Probably no act less extreme than mine that lonely night could have disciplined me for the public ordeal that I was to undergo in the two Hiss trials. For it disciplined me in a deeper sense. From it, I took away an indispensable certainty, the knowledge that all we ever have the right to pray to God for in the end is a strength equal to our necessity. I no longer felt absolutely alone. I no longer felt estranged. I felt a sense of gentlest solicitude playing around me, as if a father had pushed his son, for his own good, too far, as fathers will, as I have sometimes done with my own son, only to suffer at the first sign of his real weakness, self-reproach, taking form in a special tenderness.
Still, no one who has been through such an experience can be expected to be quite the same man again. He is both freer and stronger, because he is, ever after, less implicated in the world. For he has been, in his own mind at least, almost to the end of everything, and knows its worth.
LI
A few days later, the Grand Jury had summoned me in and put to me the question that it had perhaps been discussing from the first: why had I said no when I was asked if I had direct knowledge of espionage?
I had almost the same experience that I had had during the August 25th hearing, when Nixon had put his question about my motives in accusing Alger Hiss of Communism. I paused for a moment. Then the words came effortlessly and I listened to them as if someone else were speaking. I said: “There are in general two kinds of men. One kind of man believes that God is a God of Justice. The other kind of man believes that God is a God of Mercy. I am so constituted that in any question I will always range myself upon the side of mercy.” I said much more about my understanding of the difference of purpose of God and man in time and in eternity, but it is those words that I remembered so clearly that I had no difficulty in repeating them under questioning in the Hiss trials.
In that argument about God and man, spoken so strangely in that bare official room, under the presiding presence of the law, I never doubted that the jurors understood exactly what I was talking about.
LII
To the distress of this period belongs another dark, and, as it then seemed to me, completely gratuitous shadow, which dropped across us coldly ten days or so after the Grand Jury had expired, but which is an organic point of my memory of those days. My wife was to drive from the farm to meet me at the Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore. She was not there when I arrived. I telephoned the farm. No one answered. I waited an hour, and part of another hour. There was nothing to do but wait. The dread rose in me that something had happened to my wife.
When at last she appeared, she tried to smile and begged me to forgive her for coming late. Then, “dear heart,” she said, “something has happened. I had an accident” “Bad?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. I knew the answer before I asked the question: “You killed someone?” No, she said, but she had hit someone. A very old woman, who, it later turned out, was also deaf, had stepped from between two parked cars directly into the front of my wife’s car. My wife had been driving slowly. But the woman had been knocked down, though apparently she was not fatally hurt so that the police had let my wife proceed to meet me. The woman had been taken to a hospital.
I felt the same direct horror for the victim’s sake that my gentle wife was feeling, and a special horror that my wife now stood, like me, in jeopardy. I saw the children might at a stroke lose both their parents and their home. Then there was the backlash of this unhappy disaster on the Hiss Case.
The first human necessity was to see about the woman who had been hurt. I said: “We must go to the hospital at once.” My wife went in first while I telephoned Richard Cleveland to tell him what had happened and to ask his advice. As I finished talking to him, my wife rejoined me. The doctors had told her that they could not really say much yet, but they did not think that there was reason to worry.
I should have known better. I should have recognized the professional rubric. But the report lifted the weight from my mind, chiefly because it was too crushing to bear. Even so, the drive home was a dark one, with my wife, from time to time, convulsively shuddering, as the memory of the moment of the accident crossed her mind. And yet, as we drove up to the barn, and I saw a state trooper standing at the end of the lane, my first thought was that the Hiss forces had prepared some new mischief for us. That, coming on top of everything else, filled me with a rush of outrageous anger.
“That woman your wife hit,” said the state trooper to me, “she died.” My wife’s knees buckled and she began to slide against me to the ground. The trooper and I raised her. She beat her forehead with her hand. “Oh, God, why?” she said in the voice of a pleading child. “Why, God, why?”
“We don’t know,” said the trooper gently. “We don’t know why.”
We went into the house. The children stood tense, white-faced and silent, staring at their distracted mother. They already knew what had happened. The trooper telephoned his headquarters. “Both the parties are here,” he said, “and we’re starting back now.” He explained that he would drive us to the state police barracks in Pikesville, just northwest of Baltimore. There a municipal police car would pick us up and take us to Baltimore’s northwestern police station. I called Richard Cleveland and asked him to be there to post bond so that my wife would not have to spend the night in prison.
We got into the state trooper’s car and started back to Baltimore. My wife and I sat absolutely silent on the back seat. From time to time, the short-wave radio would come in with a harsh crackle and a metallic voice would utter instructions. There had been a holdup and a pursuit was in progress. While my wife and I, each with his own thoughts listened, we heard something like this: “Cars 28, 29, 30, proceed to number 9999 Fullerton Avenue. This is a tobacco store. There has been a holdup. Suspect is proceeding west on Fullerton Avenue in a green Chevrolet sedan. He is armed. Cars 28, 29, 30 proceed to number 9999....”
