Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I had felt that Richard Nixon was one of the few friends who really understood what was going on. I put up the receiver slowly. As I did so, I saw Medina’s eyes rest on me with a scrutinizing glance. He had learned from Nixon about the film. I knew what unpleasant thoughts must be hovering behind his eyes.

  I walked out of the broadloom and heavy oak hush of his office into the teeming Wall Street crowds. “God is against me,” I thought.

  XLV

  “God is against me.”

  I knew that the film had not been manufactured in 1945. I knew that it had been manufactured some time prior to April, 1938. How could I dispute the opinion of an expert? If the expert said that the film had been manufactured in 1945, that was what the world would believe.

  That was what the world wanted to believe, anyway. For, in fact, the world’s instinctive feeling was against the little fat man who had stood up to testify for it, unasked. The world’s instinctive sympathy was for the engaging man who meant to destroy it, was for Alger Hiss. He, and not I, personified the real values of a world that could not save itself; and it was he, and not I, that that world felt that it understood. “God is against me.”

  I toted my frozen core about the streets of the financial district. I was not going anywhere. Kierkegaard had, of course, been right: “Between man’s purposes in time and God’s purpose in eternity, there is an infinite qualitative difference.” I had sought to bow to God’s purpose with me to the point of my own destruction. By my acts in the world of time, I had succeeded only in transgressing God’s purpose. By informing against the conspirators, I had misunderstood God’s purpose, and God was making that clear to me in the one way that reduced my error to the limit of absurdity. He was doing so by a simple mistake on the part of the one authority that the modem mind held infallible—science. It was an irony too great for me. I felt it to be neither cruel nor unmerciful. For the quality of God’s mercy in that juncture must be sensed as a function of His purposes, and, like them, could not be measured by the human mind. I knew absolute defeat.

  But an irony so tremendous staggers the mind. It rocks it and will not let it rest. It clamored for an alternative reading. Suppose that I had not misunderstood God’s purpose, but that God’s purpose itself had changed. Suppose that it had been God’s purpose to save this nation. Suppose that He had intended all that had happened until this time to be its trial and its test. Suppose, then, that He had seen in the general failure to understand what had happened a final failure of the will to live, a failure of the power of this dying world to survive, a failure of more than intelligence, a failure of the force of life itself. Suppose He meant at last to plough it in as a man might plough in a smutted crop. For there was that intuition that no life can be saved which has lost the vital power to save itself.

  If that were so, and neither I nor anybody else could know whether it was or not, then I was merely a rejected instrument, lesser, but not less abject in my rejection, than Jonah before Nineveh:

  The waters compassed me about even to the soul; the deep hath closed round about; the sea hath covered my head.

  I went down to the lowest parts of the mountains; the bars of the earth have shut me up for ever....

  So I thought, walking in the Wall Street maze, a man who had nowhere to go in heaven or on earth, sometimes stepping off the narrow sidewalks, more by instinct than by sight, to avoid colliding with the busy people.

  XLVI

  For some reason, I had promised to call Medina back later in the afternoon. “Say,” he said, “Nixon called again and wanted me to tell you that that was all a mistake. The expert was mistaken. They manufactured that kind of film in the 1930’s and then discontinued it. In 1945, they began to make it again.”

  The relief I felt was wholly about the point of fact. I was relieved that the error had been corrected, that there need not be the ugliness of so disastrous a mistake. But my mood did not change. An error so burlesque, a comedy so gross in the midst of such catastrophe was a degradation of the spirit. It continued to shake the soul. All the suffering of which I had been the cause and witness, all the distortion and abuse of which I was the object and whose more pertinent meaning was a universal inability to distinguish true from false, right from wrong, because the false was cast in the image of the world’s desire, and the true was nothing that the world could fathom, or wanted to—all that pointless pain continued to roll me under in a drowning wave.

  I walked to the west side of the City, to the district around Cortlandt and Vesey Streets, where in spring rose bushes and shrubs and trays of hardware are set out to snare commuters from New Jersey. I went into a seed store and looked for a while at the seeds. Then I strolled among the sprays and insecticides. I did not find what I was looking for. I was looking for that poison one of whose ingredients is a cyanide compound. At last I asked a clerk if they stocked it. From some hiding place, he brought me the big round, tan-colored tin. I paid for it and went out.

  I went to another seed house. Again the poison was not displayed. I had to ask for it. “Is there any danger in using it?” I asked. “Be very careful,” said the clerk, “if you breathe enough of it, it will kill you.” I thanked him.

  I took my two wrapped tins to the Pennsylvania Station and put them in a lock box. Then I got ready to meet the Committee.

