I have only heard Meet the Press once since that night. From that occasion, and from what others tell me, I gather that the tone of the program seldom varies and that it can be summed up as fun for the boys but death for the frogs. In that respect, the program in which I participated simply ran true to form. But I also believe that few of the thousands who listened to Meet the Press on August 27, 1948, would fail to agree that it was enlivened by an unprecedented personal venom; that it amounted to a savage verbal assault and battery on the guest, without pause, and with little restraint or decency.
I should have known, if I could possibly have imagined, what was in store, from the moment that I entered the studio. In a waiting room, I was introduced to two of my questioners, Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post, the most implacable of the pro-Hiss newspapers, and a correspondent from some other paper whose name I never caught. I was unprepared for the chilling stiffness of my fellow journalists, in part because I had not yet had time to overcome the habit of regarding myself as a working journalist and a Time editor.
James Reston of the New York Times quietly joined us. His role and manner acutely puzzled me. I did not know that he was to be the moderator for the evening. Reston complained to his colleagues: “I sent him a note and he would not even answer my question.” He referred to his note during the August 25th hearing, asking whether, at the age of four, I had published a book of poems under the name of G. Crosley.
In the broadcasting room, I sat at a small table, facing my inquisitors. They were Spivak, the unrecollected newsman, Folliard and Tom Reynolds of the Chicago Sun. The Sun was a half-sister to Marshall Field’s PM, the New York daily, sometimes referred to as the uptown Pravda or Daily Worker.60 At my right sat Reston, the moderator. Somewhere beyond him sat Martha Rountree, the only person whom I recall as trying to moderate anything during the broadcast. At my left, sat a small studio audience, including my son and Louis Banks of Time.
It was my first time on the air. I knew that every word I spoke, every inflection of my voice, was critically important not only to the Committee and me, but to the future of the Case. I was concentrated on answering simply and directly. I sought not to let myself be crowded, not to lose my temper during the baiting.
The question that we were met to ask and answer was put almost at once. Folliard put it: Are you willing to repeat your charge that Alger Hiss was a Communist? I paused for the shade of a second. Then I crossed the bridge. I answered: “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may still be one.”
It was almost certainly the most important answer that I shall be called upon to give in my life—and not only for myself. Millions who heard, or heard of it, caught only its surface meaning: Whittaker Chambers had deliberately opened himself to a libel suit by Alger Hiss. But I like to believe that some who heard it, heard at the same instant, its inward meaning. That meaning was that God, Who is a God of Mercy, is also the God of Whom it is written:Der Gott Der Eisen wachsen liess,
Er wollte keine Knechte.
The God Who made iron grow—
He wanted no slaves.
Of the mayhem that followed, only one question and answer seems worth remembering. It bears directly on the Hiss Case. I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism.
I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: “The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.”
Tom Reynolds was the most unsparing of my questioners. His manner and bias are fixed, I think in one question. “Do you find it easier,” he asked me, “to make a living now than when you were in the Communist Party?” At the time, I was too busy answering to catch the inner animus of that and other sallies. Even after it was over, Reynolds could not let go. He blustered up and asked how, if I were not a follower of Professor Toynbee, I explained the fact that I had written so favorable a piece about him in Time. The implication was that the piece was dishonest. I said that I had not been interested in presenting my views about Toynbee, but Toynbee’s views about history. “Well, that’s the kind of piece I’m going to write about you,” Reynolds said. “It won’t be my views, it will just be the truth about you.”
I left the studio with my son and Louis Banks. “You are a brave man,” said Banks. It was meant sincerely, but I could not help thinking with amusement of the way a buyer for a packing house eyes a beef admiringly and observes: “He’ll string up a nice carcass.”
It was a hot and breathless night. As we walked down Connecticut Avenue, a studio messenger caught up with us and handed me a note on which was written a telephone number that I was to call at once. From the Time office, I called it. An angry Nixon answered the phone. “It was a damned outrage,” said the Quaker Congressman.
My son had been extremely silent. But as soon as we were alone in the dark car, heading out of Washington toward Westminster, he asked me quietly: “Papa, why did those men hate you so?” “Does it worry you?” I said. “Don’t let it worry you. It is a kind of a war. They are on one side, and I am on the other side. Later on, perhaps you will understand. Now you don’t have to think about it. But I am glad that you saw it and I hope you will always remember it.”
He fell asleep while I drove on.
V
Until then, our home had been our sanctuary. This was especially true of the children. Their acres were their peace, and the distresses of the world beyond, rumors of which sometimes reached them, might brush their fields; they had no power to enter.
