But the Communist go-between at Cherner’s did not enter the sale in the Cherner records; Peters wanted no record of the transaction which could be avoided, in the official document. Instead, at once, the same night, the go-between transferred title to the car to one William Rosen, located at a Washington address where no William Rosen had ever lived. The go-between (or someone else) also wrote in Rosen’s signature. For Rosen’s signature on the transfer is not in Rosen’s handwriting. Yet Rosen repeatedly refused to testify before the Committee, and again at the second Hiss trial, whether or not he is a member of the Communist Party, and whether he ever owned a 1929 Ford roadster. His ground was self-incrimination. It is the belief of the Committee that Rosen did not receive the Hiss roadster, but that he was shielding someone else who did. No trace of the car has ever been found after it left Alger Hiss’s hands.
This was the evidence, second in importance perhaps only to the copied State Department documents and microfilm, that Judge Samuel H. Kaufman excluded from the first Hiss trial. That is why Thomas F. Murphy, in summing up before that jury, said, “And Judge Kaufman would not let me prove what happened after that.”
XXXI
Alger Hiss was recalled to the stand.
MR. STRIPLING: Mr. Hiss, I show you this photostatic copy of assignment of title, title No. 245647, for a Ford used, model A, 1929 roadster, and the numbers are A-21888119-19-33—that was the date on which it was originally registered in the District of Columbia. The tag, I believe, was 245647, in the name of Alger Hiss, 3411 O Street NW, Washington, D.C.
Now, Mr. Hiss, is this your signature which appears on the reverse side of this assignment of title? (showing witness photostatic copy.)
MR. HISS: Mr. Stripling, it certainly looks like my signature to me. Do you have the original document?
MR. STRIPLING: No; I do not.
MR. HISS: This is a photostat. I would prefer to have the original. Do you have the original?
MR. STRIPLING: The original document, Mr. Chairman, cannot be removed from the Department of Motor Vehicles. They keep it in their possession.
MR. HISS: They have it in their possession now?
MR. STRIPLING: I assume they do.
MR. DAVIS: Could it be subpoenaed?
MR. STRIPLING: It might be possible to subpoena it here if they bring it up themselves.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, Mr. Hiss, can’t you tell from the photostat what this signature is? Whether it is your signature or not?
MR. HISS: It looks like my signature to me, Mr. Chairman.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, if that were the original, would it look any more like your signature? (Laughter.) So, it is just reasonable to believe that you can tell from that whether or not it is your signature.
MR. HISS: I think if I saw the original document I would be able to see whether this photostat is an exact reproduction of the original document. I would just rather deal with originals than with copies.
MR. HÉBERT: Mr. Stripling, may I interrupt? In other words, in order to give Mr. Hiss every opportunity—if we recall what he did with the photograph, that he did not recognise Mr. Chambers for some time, and he finally recognized him. I suggest that the committee issue a subpoena duces tecum to the motor-vehicle people and let them come in here with the original, and it will be just a matter of hours, and he will have to admit it is his signature.
MR. HISS: The reason I asked was that we had not been able to get access to the original. I just wondered what had happened to it.
THE CHAIRMAN: We will try, and Mr. Stripling, you try at noontime, if we ever reach noontime.
MR. STRIPLING: I think we can reach it this way. Do you recall ever signing the assignment, Mr. Hiss?
MR. HISS: I do not at the moment recall signing this.
MR. STRIPLING: Is this your handwriting? There is written here, “Cherner Motor Co., 1781 Florida Avenue NW.” Did you write that?
MR. HISS: I could not be sure from the outline of the letters in this photostatic copy. That also looks not unlike my own handwriting.
MM. MUNDT: Could you be sure if you saw the original document?
MR. HISS: I could be surer. (Laughter.)
MR. STRIPLING: Now, Mr. Hiss and Mr. Chairman, yesterday the committee subpoenaed before it W. Marvin Smith, who was the notary public who notarized the signature of Mr. Hiss. Mr. Smith is an attorney in the Department of Justice in the Solicitor General’s office. He has been employed there for 35 years. He testified that he knew Mr. Hiss; he does not recall notarizing this particular document, but he did testify that this was his signature.
MR. HISS: I know Mr. Marvin Smith.
THE CHAIRMAN: You know who?
MR. Hiss: I say I know Mr. Marvin Smith.50
MR. STRIPLING: The man who notarized this.
MR. NIXON: Mr. Hiss, you knew Mr. Smith, the notary, who signed this in 1936, did you not?
MR. HISS: I did....
MR. NIXON: On the basis—in other words, you would not want to say now that you question the fact that Mr. Smith might have violated his oath as a notary public in notarizing a forged signature?
MR. HISS: Definitely not.
MR. NIXON: Then, as far as you are concerned, this is your signature?
MR. HISS: As far as I am concerned, with the evidence that has been shown to me, it is.
