Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  “About what?” I asked. Her words seemed to make it more difficult to break the news I had for her.

  She was halfway down the stairs now and could see my face. “You mean,” she asked incredulously, “you don’t know that Alger Hiss has been indicted?”

  She threw her arms around me. I said something about Alger’s mother. “Oh, I do think of her,” said my mother. “Poor woman! Oh, poor woman!”

  14

  1949

  I

  The years changed. 1948 passed into 1949. Among the years, 1949 is to me the dead year, a dreariness differentiated chiefly by spasms of a public pang. It opened with a new Grand Jury sitting in New York. It ended while for the second time a trial of Alger Hiss was dragging toward its close. It was the year in which I endured the ordeal of preparation and public testimony in the Hiss trial that was for me the probation, which must set the seal of integrity upon all my earlier acts.

  In the first months of the new year, I continued my testimony before the new Grand Jury. I had already begun with the F.B.I. what amounted to a total recall of my life. It amassed all that I could remember about Communism and Communists in the United States and elsewhere. In report-form it made a fair-sized book.86

  Two special agents of the F.B.I., usually Tom Spencer and Frank Plant, worked with me on this project. We worked together for several months, from about ten o‘clock in the morning until five o’clock in the evening, sending out for our lunch of coffee and sandwiches, which we ate at our desk. Merely the effort of such a total recollection is wearing. The recollection itself is exhausting. The great intelligence, tact and understanding with which Spencer and Plant brought me through that difficult experience, more than anything else, first moved my respect for the methods of the F.B.I. and won my trust on the human level.

  Meanwhile, the immense investigation that preceded and accompanied the Hiss trials was going on. In time, there was probably no field office of the F.B.I. in the country that was not somehow engaged in that investigation. I could not fail to be impressed by the energy with which the organization as a whole, and the agents individually, threw themselves into their work. Wadleigh and Reno had early confirmed those parts of my story that concerned them. Other witnesses confirmed more. On the slim chance that my vague recollection of his real name might be right, the F.B.I. began to look for “Keith.” In a few hours they had found him. To the Grand Jury and the F.B.I., that highly important witness corroborated my testimony, adding some facts that I had forgotten or never known.

  On the chance that I might be able to locate the former residenceof the underground photographer, known only as “Felix,” two F.B.I. agents and I sloshed one night around the snowy streets of Baltimore. As I have written earlier, I had glimpsed the apartment house where Felix had lived only once, for a few minutes, ten years or more before. I reconstructed as well as I could where I had then sat in a parked automobile, and sighting a block of apartments, said to the agents: “Try there.” Within twelve hours, the F.B.I. had located Felix’ old apartment, had discovered that his full name was Felix Inslerman, and had found him near Schenectady, N. Y.

  There was a man with whom Hiss and someone else had attempted espionage dealings. I believed that the man was dead and said so. The F.B.I., checking back on my lead, found him alive. To the Grand Jury and the F.B.I., he confirmed my account of his dealings with Alger Hiss and others.

  There were no “breaks” in the Hiss Case such as are common in more routine cases. The Communist conspiracy was too effective. The events involved had happened too long before. Time had effaced or changed too much. The far-flung investigation was a matter of daily grind varied by flashes of great probative intelligence. It is not my intention to discuss the details even of that part of it which I could observe. Much of it was beyond my sight. I will merely note that I myself was an object of its most intensive probing. Everything that I had said or done, every scrap of information I gave, every charge or rumor against me had to be laboriously checked and rechecked. In time, I came to feel that the F.B.I. knew much more about me than I knew about myself.

  In time, too, the scores of agents 87 whom I was constantly dealing with began to take form for me as human beings. I began to know about their gripes and special interests, their families, their troubles and their hopes. It is in those human terms that I mean to speak of the F.B.I. and its agents. For it is in those terms, which few ever think of, rather than its organizational expertness, which everybody knows about, that my memory of the F.B.I. is most personal and most grateful. It reached its pitch in the days of my testimony in the two Hiss trials.

  In the morning before I went into court, at the lunch recess, in the evening, when I had finished testifying for the day and simply sat still for an hour or so to drain Lloyd Paul Stryker or Claude Cross out of my system, the agents, singly, or in twos and threes, would come to sit with me. By their comments and conjectures on the progress of the fight, by gossip, by banter or a few considerate words quietly dropped—the immemorial, simple ways by which men have always kept up one another’s morale in trouble, they kept up mine. They were like sturdier brothers in those days. I could catalogue their names. They would be meaningless to others. They know who they were and what they did, and why, when I hear that someone, like Max Loewenthal, has been shaken by fears that the F.B.I. is a potentially dangerous secret police, I smile, suspecting that, in general, such fears measure the F.B.I.’s effectiveness in the nation’s interest. For how can those men be dangerous to the nation who, as at present headed and organized, are, in fact, the nation itself, performing its self-protective function?