  XLVII

  The Committee was in the preposterous position of having the microfilm in its possession, but of not knowing what it was all about. The Justice Department had acted so swiftly in whisking me off under subpoena to the Grand Jury in New York that the Committee in Washington had had no chance to question me about the film. Moreover, the Committee was in a high state of disorganization at the moment. Some members had gone home to mend fences in an election year. Richard Nixon had just started on a Caribbean cruise. Warning wires from Bert Andrews and Robert Stripling caught up with his ship. By Coast Guard cutter and plane, Nixon raced back to Washington.

  Now the Committee with Nixon in command was determined to question me. The Justice Department was quite as determined that the Committee should not question me.81 Moreover, the Justice Department wanted custody of the film, or at least the right to examine it. The Committee was determined to hold onto it at least until it could talk to me. It feared that, if the film got out of its hands, the Hiss Case would suffer another partial or total eclipse.

  Battle was joined in the train shed of the Pennsylvania Station in New York. When the congressmen and their staff debouched from their coaches, representatives of the Justice Department were waiting for them. A strident scene followed on the platform. It was adjourned to a hotel room. It grew so shrilly invective at last, the air was so blue with shouts of meddling and bad faith, that at last Robert Stripling threw open a window. “We might as well let them hear all about it on Fifth Avenue,” he said.

  Some kind of compromise was eventually worked out whereby the Committee permitted the Justice Department to have photostatic enlargements of some of the microfilm and the Justice Department agreed to let the Committee interview me.

  All this had been taking place while I was shopping in the seed stores. I must narrowly have missed the warring factions when I left my parcels in the lock box in Pennsylvania Station. I had no idea of the factional cross fire I was caught in. Yet, as I neared the Commodore Hotel that night, some sixth sense suddenly told me that I was under surveillance. I was brooding upon that discovery, heading for the main entrance of the hotel, when I was suddenly whisked into a taxi, and Appell at last brought me by a long detour, for the second time, to the ramp entrance of the Commodore. “Don’t let them see you,” said Appell as we stood together for a moment on the balcony, “but look down there.” The hotel lobby was seething with newsmen.

  I was hustled into an upper room, where I found Congressmen Nixon and McDowell, Robert Stripling and others. There for several hours, I testified in executive session as to the nature and history of the microfilm in the Committee’s custody.

  It was
a rather ghostly session. The Committee was convinced that the Justice Department had it surrounded, that the hotel room was wired or that the session could be overheard by wireless devices. Conversation would begin in a low cautious key, then rise naturally to an ordinary tone, then, at a monitory glance or nod, drop down again. Certain comments were not spoken at all. They were scribbled on a scrap of paper and passed around the room. None of them was important or had any direct bearing on the testimony. The only one I remember was the first, which warned that the room was wired. They were chiefly manifestations of the incredible atmosphere in which one agency of the Government believed itself to be under siege by another, and members of the Committee’s staff stood guard at the doors to challenge intruders and keep off the press. In this extraordinary form the deep conflict that had always beset the Hiss Case was made manifest.

  This was my first lengthy testimony to the Committee about the espionage angles of the Case. The hearing lasted for several hours, but my testimony was necessarily far from complete. I left the session late at night with the tired knowledge that I had to be at the Federal Building early the next morning. I took my two tins out of the lock box and carried them to my mother’s house on Long Island. I placed them in my bureau drawer under some shirts. I did not unwrap them, for I did not want my mother to see what was in them, and I knew that, if she found them wrapped, she would assume that they were Christmas presents. The scene that I had witnessed that night merely made me happier to have them.

  XLVII

  Even before the mistake about the microfilm, I had suffered a spiritual exhaustion (abetted, no doubt, by simple physical exhaustion, natural enough in the experience through which I was passing). With it came an acute sense of what I understand older Quakers to mean by “dryness,” a drought of the soul, a sense of estrangement and of being discarded. I had felt this almost from the time that I had disclosed the copied State Department documents. With that act, and the events that resulted from it, it seemed to me as if the plane upon which I had begun my witness had been lost and that we were now on another plane, crisscrossed and violated by the tracks of worldly interests and their passions with which I had nothing to do, but in which I was caught. When I sought prayerful guidance, there was none. There was nothing. I was not only alone among men. I was alone in an absolute sense.

  I could not separate the acts that I had felt that I must perform from my repugnance at having to perform them. What I had done I had done from a necessity that I could not evade, and I had done it most reluctantly. Yet I could not free my mind from an organic revulsion that I should have had to denounce those men and women, none of whom, as human beings, I would ever have raised a hand to injure. I sought only to end their power to injure others. Now my self-revulsion was whipped to torment under the mounting sense of the futility of everything that I had done. Everything cited that futility: the inability of the nation to understand the Case, the official animus against me, the struggle between the Justice Department and the Committee. It all spelled futility and added to my sense of total defeat, my sense that I had misunderstood my purpose with consequent disaster for all. I had, for a time, reached the limit of my strength.

