Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

Before I had finished milking that night, the chief investigator of the House Committee on Un-American Activities suddenly appeared in the cow barn. As we walked down to the house together, Stripling glanced across the yard. “Nice pumpkins you’ve got there,” he said. A volunteer pumpkin had come up in the strawberry patch. We had let it remain, for my wife and I had always thought that the leaves, flowers and fruit of the calabashes and melons are among the most decorative growths in nature. Now the vine had taken over the strawberry bed. It was covered with pumpkins, which, because of a late start, were still green.

  XXX

  In the living room, Stripling took out of his pocket a crumpled scrap of newspaper and handed it to me. It was the Washington Post column of which until then I was not aware. “Does that mean anything to you?” he asked. I said that I was not free to discuss anything at all about the libel suit. “I hear that there has been a bombshell in the suit,” said Stripling. “What kind of a bombshell ?” I repeated that I could not discuss the suit.

  Stripling gazed at me silently for a few seconds out of those impervious blue eyes. The conversation, as nearly as I can remember it went like this: “Is your position,” Stripling asked, “that you would not be free to discuss this bombshell even if there had been one?” I said yes. “In other words,” he said, “you are not free to say whether or not you have introduced any new evidence in the libel suit, is that right?” I said yes. He asked: “Is there any evidence that you still have that you have not yet presented in the libel suit?” I shook my head.

  Stripling has been in the business of reading men’s faces for many years. He never took his eyes off mine while he questioned me. He left shortly after.

  XXXI

  The next day I was scheduled to testify as a witness in a loyalty case at the State Department. The hearing was scheduled for the afternoon. I had decided to drive to Washington and planned to leave early in order to give myself plenty of time.

  My overcoat was on when it occurred to me that, since I was going to be away from the farm, perhaps I should find a better hiding place than my bedroom for the microfilm. Rumors that Hiss investigators were prowling around the farm had reached us again. I believed that there was no length to which these people would not go, especially since my disclosure of the documents must have made the Hiss forces desperate. I thought that the investigators might well force my wife to let them ransack the house.75 The problem was to hide the film so that experts could not find it. Hurriedly, I tried to think of any classic examples of concealment. All that I could remember was an old Soviet moving picture, Transport Agon (Transport of Fire), a picture that was little noticed, but parts of which seemed to me among the best that the Soviet cinema had done. In that picture, underground Communists had transported arms and ammunition inside a number of big papier maché human figures. There had been one close up of the Chinese god of Fate, a seated, pumpkin-shaped idol whose hands waved, and whose head nodded, up and down, up and down, in a motion of perpetual and blandly smiling incertitude.

  While I was wondering what clue that recollection offered in the way of a hiding place, the telephone rang. It was Robert Stripling, calling from Washington. I had told him the night before that I was to testify before the State Department Loyalty Board. Stripling asked if I would drop in at his office while I was in Washington. The problem of hiding the film was at the back of my mind while I talked with him. As I hung up, two filaments of thought spun into a single thread: the pumpkin-shaped god of Fate with the firearms hidden inside, and Stripling’s remark about pumpkins the night before. A hollow pumpkin was the perfect hiding place for the microfilm. Investigators might tear the house apart. They would never think to look for anything in a pumpkin lying in a pumpkin patch.

  My wife was in the barn. I broke off a pumpkin, took it into the kitchen, cut out the top, scooped out the seeds. I wrapped the developed film in waxed paper to prevent damage by juices from the pumpkin. Then I laid the developed film and the cylinders of undeveloped film inside the hollowed pumpkin and replaced the top. It was all but impossible to see that the top had been plugged. I took the pumpkin out and laid it where I had found it at the farther edge of the patch. There was no geometric pattern of pumpkins, as Lloyd Paul Stryker worked hard to prove at the first Hiss trial, to guide me back to the hollow one. Stryker could not grasp that the whole art of the concealment lay in its complete naturalness and its complete unexpectedness. This was, in fact, a critical point of the Hiss Case in which I fought Communism precisely with those arts which Communism had taught me, and no other experience could.

