By August 25th, I had begun to grasp, too, what soundless void lay beneath the bridge. For I had begun to understand that to be a witness, in the sense in which I am using the term, means, ultimately, just one thing. It means that a man is prepared to destroy himself, if necessary, to make his witness. A man does not wish to destroy himself. To the full degree in which he is strongest, that is to say, to the full degree of the force that makes it possible for him to bear witness at all, he desires not to destroy himself. To the degree that he is most human, that is to say, most weak, he shrinks from destroying himself. But to the degree that what he truly is and what he stands for are one, he must at some point tacitly consent in his own mind to destroy himself if that is necessary. And, in part, that tacit consent is a simple necessity of the struggle. It is the witness’ margin of maneuver. In no other way can he strip his soul of that dragging humanity, that impeding love of life and its endearments which must otherwise entangle him at every step and distract him at last to failure. This is the point at which the witness is always most alone.
In those decisive forty-eight hours, I knew, too, that I would go all the way across the bridge. I knew it at the moment when I tried to stop midway. For then I knew that I could not go back without betraying that faith for which I had begun my witness. And there was something more. At the heart of the crisis of our times lies the cold belief of millions, avowed or unavowed, that the death of religious faith is seen in nothing so much as in the fact that it has lost its power to move anyone to die for it. I sensed that the deepest meaning of the Case, and the meaning of my life for myself and for all other men, was the degree to which I could be so moved to act.
I do not mean that, by taking thought, I suddenly decided to become a witness in the fullest sense or that I never again wavered. No man decides to become a witness. In the last push, no height is stormed merely by taking thought. It is taken by those who throw themselves against the outnumbering odds, not counting them, because to count would be to fail. The point about my witness in the Hiss Case is never that I was a man driven by a fixed, implacable purpose. The point is that I was a man constantly wavering, from human and other considerations, a man constantly seeking guidance, constantly uncertain that his understanding of what it was right for him to do was the right understanding, and finally brought to desperation by the fear that it was not. I did not reach the height of my purpose in the Hiss Case immediately or all at once. I reached it by stages corresponding to the practical developments in the Case. I reached it by stages equal to the strength that I had for each successive effort. The wonderful thing is that, as each required new strength, new strength was given to me.
Toward the end of August 1948, I finally found the strength to cross the bridge and enter that region of grief, fear and death beyond. There followed about one hundred days in which was largely determined the form that the Hiss Case would take, and even whether there would be a Hiss Case, as we know it, at all. No period of the Case, I think, is more perplexing to most people. That is not strange, for many unusual factors were present And there was going on a struggle in the dark between the forces which sought to bring the Hiss Case to light and those which opposed them. It is still impossible to be explicit about that struggle, in part because the full facts about the forces that, until the end, favored Alger Hiss, cannot in the nature of their operation be known. I can describe that struggle only as I knew it—one single man, seeking to do what was right to the limit of his understanding and strength, upon whom beat a surf of pressures, rumors, warnings, so that to keep my footing in the inevitable backwash of doubts and fears was a daily feat It is possible that not all of the forces that I was then led to believe were working against me were working in unison, or to the same degree or from the same motives that I supposed. It is possible that some of those whom I was led to deem enemies were not enemies, even if they were not friends, or that some whom I deemed friends were not mistaken in some part of what they warned me of. Therefore, I claim no infallibility for my views which freely stand subject to the light of clarifying facts—facts, not arguments. I can only describe that struggle as I experienced it in terms of what I then felt The struggle imposed upon the acts which shaped it forms which seem strange, and to some, grotesque, for example, the incident of the pumpkin.
In that struggle, though scores of people, chiefly enemies, were swirling around me, few men could have been more alone. Then, toward the close of that hundred days, the affairs of the Hiss Case passed out of my uncertain hands into the hands where they belonged—the hands of two forces stemming directly from the body of the nation and having its interests primarily at heart—rather than the interests of any partisan group. Those forces were the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York working with Tom Donegan, a special assistant to the Attorney General, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.56
The events of those hundred days are the subject of most of what remains of this book. For me, it is almost as painful to remember as to have lived through them. About them in my mind there clings, and always must, an air of death. And that not only because death tacitly seals the vocation of a witness, but also because in those days. I tried to die. By the necessities of narrative, I must write of myself at that time as making certain decisions and performing certain acts. But, in fact, I cannot recall those days without again slipping to my knees as I did then, bowed down in trouble, but also in awe, to the dust of which I then most truly knew myself to be a part.