The News-Post’s story changed all that. Our address had never been more secret than the telephone book in which it was listed. But neither had it been of public interest. Now the nation knew it. Now anyone who wished was free to walk into our home, and first of all the press. My children watched round-eyed, then horrified, then with a saving disgust, as newsmen and news photographers swarmed in with an enthusiasm that, to us, could only seem like the delight of urchins in trampling a garden. What was most frightening to the children was their incredulous realization that their father and mother, the source of all security in their lives, were clearly powerless to halt the violation. We could only treat the invaders, and counsel the children to treat them, courteously and simply, in the hope that they would presently drift on to fields of fresher sensation.
Of course, many of the newsmen had no more stomach for their assignment than we had. They had their own homes and families where they would much rather have been. They were doing a job. Some of them exuded a hostility and distrust that they could not entirely curb. Nevertheless, even these stayed just within the limits of civility. Only one, so far as I can remember, was ever outstandingly rude. He was a representative of the Washington Post and a former Life employe. He appeared, for the first time, at the very end of the Hiss Case, a few hours after Alger Hiss had been convicted. “I’m going to give you hell in my story tomorrow,” this gracious fellow assured me. To my wife, he promised: “We’re going to give your husband what he used to give the writers at Time.” He kept his word (as he understood it), overwrought, no doubt, by Hiss’s conviction.
On the other hand, a reporter from another pro-Hiss newspaper, sent to ply me with a set of provocative questions presumably dreamed up by his editor, noticed an expression of fatigue pass over my face. Suddenly, he thrust his pencil in his pocket. “I guess you’re sick to death of this,” he said, and getting up, with the rest of his questions unasked, walked out of the house.
Certainly Pipe Creek Farm and those who lived on it were puzzling to the press. The first wave of assault had come apparently expecting to find its own dream of a Time editor’s country place—the miles of white wooden fences, the acres of clipped turf, the monogrammed Cadillac station wagon, the mansion of reconditioned antiquity, made livable, however, by the addition of a cocktail bar. Instead, they found a dirt farm where there had never been enough hands to do all that needed doing and where the only liquor in the house was used to revive sick calves. The family that claimed former friendship with the urbane Hisses
wore work clothes, milked cows, spread manure, cooked its own meals and commonly ate them in the kitchen beside the range. The discrepancy was staggering. How could a newsman, fighting a deadline, be expected to probe what special experience of life and history could lead to a situation so unfairly confusing? Why would an editor of Time and his wife prefer the drudgery of a dairy farm when Baltimora’s night clubs were only thirty miles away? Clearly, most of the newsmen regarded any hard work as a form of insanity. Clearly they regarded any man who would earn $30,000 a year in order to live in primitive peace in the countryside as out of his mind, or a fraud. I think that most of them settled quickly for a fraud.
Their bafflement fed the deeper suspicion, which just peeped through their formal manner, that we were impostors, and that Alger Hiss was a wronged man. No answer we could give to anything that they could ask could be taken at face value, and that they quietly made us feel. Our strong instinct for privacy, and our natural reticence merely seemed to them secretive and furtive. To the press, our life on the farm was clearly an act, which we had rigged for the occasion, part of a greater act that included my charge against Hiss. This viewpoint, which I am convinced was largely unconscious, was so ingrained that, even today, newsmen ask me, with a knowing smirk, if I have given up farming yet. The same notion lies presumably at the root of the repeated stories that I have returned to Time.
For months, no newspaper in the country sent anyone to the farm (always with the exception of Bert Andrews) who was equipped to report what he might find there. Questioning seldom got beyond the current news except to count and recount the number of our cows, or to ask, again in the tone of catching us in a fraud, if we did not use milking machines.
Not until the end of the first Hiss trial, did any newsman ask me an intelligent question. Then Nicholas Blatchford of the Washington Daily News, disregarding cows, barns, house, or acres, asked me simply: “What do you think that you’re doing?” We were sitting in the living room. At his question I turned to look out at the mists that were rising from the bottom below the house, filling the valley. I answered slowly: “I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist.”
That was all. A newsman had had the imagination to ask a troubled man one of the only two or three questions worth asking and, as a result, Blatchford’s story was instantly picked up all over the country. The movie cameramen who, in marked contrast to the press, were consistently friendly and kindly, were soon making me repeat my answer to Blatchford behind piles of hay bales, in front of the barn or encircled by cows.
Yet the evening of the day of Blatchford’s visit, my daughter came out to the barn where I was milking, to say that a Baltimore newsman had arrived with a report that the jury in the first Hiss trial was out in New York. He had taken up his post in the house where he was going to remain until the jury returned its verdict. When I had finished milking, I went in to see our visitor. I explained to him that there could be only two probabilities: the jury would reach a verdict at once (which clearly had not happened), or the jury would be out all night. “Do you really mean to stay here all night?” I asked him. He made some indistinct noise. Later, I pressed him again. “You see,” he said, “it isn’t just the jury. My city editor seems to think that you are going to skip to Canada tonight.” He glanced at me darkly.