  I did not tell my wife what I had done. For Communism had also taught me, as a basic rule of conspiracy, that what someone does not know, he cannot tell, even under pressure. I drove to Washington with an easy mind, feeling certain that inside the pumpkin the film was perfectly secure.

  XXXII

  I reached Washington early enough to stop first at the Old House Office Building. When I walked into Stripling’s office, he did not rise from his desk. In the hand, which he extended for me to shake, he held a paper. It was a subpoena duces tecum, summoning me to turn over to the House Committee on Un-American Activities any evidence whatever that I might possess which related in any way to the Hiss Case.

  Stripling said that he would drive back to Westminster with me that evening to pick up whatever evidence I might have. He did not, so far as I remember, ask me what I might have or where it was. He did not need to. He had read my eyes correctly the night before.

  XXXIII

  I did not return to Stripling’s office until about five o’clock. He had decided not to make the long drive to Westminster. Instead, Donald Appell, who had sat beside me at my first public hearing, and William Wheeler, another Committee investigator, went with me. They drove their own car.

  We reached the farm about ten o’clock. I first went into the kitchen to reassure my wife. The investigators followed me in. They were a little puzzled when I turned on the yard lights and immediately went out again. Both followed me back into the yard. I had to grope a moment before I found the right pumpkin. I tossed away the top. With the hollowed pumpkin in one hand, and the microfilm in the other, I walked up to Appell, who had moved closer to try to make out what I was doing in the shadows. I handed him the developed film and the cylinders. “I think this is what you are looking for,” I said.

  XXXIV

  Before I was out of bed the next morning, a news photographer was trying to decide which pumpkin to take a picture of. As soon as he had gone, I smashed to pieces the hollow pumpkin, which for a few hours had contained the microfilm, so that there could be no sensational pictures in the press. The photographer had arrived because, in Washington, the Committee had at once released the pumpkin story to newsmen.

  The Committee also had the undeveloped microfilm developed. The uncapped cylinder proved worthless. But even after lying undeveloped for almost ten years, much of the film in the other containers was legible. The enlargements made a pile almost four feet high.

  The guffaw that went up about the pumpkin was nationwide. The pumpkin was a handy caricature with which the pro-Hiss forces could deride all my charges. But in the shrillest derision, it seemed to me that I could detect an undertone of rage. For the point about the pumpkin was not that it was absurd, but that it worked; and, together with that shocking pile of enlargements, the pumpkin meant just one thing. It meant that the Hiss Case had been broken open beyond the power of any self-interested group ever to lock it shut again.

  XXXV

  The Justice Department swung into action at once. From Baltimore, Richard Cleveland telephoned me that the F.B.I. would like to meet me in his office from which they and I would then go to F.B.I. headquarters. There I would be questioned. In view of the fact that the F.B.I. had been in touch with me for years, though out of touch with me (with one trifling exception) from the moment I began to testify against Alger Hiss, I found the protocol of meeting in Cleveland’s office ominously formal.

&
nbsp; When I left for that meeting, my wife and I looked at each other in silence for a moment, like people between whom a river is widening. “I don’t know just when I will see you again,” I said. She tried to smile courage.

  About five o’clock, three agents walked into Cleveland’s office. One of them was Frank Johnstone, whom I had known before, and whom I have since come to regard as a friend. Another was Daniel Callahan whom I had met but whom I did not know well.76 The third was a special agent whom I had never seen before. His name has also passed out of my mind, for I never saw him again. I shall call him Special Agent Black. He scarcely greeted me, was extremely morose and even surly. He was apparently the ranking agent.

