Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I would suggest, too, that the source of what at last made it possible for me to bear witness against Communism, as a power of evil, lay close to the source of what made it necessary for me to bear a witness of mercy for the Communists as men. I do not know why, but I sense that the witness of mercy unlocks the possibility of a cycle of redemption, and that any other locks upon men the old coils of hatred, multiplying new evil.

  XII

  I had no doubt that Hiss, with his close ties in Government, would quickly learn what I had testified about espionage, and would at once take advantage of it. I wondered how he would feel, taking advantage of a man who had sought to shield him. And I was human enough to resent the fact that he would feel nothing. For such a witness acts in no sudden or miraculous way. Its action is slow, but it is enduring. It remains a measure against which the base must scale themselves, never more so than in the act of defying or deriding it.

  XIII

  Once Hiss sued me, Time, with its usual generosity, came to my aid. The magazine took the position that in charging me with libel, Hiss had impugned my veracity, not merely as an individual man, but as an editor of Time. Time, therefore, had a direct concern in my vindication.

  For one reason or another, which I did not seek to explore, I was never privy to the exact arrangements made by Time. But I was presently informed that the costs of the legal defense had been, in so far as possible, lifted from me. Some of the costs I must unavoidably bear. Time’s interests in the Case were looked after by Harold Medina, Jr., son of the now celebrated judge who was soon to preside over the long trial of the Communist leaders. It was sometimes necessary for me to confer with young Medina. I learned that now I had investigators of my own.67

  The names of a number of other Baltimore attorneys were given me from which to make my choice of counsel. I listened to as many first-hand opinions as possible about all of them. Then I decided on the man whom I had decided on the first time that I read over the list—Richard F. Cleveland, the youngest son of the former President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, and a partner in the Baltimore law firm of Semmes, Bowen and Semmes.

  It was another of those turns in the Case which have seemed to me providential. I knew nothing whatever about Richard Cleveland. Until his name was handed to me, I had never heard of him. Yet it is hard to imagine that any other man could conceivably have filled the role that was thrust upon this quiet; deliberate, shrewd, deeply devout and deeply understanding gentleman. From the first, he sensed that there was something missing in the Hiss Case. From the moment that I confirmed his intuition and told him what that missing factor was—espionage—he grasped the Case in its full meaning. He understood exactly what I had to do and why I was doing it.

  Twice, at least, his words reaching me when he himself was not present, bore me up in critical moments. His letter, which was handed me by the F.B.I. a few moments before I went in to testify in the first Hiss trial, offering me the support of a shared understanding and the force of his prayers, was a powerful help to me during my public evisceration by Lloyd Paul Stryker.

  The other occasion was of a kind that no man could ever forget. It occurred in December 1948, during my days before the Grand Jury, when the outcry against me was deafening. Richard Cleveland and his wife had driven from Baltimore to our farm. If any conscious factor had influenced my choice of Cleveland as my lawyer, it was my respect for his father. To my gentle wife for whom in her loneliness that dark moment was darker than for me, Cleveland said in his gentle way: “In many ways, Whittaker reminds me of my father.” It was, of course, the measure of Richard Cleveland, not of me.

  XIV

  Semmes, Bowen and Semmes occupies the twenty-first floor of the Baltimore Trust Building, Baltimore’s skyscraper, at No. 10 Light Street. There I now began to visit Richard Cleveland in his office, which looked westward across the roofs of the city to a comer of that Druid Hill Park, where, as a boy, Alger Hiss used to bottle spring water.

  There I first met William Macmillan, Sr. Macmillan is Cleveland’s partner, and would have been the trial lawyer had the libel suit ever taken place. This resolutely cheerful, bouncy, alert and very human man was second only to Cleveland in upholding my morale when there was almost no one else to uphold it. I felt extreme confidence in him as a lawyer. At that time, I was completely unfamiliar with the procedures of the law. I was, in fact, a blank. From William Macmillan I first caught a sense of courtroom, a rudimentary notion of what constitutes evidence, of what is material and admissible, together with a consciousness of the jury, and how a lawyer, drawing upon a lifetime of experience, feels that the minds of jurors work.