The radio would crackle and sputter as if space itself were crashing. The same metallic voice would repeat the orders; then add: “Here is a description of the suspect. Five feet four. Hair blonde. Eyes blue. Wearing gray fedora hat, gray suit, brown overcoat, belted. Five feet four. Hair blonde. Eyes blue....”
The ensuing silence of space would be suddenly broken by a single indecipherable sentence uttered in a perfectly casual voice: “Jack, the man you were to meet will not be there. Jack, the man you were to meet will not be there.” The night was filled invisibly with human anguish which the genius of the human mind made audible to our anguished ears. All the thirty miles to Pikesville, we listened at crackling intervals to the stages of the pursuit of the green Chevrolet sedan, until at last the suspect (“he is armed”) deserted it somewhere beyond Baltimore as the pursuit grew hot. In the last broadcast we heard, he was at bay in a group of farm buildings. The police were closing in.
The Pikesville headquarters was silent except for a ticking clock. We waited in a bare room for the Baltimore police to come for us. I could only press my wife’s hand which was cold with that bloodless coldness of someone who is suffering a heart attack.
The Baltimore policeman looked at us impersonally and seated us in the back of his car. I was shocked to learn that we were racing through the dark roads of suburban Baltimore, not to the northwestern police station but to the northern police station. Cleveland, therefore, would go to the wrong station.
Suddenly, we swung into the courtyard of the police station and drew up with other police cars. We walked into a room which seemed to me glaring with light. It was filled with police and unidentifiable people, whom I did not even clearly see. A magistrate was sitting at a high desk. The policeman led my wife up to it.
From the anonymous onlookers of the police court, Richard Cleveland and Mrs. Cleveland suddenly broke and hurried up to my wife. They stood on either side of her. A bondsman, who had already retired for the night, had got out of bed and come down to post bond for my wife. In a few seconds she was free.
Outside, photographers of the
Baltimore News-Post and Sun were lying in wait. Before the News-Post cameraman could snap his picture, Mrs. Cleveland threw her coat over my wife’s head. Cleveland, white with rage, charged the Sun’s photographer exactly as a bull goes after a dog.82 We drove my wife to the Clevelands’ to spend the night (she had to appear in court the next morning). Cleveland drove me back to Westminster so that the children would not be alone.
My wife was quickly exonerated of any responsibility for the accident. We were fully covered by $15 or $20 thousand worth of liability insurance. But a Baltimore lawyer filed suit against my wife and me for $50 thousand damages in the name of the unfortunate woman’s relatives. Our insurance company would not settle for more than the four or five thousand. The Baltimore lawyer prepared to go through with his suit. The possibility of this harassing court action was always over us until, a day or two after the first Hiss trial, the claim was settled.
To my wife and me, this tragic episode seemed proof that there was no depth of the abyss that we were not to sound.
LIII
In those days, came the first of a series of letters that I was to receive throughout the Hiss Case. They came almost weekly and, in the depths of the Case, sometimes twice a week. After Hiss’s conviction, they came at longer intervals and at last stopped.
They were never signed. They were written in an angular hand and contained just three words: “The ninety-first Psalm.”
LIV
Sitting alone in the witness waiting room, I did not know how the Government proposed to proceed against me, and I never then, or at any subsequent time, made the slightest effort to find out. I went through both Hiss trials without knowing. Like everybody else, I first learned from the press, some time after Alger Hiss’s conviction, that the Justice Department had no plans to take action against me. That is all that I ever learned. Until then, I had heard, without brooding on them (for I needed all my strength to do what I had to do), reports to the exactly opposite effect.
But, in the Grand Jury days, whatever the Government’s feelings about me, it was hampered by a diffcult legal situation, in the face of mounting evidence against Hiss. If it insisted on indicting me, it could not indict Alger Hiss, for one of the two indispensable witnesses against him83 would then be destroyed. Justice, in the most technical meaning of the word, might be satisfied by my indictment. But common sense, the problems of the country’s security, and perhaps something more, must be somewhat defeated by action against a man (myself) who, despite an acknowledged offense in seeking to shield those whom he pitied, had at last done everything in his power to disclose the Communist conspiracy; had begun to do so nine years in the past. Action against me must, in fact, raise the whole invidious question of why my original information, repeated to a President by other warning voices, had never been acted upon.
I did not then know how thoroughly and tirelessly the F.B.I. had been checking my testimony and other information or what progress it had made. I did not know that the weight of verifiable evidence, and the corroborative testimony and statements of witnesses, like Julian Wadleigh,84 Franklin Victor Reno and “Keith,” was becoming so overwhelming as to convince important figures in the Justice Department that Hiss was guilty and to leave them almost no choice but to seek his indictment.