  For reasons that then mystified me (they became apparent later on), nobody made a move to leave Cleveland’s office. Nothing was said about questioning me. We simply sat, chatting. This was no hardship since William Macmillan, who was present, and Frank Johnstone are, each in his own way, masters of psychological relief. Macmillan knows a great many funny stories. Frank Johnstone’s humor plays over human foible with a gift for knifelike phrase. But it was a little like clowning on top of a time bomb. Only Special Agent Black did not speak or smile. Whenever I glanced at his face, I thought: This is it.” I was not particularly distressed. There is a point at which situations are accepted.

  We talked for an hour or two. The telephone rang. It was a Washington newsman. “Listen,” he said, “the scuttlebutt here is that the Department of Justice has ordered the F.B.I. to pick you up tonight.” I thanked him and asked him to inform my wife and tell her to keep absolutely calm. “I’ve already talked to her,” he said, “that’s how I knew where you were.” I went back and sat down again while the jokes and laughter continued.

  The phone rang again. Again it was for me. This time it was a man in the Government in Washington. The F.B.I. has orders to pick you up tonight,” he said. “We are sitting together now,” I said.

  Once, while we were driving together, I told this part of the story to my son in the hope that some memory of it might help him to act in some other situation in his own life. “When I walked back into Cleveland’s office,” I told him, “I wondered if I should tell the agents what I had just heard. Then I decided: no, they’re only carrying out orders. It could only embarrass all of us. So I said nothing.” “You did right, Papa,” said my son.

  It was dark before the three agents, after consulting their watches, left with me. We did not go directly to the Court Square Building (F.B.I. headquarters in Baltimore). Instead, we went to supper at a nearby cafeteria. It would scarcely be possible to imagine a more uneasy meal. Even Frank Johnstone seemed a little strained. Special Agent Black ate in surly silence. I had a definite impression that he had taken a strong personal dislike to me.

  We went up to headquarters—a gaggle of strange figures—through a deserted office building, in the night elevator (it must have been about eight o’clock). I was seated, facing an official desk. On one side of me sat Frank Johnstone; on the other side, someone else. Special Agent Black, clearly my inquisitor, seated himself opposite me behind the desk at which for a moment he stared. Then he looked up and, in a voice of the simplest human concern, spoke almost for the first time since I had met him. “Mr. Chambers,” he said, “believe me, this was nothing that the Bureau wanted to do.”

  For a moment my mind whirred like the works of an adding machine before it adds up the right total. Then I grasped that his surliness had never been at me. It was at the way things are, about which there are times when a good man can do nothing.

  The questioning began. It centered around the Baltimore documents, the microfilm and the Bykov apparatus. One thing I remember clearly-my sense that we had reached the moment when there could no longer be any question of shielding anyone. Everybody, big and little, greatly guilty or scarcely guilty at all, who was in any way implicated in the underground past, must now be named. There was nothing further that I could do for them. Alger Hiss and the Communist Party were their fate, which had been taken out of my hands. Yet, I felt myself gag inwardly as I mentioned each name.

  Suddenly, there was a stir. A United States marshal entered and handed me a subpoena to appear before the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York. No doubt, it was to allow time for the arrangements connected with the subpoena that we had stayed chatting in Cleveland’s office.

  The questioning was resumed. In half an hour or so, the marshal reappeared. He took back the original subpoena and handed me another. The first subpoena had summoned me to appear before the Grand Jury in three or four days. The second subpoena summoned me to appear at once. Someone must suddenly have realized that before I responded to the first subpoena, the Committee might have served me with a subpoena of its own and called me to a public hearing. The second subpoena outmaneuvered the Committee and prevented it from questioning me.