  My first interview with Cleveland and Macmillan was chiefly to give them a chance to look me over and to listen to my story before they decided to accept me as a client. I found that I came as something of a relief. “To tell the truth,” said Cleveland as we parted that first day, “Bill and I were a little worried. When we heard that you were an ex-Communist, we expected a wild-eyed man without a necktie. You are quite a surprise.”

  XV

  My life now began to revolve around the law, which fixed its pattern. Day after day, I drove to Baltimore and went over the story of the Ware Group, sometimes with Cleveland and Macmillan together, sometimes with Cleveland alone. Macmillan lingered insistently over details: what Communist undergrounds were like, how they worked, what the Ware Group had been doing and why I had been known to them only by the name of Carl. I felt a sense of dismay that highly intelligent men, living constantly in the atmosphere of history, justice and government, should be as completely unfamiliar with the character and practices of the Communist power that threatened them as I was with the procedures of the law. But I saw, too, that out of the accumulated experience of years of legal practice, they were probing for something that they could not put their finger upon, but which they sensed should be there, and which was not there. My confidence in them grew daily. I realized, too, that complete truth was the only possible working relationship between lawyer and client.

  I was sitting alone one day with Richard Cleveland. Once more he led me over parts of the story. After a time, he paused and gazed off toward Druid Hill Park.

  “You feel, don’t you, that there is something missing?” I asked.

  “I was discussing the case with my wife last night,” he said, “and we both agreed that there was something missing.”

  “There is something missing,” I said. “I am shielding Hiss.”

  Cleveland glanced at me over his half-glasses as he sometimes did.

  “Espionage,” I said.

  XVI

  I had reasoned that, once Alger Hiss made the gesture of suing me, there was an outside possibility that he would postpone the action, on one pretext or another, until people lost interest. Instead, Hiss’s lawyers summoned me almost at once to a pre-trial examination in Baltimore. I had no further doubt that the Communist Party had decided on a frontal attack and that the purpose of the libel suit was to destroy me.

  Pre-trial examination is cross-examination under oath of witnesses in a legal action by the opposing lawyers. Its purpose is at least twofold. It clears out of the way masses of testimony that would otherwise clutter the trial which it prefaces. It also gives the opposing lawyers an opportunity to probe into the past of witnesses—a so-called “fishing expedition.”

  My pre-trial examination took place in the library of the Marbury firm in the Maryland Trust Building. The library was a large room, with windows at the far end and part way down the two long sides. In the middle was a conference table. I took my place at one end of this table. At my right sat Macmillan, and, next to him, Cleveland. Facing me at the opposite end of the table, sat William Marbury. At his right, sat another member of the Marbury firm. Next to him, sat a figure new to me in the Case—Edward McLean, a member of a Wall Street law firm and part of Hiss’s New York defense battery.

  McLean was to be a member of Hiss’s counsel in both criminal trials. I had never
seen any of these men before.

  But there was another member of Hiss’s counsel at the pre-trial examination whom I had seen. Sitting beside McLean, on these first days, but later sitting apart from the others on the opposite side of the table, was a short, dark man who seemed oddly different in kind from the rest of Hiss’s team. He was Harold Rosenwald, the little man with the lingering, sullen glance whose whispered conversation with Hiss’s counsel had caused a brief interruption in the August 25th hearing.

  As the Committee had challenged him then, William Macmillan now asked in surprise who he was. Mr. Rosenwald was assisting counsel, said McLean. “A very good lawyer, too,” he added with one of his Mona Lisa smiles. McLean’s face to the world was invariably one of a fastidious urbanity, counterfeiting an affability that dissembled a sneer. Most good lawyers are of necessity part-time actors. How far, in McLean’s case, the mask and the man were one, I did not learn.