I did not know then, either, that, at the end of the week of December 7th, with only a few days of its term left to go, the Grand Jury reported that it could not find an indictment against Hiss. The Grand Jury had examined the copied State Department documents and had heard the witnesses. But Hiss still coolly denied that he had ever given me any confidential documents or that he had any knowledge of how they were typed or that he had ever seen me after 1937. His Woodstock typewriter (on which the documents had been copied) was missing.85 †The jury knew that the documents had been
The old Woodstock had been given to Priscilla Hiss by her father, Thomas Fansler, who had been an insurance broker in Philadelphia. Working under high pressure on that critical week-end, the F.B.I. in Philadelphia uncovered specimens of typing made on the Woodstock when it was in Mr. Fansler’s possession, and, from elsewhere, a letter typed on the same machine by Priscilla Hiss while it was in the Hisses’ possession. The type face on the newly discovered documents and the type face on the copied State Department documents was identical. Evidence could scarcely be more conclusive. It was a stroke in the great tradition of the F.B.I.
The commotion of these activities reached me in my waiting room only as the touch of tensions whose nature I could not trace or define.
Then, on the afternoon of December 14th, two special agents of the F.B.I. dropped in for a minute to see me. For the first time, they spoke in a vaguely different way. “Things seem to be clearing up in there, don’t they?” said one of them, nodding toward the Grand Jury. I did not have the slightest idea of what he was talking about.
LV
All through the morning of December 15th, the heavy door of the Grand Jury room kept opening and closing. There was a constant coming and going in the corridor. It was the last day of that Grand Jury’s term. Someone told me that Alex Campbell, the chief of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, was in the Grand Jury room. I had heard that Alex Campbell had taken his post just prior to the November election. When everyone had expected a Democratic defeat, and few others wanted to take the job, he had had faith in the President. With the red herring in mind, I thought only that the presence of Campbell before the Grand Jury boded little good for me.
The very reverse was true. The evidence had convinced Alex Campbell that Alger Hiss was guilty. He had spoken to Hiss in the presence of his counsel, Edward McLean. “Mr. Hiss,” he said, “I am convinced that you committed espionage. You have seen Chambers and the others go in and talk. If you do so, too, it will be better for you.”
“What you have to say, Mr. Campbell,” said Hiss, “is not of the slightest interest to me.”
“I am also convinced,” said Alex Campbell quietly, “that you committed perjury.”
Hiss was called into the Grand Jury room. Tom Donegan and Raymond P. Whearty, the special assistants to the Attorney General, were presenting the Government’s data. “Mr. Hiss,” said Donegan, “you have probably been asked this question before, but I’d like to ask the question again. At any time, did you, or Mrs. Hiss in your presence, turn any documents of the State Department, or of any other Government organization, over to Whittaker Chambers?”
“Never,” said Hiss, “excepting, I assume, the title certificate to the Ford.”
A juror asked a question. “To nobody else did you ever turn over documents? To any other person?”
“And to no other unauthorized person,” said Hiss.
“Mr. Hiss,” said Donegan, “Mr. Chambers has testified that he obtained typewritten copies of official State Department documents from you.”
“I know that,” said Hiss.
He was asked: “Did you ever see Mr. Chambers after you went into the State Department?”
HISS: I do not believe that I did. I cannot swear that I did not see him some time, say, in the fall of 1936....”
MR. DONECAN: Can you say definitely that you did not see him after January, 1937?
HISS: Yes, I think that I can definitely say that.
By his answers, Hiss had perjured himself on two counts.
Then Hiss was shown the specimens of typewriting from the files of Mrs. Hiss’s father and the letter typewritten by Mrs. Hiss. It was pointed out to him that the documents had been written on his Woodstock typewriter. He was asked if he could explain how it happened that the fifty pages of copied State Department documents also came to be written on the same machine.
“I am amazed,” Hiss answered coolly, “and until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.”
With a terrible sound the hundred days ended, as grand jurors laughed.
LVI
Tom Donegan brought a stranger into the waiting room.
“Mr. Alex Campbell,” he said briefly. Campbell looked past me and shook hands. Then he went out. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason why you should stay around here,” said Donegan. “Just go to the F.B.I. on the sixth floor at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.” The sixth floor was the criminal division of the F.B.I.
I telephoned William McNulty, my attorney. “I believe I’ve just been indicted,” I said. “Will you be on hand with a bondsman at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning? I’ll need your help in going through this business.”
I dreaded the details, the mugging and fingerprinting, the press, the photographers. I knew that, in the struggle that must now presumably fill the rest of my life, an indictment set me far back, that all the ground lost by it would have to be regained before I could regain even the weak point in the Case where I had stood before. But one thing I did not believe. I did not believe that the truth could be permanently defeated. I believed that, in prison, a man like me would be far more dangerous to those powers that sought to preserve the conspiracy than he was when free. For there is in men a craving for justice that ultimately cannot endure wrong. In prison, I would be the rallying symbol for all those who sensed that justice had been outraged, and I had no doubt that there would be thousands of them. My task was patiently and firmly to endure.
When I opened the door, I could hear that my mother was playing the radio in her bedroom. I called to her so that, if she heard me moving about, she would not be frightened. The radio snapped off. I heard her running across the room. “Oh, I’m so thankful,” I heard her say, “so thankful.”
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