  I could not undo what I had done, nor did I wish to. But there was one act that I could perform which would still spare the others.

  I could spare the others by removing myself as the only living witness against them. As men and women, they would then be free of my charges. But my witness against the conspiracy would remain. It would remain in the form of the documents and microfilm. Let men make the most of it after what instincts of survival were left them.

  One night I went to my room. My mother had already retired. I wrote a number of letters. The first was to my wife. “I could not get back to you,” it began. I wrote to each of my children. I urged them never to leave the Quaker meeting and never to leave the land. On that land, which I had loved and worked, my spirit must unfailingly be about them. I wrote to my mother, asking her forgiveness. I wrote to my friends, Joseph and Patricia Roesch, reminding them of their promise, given before the Hiss Case began, that, if ever anything should happen to me, they would act as guardians to my children. I begged them to take care of my wife.

  Then I wrote a letter addressed simply: To All. In it I said that, of course, my testimony against Alger Hiss was the truth (time would certainly bear me out), but that the world was not ready for my testimony. I wrote that, in testifying, my purpose had always been to disclose the conspiracy, never to injure any individual man or woman. That I had been unable to do. But I could spare them the ultimate consequences of my actions and their own, by removing myself as a witness against them. My act was not suicide in the usual sense, for I had no desire to stop living. It was self-execution. I urged others to try to understand my testimony that they might be spared the day of disaster and a similar act.

  It had taken me several hours to write the letters. I unwrapped the tins of chemical. It was a substance that liberated a. lethal gas in the presence of moisture. The instructions for use were printed on the side of the cans in blocks of small black type. I had the same difficulty that I had had at the Commodore Hotel confrontation: I could not make out the type. The letters were blurred. But I thought that I understood the principles involved.

  I poured some of the chemical in the cover of each tin. But I was afraid that the fumes might be diffused in the air of the room. I thought to concentrate them by rigging a receptacle for my head. I moistened the chemical. The fumes began to rise.

  I prayed for my mother, my wife and my children. I felt that I had no right to pray for myself and did not do so. On my bureau, there was a small picture of each of my children. I took one picture in each hand to have them with me through the night. Then I lay down with my head inside the receptacle, which I closed with another damp towel draped across the front.

  The fumes were somewhat sickening, but, perhaps because of them, and because I was very tired, I fell asleep almost at once. Some time during the night, I half-awoke, as if I had been stabbed in the chest and my body had jack-knifed against the pain. I suspect that at that moment the fumes had begun to take effect, that my body had bucked against them, and that when it did so, the towel fell from the front of the receptacle; the fumes poured out and air moved in.

  XLIX

  I awoke abruptly and painfully in the early morning. My first thought was sheer horror to find that I was still alive; my second, disgust that I had failed. The room was full of the sickening smell and haze of the heavy fumes. The towel was gone from the front of the receptacle. I dragged myself out of bed and tried to stand. I was weak and sick. I vomited and retched ten or twelve times. I was still retching, holding to the bed when my mother, hearing the sound, knocked, and, when I did not answer, opened the door. Perhaps with the memory of her other son in mind, this possibility had tormented her since the Hiss Case began.

  “What is the matter? What has happened?” she asked. Because there was nothing else to do, I told her. “Oh, how could you, how could you?” she said. “The world hates a quitter. They would never forgive you.” Her reaction was admirable in a way that I could not fail to respect, and yet among the nauseating fumes and the retching it had a saving humor.

  I drank several cups of black coffee, somehow made my way to the train and eventually to the Federal Building. I was still weak, my head was splitting and now and again I thought that I was going to be sick. For hours, I sat alone, wondering how I could possibly testify that day. That day I was not called to testify.

  L

  The physical and chemical causes of my failure are simple. They involved a mistake in moistening the chemical. I do not care to go into the details. Had I been able to read the instructions, I should not have made the mistake.

  Once I had made such an attempt, it was never possible to make it again. I could scarcely think of it again, or see such a can of chemical, or smell similar fumes, without a shudder of organic horror. That act had been the utmost limit of
my powers with respect to those against whom I was testifying. My shudder of revulsion at my act also shook me free once for all from the conflict in my witness-the conflict between what I must do against the conspiracy and what that had forced me to do against the men and women involved. I never wavered again. I do not mean that I did not constantly feel self-loathing at having to testify against those I had known as friends or even as mere co-workers. Both my wife and I suffered that horror right through the first Hiss trial. By then, my own feeling had changed. I still had no desire to send Alger Hiss to jail. I never thought that that would serve any real purpose. The important point to me was to smash the conspiracy, not to jail Alger Hiss. But he and others had chosen the kind of war they meant to fight. They were implacable and I saw at last that there was no choice but to fight them just as implacably, though without their rancor, to the finish which their own impenitence made unavoidable.