  I went into my first day of pre-trial examination, wondering if William Marbury might be a Communist. Richard Cleveland had called the suggestion preposterous. I felt, of course, that it was no more preposterous than the fact that Alger Hiss, Noel Field, Grace Hutchins or a score of others of the same general breed were Communists. Marbury conducted my questioning. After an hour or two, I was convinced that Marbury was not a Communist and I never had reason to change my mind.

  But I used to wonder, as my testimony unfolded, and particularly after the documents and the memos in Hiss’s handwriting had been introduced, how a man of Marbury’s acute mind and long legal experience could possibly continue to believe sincerely in Hiss’s innocence. Of course, he did not have to believe in it. From the first, Marbury knew that my charges could not be true because he himself was not a Communist and Communists simply could not occur in the social and professional worlds that were his own. Hiss could not be guilty because he was Marbury’s friend and belonged to both those worlds. Similarly, no charges against me could be too fantastic to explain my motives and conduct.

  Throughout the Case, therefore, Marbury’s mind was closed to certain possibilities, and a part of its natural acuteness blunted—a condition that would seem to be almost as dangerous to a lawyer as to a general in the field. It led Marbury to a fatal step. It led him to ask me to turn over to him any letters or other communications from Alger Hiss that I might have in my possession—the question that was in effect Hiss’s undoing, and which need never have been asked, and scarcely would have been asked if Marbury had believed that I had anything to produce.

  Like any man’s impression of another, particularly one whom he has seen so briefly in circumstances so unfavorable, mine may be unfair to Marbury. But, in the main, I do not believe that it is far out. I began to form it from the start. For, as his first act of the pre-trial examination, Marbury jumped up from his place at the other end of the room. Tripping the whole length of the table, he held under my nose, in a shaking hand, a copy of the statement that I had made to the press when Hiss filed his suit. Had I, he demanded, made that statement? A brief snort, I believe, was his principal comment on my answer that I had. He seemed choking with a self-righteousness that subsided only intermittently in the course of the pre-trial examination until that sobering moment when I laid upon his table the copies of the sixty-five pages of copied documents which Alger Hiss had purloined from the State Department.

  XVII

  In part, Marbury said at once with the only touch of gayety that I recall that the pre-trial examination was to be a fishing expedition.68 Its purpose was to dip into my past.

  In response to Hiss’s libel action, my attorneys had formally pled truth. In other words, I pled that I had not libeled Hiss by calling him a Communist because he was, in fact, a Communist. Therefore, no special strategy was necessary on our part. Cleveland and Macmillan counseled me simply to answer all questions as directly and fully as possible. That was also my own initial feeling. Later, as I watched the Hiss attorneys cataloguing with gleeful malevolence facts about my life of which they had known little or nothing until I told them, facts which had nothing whatever to do with Alger Hiss and Communism, I was personally inclined to let the enemy do his own investigating. I could see no point in making matters easier for Hiss in contriving a rascally and misleading action against me. Nevertheless, I followed counsel who, from a legal standpoint, were right beyond question if only because the probing of a defendant’s life is of necessity a part of any libel action.

  Yet a confession made under legal duress, when a man knows that every word he utters will, if possible, be turned against him, is a special kind of ordeal. Perhaps it was less an ordeal for me than for Cleveland and Macmillan who hour after hour had to sit silent while questions and answers droned on. I, at least, could speak. In part, I was spared in somewhat the same way that I had been spared on Meet the Press-I did not know, I could scarcely have guessed, the intent behind many of the questions, or the dark thoughts that were hiving in the minds of the men who were my legal enemies.

  I could not avoid knowing that I was being treated, with a blistering condescension, as a kind of human filth. From the moment the examination began, I was aware of a tone of carefully modulated evil playing over me, without ever quite divulging itself. It reminded me of something creepy which at first I could not quite bring to mind. It always just eluded me. Then, one day, it came back. It was the three boys in the schoolyard of my childhood, who had wet on a lollypop and then offered it to a fourth boy. Only, now, the lollypop was being offered to me.