13
THE HISS CASE II
I
The hundred days began, characteristically, with an act of indecision. On August 24th or 25th, I wired Lawrence Spivak in New York that I would not appear after all on his radio program, Meet the Press. Spivak was then, among other things, the publisher of the American Mercury. I had known him for several years. I knew that he was an anti-Communist. I considered him friendly. A few days before, he had asked me, as a favor to him, and a service to the Committee and myself, to go on the air.
I had never listened to Meet the Press. I knew only what Spivak told me: that the program consisted of a panel of newsmen, including Spivak and a moderator, who shot questions at some guest currently in the news. I had no fear of questions. I agreed to go on, in part to please Spivak, in part because Meet the Press seemed to give me a chance to let the nation hear my voice. On the most controversial issue of the hour, no other agency in the country had been enterprising or impartial enough to approach me.
I gathered from the concern of friends, and from the general buzz, that the press and radio had in general succeeded in dropping a distorting curtain between the nation and me. But I believed then, and I still believe, that if the mass of people can hear a man’s voice, listen to what he has to say and his way of saying it, they will, not invariably, but as a rule, catch the ring of truth, and pretty unerringly sort out a sincere man from an impostor.
Alger Hiss’s challenge to me to repeat my charge of Communism where he could sue me for libel made me hesitate. He had first challenged me at the Hotel Commodore confrontation. His challenge had been repeated in the press on August 24th and was repeated at the August 25th hearing. Clearly, one of the first questions that I would be asked on the air was whether or not I was prepared to repeat my charge. Hiss would then be free to sue me. I did not want to be sued—the very idea of a lawsuit was alien and repugnant. Nor did I believe that Hiss could want a suit. How could he possibly want one? Even should he win, so much must come out about him in the course of a lawsuit that any verdict must be disastrous to him.
But whether Hiss’s challenge were a calculated tactic or a bluff, two possibilities were implicit in it. As a tactic, it would serve to change the focus of the Case, to divert the chief issue from his Communism to a public ventilation of my life, and would put me, legally, on the defensive. If it were a bluff, it was such a bluff as he might have to make good on. Circumstances beyond his control, if I spoke out, might then force him to file suit to save face. I did not wish
to back him into that comer any more than I wished to be sued by him. Therefore, I had wired Spivak: no.
II
A single day at the farm convinced me that I was wrong. There I found the peace to measure how far three weeks of congressional hearings had brought me. I saw in the hearings something different from what anybody else I knew saw in them. Part of the nation saw in them startling or harrowing revelations. Another part saw in them irresponsible or lying charges. Others saw in them an amusing or distracting side-show to the presidential election of 1948. Still others saw in them something akin to a sporting event (which one is lying?) with sinister overtones.57
I left the August 25th hearing with two convictions that events soon intensified: 1) Alger Hiss was still an active Communist; 2) through him, I was at war with the Communist Party in its fullest extent. In the hearings, I saw a period of armed reconnaissance in which the Communist Party, taken by surprise by my testimony, had been feeling out what I was up to, how far I had gone, and how far I was prepared to go.
When the Hotel Commodore confrontation was over, the party suspected that I had not told all the facts.58 By August 25th, it was reasonably sure of this and had decided how to deal with me. In the hearing, it handed me its ultimatum. I had little doubt that Hiss’s repeated challenge to sue him, and his public demand for an inquiry into my past, were the snake skin wrapped around the arrows. Through them, the Communist Party said to me in effect: “This is the showdown. Stop testifying. Stop it or we will destroy you. This is how we will do it.” It dared me to step across the line and accept the challenge. It felt safe in daring me because it read into the fact that I had indeed held back part of the facts a motive of dishonesty. The Party would have been better advised to remember me better. But at that point the nature of Communism itself was its fate. For the Party could not possibly grasp the motives of my silence, and if it could, would have regarded them as a sign of weakness, and would have treated them with exactly that contempt which kept Vishinsky laughing all one night in scorn at the peace proposals of the West.
Besides, the Communist Party had already totted up the balance of forces and knew that it could proceed against me without even showing its hand. Lacking its intelligence facilities, I could, nevertheless, tot them up in my own fashion. They were overwhelmingly against me.
Beyond the masked power of the Communist Party, working in a thousand secret ways, there stood the resources of the Soviet Government, working through its underground apparatuses and other agencies. The United States Government was explicitly on record against me (the red herring), and the President would soon be saying at his whistle stops across the land: “If you work for Time, you’re a hero. If you work for the State Department, you’re a heel.” I had been warned repeatedly that the brunt of official wrath was directed, not against Alger Hiss as a danger, but against me for venturing to testify to the danger. Moreover, the most articulate section of public opinion was bitterly aroused against me and persistent in its attacks, none of which was ever checked in the whole course of the Hiss Case against even one intelligent effort to talk to me personally and arrive at a first-hand impression of what I might be like or what I might think that I was doing. The Communist Party did not need to move openly against me. It had only to sit back, to give a quiet turn here, to prompt my enemies there, to feed out information, some of it true and damaging, but most of it slanderous and false, to iterate that most potent of falsehoods: that nobody can believe an ex-Communist, and the powers hostile to me that the Hiss Case had set in motion would do the rest.