MR. NIXON: All right; you are willing to testify now then that since Mr. Smith did notarize your signature as of that time, that it is your signature?
MR. HISS: On the basis of the assumptions you state, the answer is “Yes.”
MR. HÉBERT: Mr. Hiss, now that your memory has been refreshed by the development of the last few minutes, do you recall the transaction whereby you disposed of that Ford that you could not remember this morning?
MR. HISS: No; I have no present recollection of the disposition of the Ford, Mr. Hébert.
MR. HÉBERT: In view of the refreshing of your memory that has been presented here this morning?
MR. HISS: In view of that, and in view of all the other developments.
MR. HÉBERT: You are a remarkable and agile young man, Mr. Hiss.
A few moments later, the hearing recessed for lunch. As Robert Stripling was gathering up his papers, Alger Hiss stepped up to him. “I don’t suppose you will want me here this afternoon,” he said. Stripling subdued his astonishment. “You had better stick around, Mr. Hiss,” he said. “He never missed a trick,” Stripling added in describing the incident to me some months later.
XXXII
The Ford car was the battle. It was a battle ably organized and executed by the Committee, with a large share of the credit going to Robert Stripling. It was a battle whose verdict, even in the full force of his two-year countercharge with the massed power of political and social allies behind it, Hiss was never again completely able to elude. And, indeed, how was it possible that any man of honest mind and plain intelligence, following Hiss’s testimony and behavior closely, observing the tireless twists and turns of his calculated equivocation varied with flashes of calculated insolence—how could such a plain man fail to know, after the evidence about the Ford roadster, that Hiss had wittingly engaged in a surreptitious transaction with Communists in which I had no part? The fact that Hiss had turned over his car to an unknown intermediary in a clandestine way was beyond question, while his elaborate efforts to cover up called into question the whole tissue of his story. Not to know that, a man must not have heard or read the testimony, not have understood it, or not have wanted to understand it.
The Ford roadster was the battle. But the Committee was not finished mopping up. For two or three long hours of the afternoon session of the hearing, it kept Hiss on the stand, leading him point by point over his past testimony, leading him to dodge, bend and weave—a spectacle of agile and dogged indignity—through his Jiscrepancies and contradictions, but never bringing him completely to lose his footing or to yield an inch in his denials.
At last, in a recapitulation that runs to almost four pages of t
he official transcript, Congressman Mundt summed up. His conclusion was in substance that of the official summation which the Committee released in closing that phase of the Hiss-Chambers Case: “.... on every point on which we have been able to verify, on which we have had verifiable evidence before us, the testimony of Mr. Chambers stands up. It stands unchallenged.... You (Hiss), on the other hand, have also supplied some verifiable data ... but, in the matter of the car, your testimony is clearly refuted by the tangible evidence of the sales slips from the Cherner Motor Company, by the registration material. On some of the other items, your testimony is clouded by a strangely deficient memory.... We proceed on the conclusion that if either one of you is telling the truth on the verifiable data, that you are telling the truth on all of it. ...”
And that, in so far as my testimony had then gone, and allowing for errors of recollection, was the fact.
XXXIII
Almost any other man but Hiss would have been exhausted simply by the ordeal of hours of questioning. At that point, Hiss attacked. This was the moment he had endured for. Into the record he was permitted to read the letter that he had already sent to the Committee’s chairman. Its purpose was threefold. First, it sought to establish Hiss’s innocence by association, merging him at the moment of his public disfigurement with a constellation of distinguished names in whose usurped light he purely shone. Then came the iterated challenge. Again, Hiss challenged me to repeat my charge that he had been a Communist in such a way that he could sue me for libel. No doubt it seemed to the counselers who put their heads together over it that that was the final routing tactic. Then came the fragmentation blast, the questions that were aimed at destroying my credibility by challenging my past while raising the smear to the level of a public charge, for one question amounted to the charge that I was insane.
But perhaps no item of the tactic was more effective in rallying support to Hiss than that he advanced first the warning that my charge of Communism against him must lead to re-examination of American foreign policy and, by implication, of those who had made it with Hiss and enabled him to make it—or, as he put it, “to discredit recent great achievements of this country in which I was privileged to participate.” That touched the rallying nerve of a common fear that would soon fill the nation with uproar as Hiss’s questions soon filled the hearing room with commotion (for there were ghosts on more roofs than that of the Livadia Palace at Yalta).
THE CHAIRMAN: Just go ahead, Mr. Hiss, and read your letter, and you wait, Mr. Counsel, until he gets through.
MR. HISS: We are doing this at your choice. I do not know what you prefer.
THE CHAIRMAN: You wanted to get started, and everybody was getting in your way. Go ahead.