  It was offered in many forms. I think that I was first most deeply aware of it in the questioning about my brother. No one who had lived through such an experience as my brother’s slow destruction could have the memory pawed by hateful minds without a wince of pain and horror. What possible bearing could my brother’s suicide have on the Hiss Case? Nor could I fathom the gratuitous relish with which Marbury, obviously a man of intelligence and some sensitivity, insisted on referring to my brother by his nickname, Dickie, instead of by his full name. How could I have understood? It was late in the Hiss Case before any friend summoned the courage to tell me the slander in which the Hiss partisans had involved me with my brother—a story so inconceivable that it seemed to me that only a mind deformed by something more than malevolence could have excreted it. I said only to the woman who told me: “What kind of beasts am I dealing with?” The fact that men and women could be found to credit and spread a lie so disgusting and so cruel remains the measure of the Hiss defense and the pro-Hiss psychosis.

  There was one moment, however, in the pre-trial examination, which perhaps it is best to characterize simply as “amusing.” I had been testifying to the facts about the first Soviet apparatus, describing in detail the house on Gay Street and the courier system on the German ships, the microfilm messages and the mirrors. Harold Rosenwald had taken to sitting by himself, apart from the rest of the Hiss counsel, on the same side of the table with my lawyers. As I developed the details of that interesting Communist underground, Marbury treated them with his usual airy incredulity. Not so Harold Rosenwald. While I spoke, I became aware that he had leaned slightly forward, and was staring at me with his eyes bugged in what seemed to me a stare of pure hatred. He seemed quite unconscious of what he was doing. But it was so conspicuous that at last William Macmillan leaned forward to intercept Rosenwald’s gaze. “I was trying,” Macmillan said to me later, “to save you from the evil eye.”

  Then, one afternoon, Marbury asked me his precipitating question: did I have in my possession any letters or other communications from Alger Hiss? If so, would I turn them over to him? His smile meant that the question was merely routine. And so it was, the perfectly proper routine question that any other attorney in Marbury’s place might have put.

  A recess occurred in the pre-trial examination at that point; perhaps only a week-end, perhaps several days. In any case, when the examination was resumed and Marbury reminded me of his request, I said that I had not looked yet. If there had been
the slightest anxiety at the bottom of Marbury’s mind, my delay, no doubt, removed it. He repeated his demand.

  I had not gone to look for Hiss’s memos for two simple reasons. I did not believe that they were of much importance, and I was overcome with a deep inhibiting lethargy. I had realized from the tone and the maneuvers of the pre-trial examination how successfully the Hiss forces had turned the tables with the libel suit. The issue had ceased almost completely to be whether Alger Hiss had been a Communist. The whole strategy of the Hiss defense consisted in making Chambers a defendant in a trial of his past, real or imaginary, which was already being conducted as a public trial in the press and on the radio.

  It was at that moment that there occurred the incident which I have described in the Foreword to this book, and which I called “the death of the will.” I saw that I might well lose the libel suit, though it was not in my nature to lose it without a fight. Nor did the thought of the loss of the libel suit ever appall me, as it did some of my friends. For I believed, with a faith beyond mere intellection, that ultimately the truth cannot be destroyed, and that the loss of the libel suit would, in fact, rally to my support people and a power of opinion that was then merely passive or quiescent, waiting to see the outcome of the suit, satisfied, as people are, naturally enough, to let somebody else make the fight.

  The root of my lethargy, what filled me with despair, was the apparent hopelessness of making anything understandable to a nation that could so easily be misled into supposing that a struggle that involved its life and death was merely a grudge fight or a scandal involving two men. Of course, the nation did not feel that way to any such degree as I then supposed. But I was sundered from the nation. In those days, I felt incredibly alone. Richard Nixon was busy with his own affairs. Richard Cleveland was almost the only friend to whom I could talk, and, like me, but in a legal sense, much more than I, he lived within the shadow of the Case as a libel suit.