It was against that rally of force (whose full weight and worth I by no means clearly understood) that I reconsidered Hiss’s challenge and the wire that I had sent to Spivak. The very fact that such massed force could exist narrowed my choice of action; in fact, determined it. Whatever Hiss chose to do, I had no choice. I had no more right to spare myself the ordeal of a libel suit than I could spare Hiss the possibility of suing me. To do so would not merely betray all that I had tried to do until then. I had only to glance across my fields and watch my neighbors at their timeless labors to know what the human betrayal would be.
Therefore, when Spivak telephoned me a second time to explain how gravely I had embarrassed him by retracting my promise to appear on Meet the Press, I answered that I had reconsidered, that I would appear. The program was scheduled for the night of August 27th.
As I write about these things, in the fall of 1951, three years after they happened, I hear the clip-clip sound of a tractor, moving far off in low gear. Through the pane in the door, I see in the distance that my neighbor and his son are working up a field for winter wheat. When the wind shifts, I cannot hear the tractor at all. It moves, slowly and stately, like a little galleon, while the two ploughs roll back a brown wake behind it. The son rides the machine. The father, an old man, walks behind to supervise the operation.
These are the men whose habitual labors hold the crumbling world together. They stand for all fathers and sons, including mine, for whom in that moment of the past I sought to act. I think:And the ploughs go round and round,
As year on year goes by.
The lines bring back the day, when, as a youth, I walked along a field path and first read the Antigone. When I reached that second chorus, I stopped walking without realizing it. As I read for the first time:Much is there passing strange,
Nothing surpassing mankind,
it seemed to me as if a second sun had burst upon the world, which, when I finally raised my eyes to look at it, was created a second time in that new light.
III
Before I could appear on Meet the Press something happened which made it clear that the Hiss Case had developed a life and a momentum of its own that it would be extremely difficult for anyone involved in it to impede. The first of the lurking factors emerged. The Baltimore News-Post, a Hearst paper, startled its readers with an exclusive story that Hiss and Chambers had, at different times, owned the same piece of property near Westminster, Md.
The story was backed up with photostats of Hiss’s correspondence with a Westminster real-estate agent, and his records of purchase and mine. That both the head of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace and a senior editor of Time magazine should have owned the same isolated property, a photograph of which accompanied the text, raised thrilling (and groundless) speculations about underground Communist hideaways. A further note of mystery was injected by photostats of my signature, taken from the register of the local hotel. But that was a purely gratuitous touch. Perhaps ten times during my years at Time, I had arrived late in Westminster for my week-end, and spent the night at the hotel to spare my wife the hardship of meeting me in town at two or three o’clock in the morning. This and other puzzling matters I could have cleared up if anybody had asked me to before the story went to press.
The Committee telephoned me at once. I stopped by its offices on my way to the Meet the Press broadcast. My testimony as to how Hiss and I came to own the same property can be read in the official transcript of that executive hearing. But nothing that was asked me that day struck me as so acute as a carefully casual comment of Robert Stripling’s after the hearing. “I have been reading over your testimony, Mr. Chambers,” he said, “and one thing about it impresses me. You answer questions readily enough, but I notice that you never volunteer information.”
IV
I had taken my son59 to Washington with me. It seemed to me that since history had overtaken the boy in a way that I should gladly have spared him, it might be less frightening to him to see that the actors in it were not merely impersonal, dread names, but people; that the most sensational of human actions still take place in a routine setting of buildings, offices and elevators, or the chromium commonplaces of a broadcasting studio. Above all, I wanted to spare him that shadow of fear, the menace of the unknown, which is, therefore, too real. At the moment, there was very little else that I could do for him.
We had supper with the Spivaks and Martha Rountre
e, the co-producer of Meet the Press. “One of the questions you will almost certainly be asked,” said Spivak, “is whether you are willing to say that Hiss was a Communist.” I said I hoped that I would not be asked that question. “Well, I think you will be,” said Spivak, “and I certainly hope that you will answer it.” From the way that Spivak glanced at me sharply over his glasses, I had no further doubt that that question stood high on the list. I said I hoped that Spivak had picked me a balanced panel, that at least two of my four inquisitors would not be actively hostile so that I might have an occasional chance to catch my breath. That part of the panel which included himself, Spivak assured me, once more glancing sharply over his glasses, would not be hostile.
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