MR. HISS: The letter which I sent to the chairman yesterday afternoon is as follows:
“Tomorrow—”
that is now today—
“will mark my fourth appearance before your committee. I urge, in advance of that hearing, that your committee delay no longer in penetrating to the bedrock of the facts relevant to the charge which you have publicized—that I am or have been a Communist.
“This charge goes beyond the personal. Attempts will be made to use it, and the resulting publicity, to discredit recent great achievements of this country in which I was privileged to participate.
“Certain members of your committee have already demonstrated that this use of your hearings and the ensuing publicity is not a mere possibility, it is a reality. Your acting chairman, Mr. Mundt, himself, was trigger quick to cast such discredit.” Although he now says that he was very favorably impressed with my testimony.
“Before I had a chance to testify, even before the press had a chance to reach me for comment—”
after Chambers’ testimony—
“before you had—”
so far as I am aware—
“sought one single fact to support the charge made by a self-confessed liar, spy, and traitor, your acting chairman pronounced judgment that I am guilty as charged, by stating that the country should beware of the peace work with which I have been connected.
“I urge that these committee members—” your committee members—
“abandon such verdict-first-and-testimony-later tactics, along with dramatic confrontations in secret sessions, and get down to business.
“First, my record should be explored. It is inconceivable that there could have been on my part, during 15 years or more in public office, serving all three branches of the Government, judicial, legislative, and executive, any departure from the highest rectitude without its being known. It is inconceivable that the men with whom I was intimately associated during those 15 years should not know my true character far better than this accuser. It is inconceivable that if I had not been of the highest character, this would not have manifested itself at some time or other, in at least one of the innumerable actions I took as a high official, actions publicly recorded in the greatest detail.
“During the period cited by this accuser, I was chief counsel to the Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, at a great many public hearings, fully reported in volumes to be found in libraries in every major American city. During my term of service under the Solicitor General of the United States, I participated in the preparation of briefs on a great many of the largest issues affecting the United States. Those briefs are on public file in the United States Supreme Court, in the Department of Justice, and in law libraries in various American cities.
“As an official of the Department of State, I was appointed secretary general, the top administrative officer, of the peace-building international assembly that created the United Nations. My actions in that post are a matter of detailed public record. The same is true of my actions at other peace-building and peace-strengthening international meetings in which I participated—at Dumbarton Oaks and elsewhere in this country, at Malta, at Yalta, at London, and in other foreign cities. All my actions in the executive branch of the Government, including my work in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration on farm problems, are fully recorded in the public records.
“In all this work I was frequently, and for extensive periods, under the eye of the American press and of the statesmen under whom or in association with whom I worked. They saw my every gesture, my every movement, my every facial expression. They heard the tones in which I spoke, the words I uttered, the words spoken by others in my presence. They knew my every act relating to official business, both in public and in executive conference.
“Here is a list of the living personages of recognized stature under whom or in association with whom I worked in the Government (there may be omissions which I should like to supply in a supplemental list):
“Men now in the United States Senate:
“Senator Tom Connally, one of the United States delegates to the San Francisco Conference which created the United Nations, and to the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations in London—where I was present.
“Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a member of the Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry—under whom I served—”and a member of the San Francisco Conference and London General Assembly delegations.”
Next—
“Men now in the House of Representatives:
“Representative Sol Bloom, a member of both the San Francisco and the London delegations.
“Representative Charles Eaton, also a member of both the San Francisco and the London delegations, although his health kept him from making the trip to London.”
Next—
“Former Secretaries of State:
“Cordell Hull, Edward Stettinius, James Byrnes.
“Former Under Secretaries of State—”
under whom I served—
“Joseph Grew, also a member of the Dumbarton Oaks delegation, Dean Acheson, and William Clayton.
“United States judges:
“Stanley Reed, Associate Justice now of the United States Supreme Court,
who as Solicitor General was my immediate superior during my service in the Department of Justice.
“Homer Bone, former Senator from Washington, who was also a member of the Munitions Committee.
“Bennett Clark, a former Senator who was a member of the Munitions Committee.
“Jerome Frank who as general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was my immediate chief in the Department of Agriculture.
“Men formerly in Congress:
“Former United States Senator Gerald Nye, chairman of the Munitions Committee, who appointed me as the chief attorney of that committee.
“Former United States Senator James Pope, who was a member of the Munitions Committee, and who is now, I believe, a director of TVA.
“Former United States Senator John Townsend, a member of the London delegation.
“Others at international conferences where I assisted their labors to build the peace:
“Isaiah Bowman, member of Dumbarton Oaks delegation, president of Johns Hopkins University.
“John Foster Dulles, a chief adviser of the San Francisco delegation, and a member of each delegation to the meetings of the General Assembly.
“Lt. Gen. Stanley Embick, a member of the Dumbarton Oaks delegation.
“Charles Fahy, former legal adviser of the Department of State and member of the United States delegation to the General Assembly.
Witness Page 82
