that my friend, James Agee, had once pointed out to me:Father in Heaven, Who lovest all,

  Oh, help Thy children when they call....

  XXI

  After that confrontation, I returned to my office at Time and went through the motions of working. Everyone was kind. No one pressed me. One day Henry Luce called me up and asked me to come to supper.

  There were three of us. The second guest was a nimble, witty European whom I shall call Smetana. At supper, most of the talk was between Luce and Smetana. I was a rather silent guest. I was too fresh from the shadows; bright conversation hurt my mind. In fact, I had left behind the world of Time and those who lived within it. It was only the friendliest of fictions that I still belonged to it.

  No one mentioned Communism or the Hiss Case until we sat over our coffee in the living room. Mrs. Philip Jessup had just used her personal good offices to try to get me off Time. Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. “By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave,” he said, “the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?”

  “You don’t understand the class structure of American society,” said Smetana, “or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.”

  Luce was puzzled, too, by a question that many people were asking: If Hiss was a Communist, how could he, constantly meeting and dealing with intelligent people, have managed not to betray his real views from day to day? I was too tired to explain how, in our revolutionary age, Hiss was seldom in danger of betraying his real views. He had only to refrain from pressing extreme views, or drawing ultimate conclusions from views very widespread among enlightened people, to find himself simply saying what all his set was saving, only, perhaps, saying it a little more valiantly, so that he drew a bonus of intense sincerity. I might have said, of course, that, in other quarters, Hiss had betrayed himself frequently. But in those early days I knew less about that than I know now. It was not until after Hiss’s conviction that a security officer of the Government would call to thank me for my part in the Case and remark: “The name Hiss has been an undertone in our work for years.”

  Smetana saved me from saying anything. “The Communist conspiracy,” he said, “is unlike any ever known before. In the past, conspiracy has always meant secrecy, concealment. The peculiarity of Communism is that everybody really knows who these people are and what the conspiracy is and how it works. But everybody connives at it because nobody wants to believe his own eyes. It is something new under the sun. It is conspiracy in the open.”

  When Smetana presently rose to go, I started to leave with him. Luce drew me back. Alone, we sat facing each other across a low table. Neither of us said anything. He studied my face for some time as if he were trying to read the limits of my strength. “The pity of it is,” he said at last, “that two men, able men, are destroying each other in this way.” I said: “That is what history does to men in periods like ours.”

  There was another heavy pause. I knew that there must be something that Luce wanted to tell me or ask me, but I was too weary to help him. Suddenly he said, “I’ve been reading about the young man born blind.” Frequently Luce asks his editors about stories in Time which they should have read and realize guiltily that
they have not read. I reacted with that old Time reflex. Apologetically, I said, “I haven’t read Time for the last two weeks.”

  “No, no,” Luce said impatiently, “I mean the young man born blind. It’s in the eighth or ninth chapter of St. John. They brought Our Lord a young man who had been blind from birth and asked Him one of those catch questions: ‘Whose is the sin, this man’s or his parents’, that he was born blind?’ Our Lord took some clay and wet it with saliva and placed it on the blind man’s eyes so that they opened and he could see. Then Our Lord gave an answer, not one of His clever answers, but a direct, simple answer. He said: 'Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’”

  Slowly, there sank into my mind the tremendous thing that Luce was saying to me, and the realization that he had brought me there so that he could say those words of understanding kindness. He was saying: “You are the young man bom blind. All you had to offer God was your blindness that through the action of your recovered sight, His works might be made manifest.”

  In the depths of the Hiss Case, in grief, weakness and despair, the words that Luce had repeated to me came back to strengthen me.

  XXII