I think that his candid answer about sums up the state of mind of much of the press from the beginning to the end of the Hiss Case. It was seldom betrayed quite so honestly. Perhaps, in general, it reflected the temper of the city desks rather than the legmen. It was an attitude very hard to bear, taken together with everything else, because it was set like cement, beyond any possibility of rationally counteracting it. There was no defense against it. It walked into our home and challenged us with its watchful eye and its faintly skeptical smile, too discreet to be frankly rude.
It was only one aspect of the dehumanization of Whittaker Chambers that was then in full swing, incubated by the Hiss defense. Within a month, the last ten years, the richest and fullest of my life, had been stripped away from me and publicly treated as if they did not exist. The enemy could not allow them to exist, for there was scarcely anything in them that could possibly be turned against me. Though I was still an editor of Time, I was for all practical purposes publicly an untouchable. At best, my editorship was becoming something to beat Time over the masthead with. A skilful and tireless campaign was rapidly turning me into something scarcely recognizable as human.
Yet our relations with the press had one very human moment. During the day when the first Hiss jury was finding it impossible to agree,61 newsmen and newsreel men sat in a great circle of lawn chairs under the trees behind our house. It was a little like a siege. At noon and in the evening, my wife and daughter fed the occupying forces and brought them iced tea and coffee while they kept in touch with the living world over their portable radios. Mr. Pennington, my son and I were haying. Now and again, the Baltimore Sun’s jeep, packed with sightseeing newsmen, would rip across the hills or try to reach us through the maze of the contours. But I think that those scenes of dismayingly simple industry finally shook the prejudice of some. For, when it was leaving, the press did a very gracious thing.
The newsmen who had wandered through the house had noted the albums of recorded music lying about—Haydn, Handel, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. The newsmen put their heads together. All chipped in, and two of them quietly slipped away to buy us a present which they presented to us in the name of the whole group. It was Sibelius’ First Symphony. Nothing could have touched us more.
VI
During the August 25th hearing, an official of the Immigration Service (of the Justice Department) had asked me to talk to its agents in New York with a view to my testifying in the deportation proceedings against J. Peters. The head of the underground section of the American Communist Party had clearly become one of the most dangerous possible witnesses against Alger Hiss, if by any means he could be induced to talk. He had long eluded the efforts of the House Committee on Un-American activities to locate him. Now, after years of surveillance (of which I had long known) he was suddenly picked up by the Justice Department and held for deportation.62
I had a slightly uneasy feeling about the Immigration Service. I knew that, only a short time before, one of its high officials in New York had severed his connections with it due to his persistent conformity to the Communist Party line.
The agents called on me at my office at Time. One was a mute man, who, if I remember rightly, said nothing at all in the course of the interview that followed. The other asked the questions. I described to them in a good deal of detail my activities in the first Soviet underground apparatus into which I had been recruited. I described my activities as contact man between the Soviet apparatus and the Communist Party, an operation in which I had worked closely with Peters. I presume that I also described Peters’ connection with the Ware Group, though I no longer remember distinctly. But my information about Peters and the Soviet apparatus was obviously of great importance to the Government. My visitors presently left, asking me to remain in New York until I should be notified whether or not I would be called as a witness.
While I was pondering upon the reasons why anybody could possibly wish to deport J. Peters at the moment when he had become important in the Hiss controversy, and allied disclosures, Congressman Nixon volunteered to enlighten me.
Once more, he and other members of the sub-committee had come up to New York. They also were interested in questioning Peters. The public hearing was held in the Federal Building. For the first time, the nation caught a glimpse of the dark, rather undistinguished little man who had long played so cryptic a part in its affairs.
I was called as a witness. I identified Peters. Peters was unwilling to identify me, on the ground that his answer might incriminate and, as he said, glaring at me and lingering lovingly over the word, degrade him. At this hearing
, I first saw Carol Weiss King, who accompanied Peters as his counsel. With bobbed gray hair, bulging brief case clutched under her arm and a cigarette drooped from her lips she seemed to be trying to caricature the common notion of a Communist.63
After the hearing, Nixon asked me if I were going back to the farm at once. I explained that I was waiting to be called by the United States Immigration Service in the hearings against J. Peters. “In that case,” said Nixon, “you can go home tonight. They will never call you.” I asked why, since there were few men in the country who knew as much about Peters and his activities as I knew, and almost no one who would testify to them.
“Don’t you understand,” said Nixon, “that if the Government calls you to testify against J. Peters, it will have admitted that you are a credible witness? If you are a credible witness against J. Peters, you are also a credible witness against Alger Hiss. They will never call you.”
Two days later, an official of the Immigration Service telephoned me at Time. He was sorry, he said, if he had inconvenienced me, but the Immigration Service found that it had so many excellent witnesses against J. Peters that it would not be necessary to call me.
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