  The interrogation ended around midnight. I had parked my car near Pennsylvania Station. Callahan drove me uptown, parked his own car nearby and watched until he saw me head toward Westminster. I wondered why, as I was to wonder once or twice later on when he insisted on waiting in the station with me until I boarded a train for Washington or New York. It simply did not occur to me at the time that Callahan was seeing me safely off. It did not occur to me that the Bureau was concerned in any way for my safety. I knew that individual agents were friendly to me, and I felt friendly to them, but I thought of the Bureau itself simply as the investigatory arm of the Department of Justice. As such, I saw no reason to trust the Bureau. I assumed that, in the Hiss Case, it had no choice but to be my enemy. For a long time, I did not trust it. I came to trust it only very slowly.

  I missed completely the fact that with Special Agent Black’s opening words, a new moment had arrived in the Hiss Case. It was the moment at which we all like to laugh because it is so hackneyed and so obvious, and because it, nevertheless, has power to stir us. It is the great American moment called: The Marines Have Landed.

  The F.B.I. had at last entered the Hiss Case and the expert forces of that great fact-finding agency were now turned loose to procure the data from which justice would presently establish what was true and what was not true in the Case. The Bureau was not my enemy —and that not because of any personal affection it bore me, or any interest that it had in my fate as an individual, but because the F.B.I. stood for right and truth, because it was the enemy of Communism, and it had reasons for supposing (reasons presently confirmed in one of the most intensive, dogged and ablest investigations in its history) that, in the fight against the Communist conspiracy, I was on the side of truth.

  XXXVI

  The Saturday before I had to go before the Grand Jury, I had met Harold Medina, Jr. in Richard Cleveland’s office. He brought me word that I was wanted at Time for a conference the next morning. I went back to New York with him. It was not a very cheerful trip. Much of the time I was silent. As we were nearing the city, I said to Medina, “I think I must offer my resignation.” “Of course not,” he said. “In six weeks this whole thing will be forgotten and you will be back at work as usual.”

  On Sunday morning, we met in the office of Roy E. Larsen, the president of Time, Inc. Seven or eight top editors and executives were present. Most of the discussion was about the necessity of my issuing a statement in view of the new developments in the Hiss Case. I was to draft the statement that day. The others filed out. Larsen and I were left alone. Nothing whatever had been said about resignation.

  There are few kinder or more sensitive gentlemen than Roy Larsen. From the beginning of the Hiss Case, his position had been unusually difficult. He was a Harvard man. He knew and respected Alger Hiss. But he also knew and respected Whittaker Chambers.

  “Roy,” I said, “I think that I should resign.”

  “Perhaps you should,” he said. I believe that few answers have been harder for him to make.

  No other answer was possible. Time, Inc. is a business, and, like any other business, it exists for t
he purpose of making and marketing a product. As a result of my actions, past and present, Time, Inc. was taking a beating of which I did not then have any true idea. Worried stockholders and furious subscribers were deluging the company with angry pleas to get rid of me. There was no reason why Time, Inc. should be penalized because of me. No other honorable or practical course was possible except for me to resign. No other course was possible but for Time, Inc. to accept my resignation. That did not make it any easier on either side. A man in my situation must always hope that his friends will stand beside him in his need, even though he recognizes that it is impossible for them to do so and that it is right for them not to do so.

  Time, Inc. made upon me a settlement so generous that, with what I had accumulated over the years in its trust funds, I did not have to worry about money again during the Case.

  XXXVII

  I now wrote a brief public statement of resignation from Time. The disclosure of the espionage aspects of the Hiss Case, I said, made my resignation imperative. I thanked my colleagues for their loyalty to me. But “No one,” I added, “can share with me this indispensable ordeal.”

  It was an immense relief to be able at last to free Time, Inc. from involvement in my affairs. I should have done so sooner. But I feared the public effect of my resignation. I feared that the nation would look upon my resignation as a withdrawal of confidence in me by Time, evidence that those who knew me best had no faith in me. Few turns in the Hiss Case surprised me more than the nation’s reaction. Far from feeling that my resignation implied a lack of confidence, people seemed to feel that a man who would resign a $30,000 a year job to join a fight must have a case. I felt a sudden general surge of sympathy for me.