  II

  The tremendous investigation was paced by the tremendous public defamation of me. I do not believe that there is a scrap of real evidence to show that the Communist Party inspired and from time to time stepped up the voltage of that vilification. Those who insist plaintively on evidence against a force whose first concern is that there shall be no evidence against it, must draw what inferences they please. Few who know anything about Communists will doubt what cloaca fed that bilge across the land.

  It was avidly blotted up by much more articulate, widespread and socially formidable circles. In accusing Hiss of Communism, I had attacked an architect of the U.N., and the partisans of peace88 fell upon me like combat troops. I had attacked an intellectual and a “liberal.” A whole generation felt itself to be on trial—with pretty good reason, too, for its fears probably did not far outrun its guilt. From their roosts in the great cities, and certain collegiate eyries, the left-wing intellectuals of almost every feather (and that was most of the vocal intellectuals in the country) swooped and hovered in flocks like fluttered sea fowl-puffins, skimmers, skuas and boobies-and gave vent to hoarse cries and defilements. I had also accused a “certified gentleman,” 89 and the “conspiracy of the gentlemen” closed its retaliatory ranks against me. Hence that musk of snobbism that lay rank and discrepant over the pro-Hiss faction. Hence that morganatic bond between the forces of the left and the forces of the right (a director of a big steel company, the co-owner of a great department store, a figure high in the Republican organization, come quickly to mind) which made confusing common cause in exculpating Hiss by defaming Chambers.

  There was another, less tangible bond between those circles which, together, accounted for a large part of the articulate American middle class. Both groups lived fairly constantly in the psychoanalyst’s permanent shadow, and few articles of furniture were less dispensable to them than a couch. And they shared a common necessity. Since my charge against Alger Hiss was that he had been a Communist and a Soviet agent, and there was, besides the Grand Jury’s perjury indictment, a good deal of clear and simple evidence that he had been, something, anything at all must be believed rather than the common-sense conclusion. The old masters—Freud and the author of the Psychopathia Sexualis—were conned again. No depravity was too bizarre to “explain” Chambers’ motives for calling Hiss a Communist. No hypothesis was too p
reposterous, no speculation too fantastic, to “explain” how all those State Department documents came to be copied on Hiss’s Woodstock typewriter. Only the truth became too preposterous to entertain. The great smear campaign was the real red herring in the Hiss Case.

  Meanwhile, there sifted in on me warnings that the Hiss Case would never come to trial (repeated postponements made this seem all too probable), that the Government meant to throw the trial, that the Government’s prosecutor would be fixed, and infinite variations. I crowded most of these warnings out of my mind, for a man has only so much strength, and I could not have gone on if I had given them active credence. Those that I could not quite ignore, I discounted. But even when I had discounted them to the limit of human mischief and imaginative folly, there still remained something that I could not discount. Neither could I be sure exactly what it was. Its contours became somewhat clearer in the antics of the first Hiss trial. But in the bleak spring of 1949, I did not believe that there was an outside chance for justice in the Hiss Case. It seemed to me that nothing short of a minor miracle could save the Hiss Case for the nation. And, in fact, something was in store that no action of my mind could have foreseen.

  One day, Tom Spencer broke into our routine talks to say that the Government’s prosecutor for the Hiss trial had been chosen. “Who?” I asked quietly, for I knew that almost everything hinged on that choice. “Tom Murphy,” said Tom Spencer. The name meant nothing to me. “Is it good?” I asked. “It is good,” said Spencer.

  I did not see Thomas F. Murphy until shortly before the first Hiss trial. He had scarcely undertaken the case before he had to undergo an operation. Once he came down to the farm, together with a trio of F.B.I. agents, to talk to my wife for the first time, and to discuss, among other things, the simple mechanics of a trial of which my wife and I knew almost nothing—where the jury sat, what the judge did,90 what the lawyers did. Later, I talked with Murphy briefly in the Federal Building. “Do you really believe that you can stand it,” he asked me, “with all those people sitting there and the press writing down everything?” “I think you will find,” I said, “that I am not in any way a coward.” Murphy turned and stared sadly out of the window (he knew much more about trials than I did). “No,” he said at last, “I don’t believe you are.” Among all the other doubts and pressures of that time, his words puzzled me and I left him in a deep depression.

  During the first Hiss trial, Murphy and I had no direct communication. What I saw of him, I saw only in the seven days, more or less, when I was on the stand. The experience was too new to me, and I was kept too busy plucking harpoons out of my skin, to form any opinion about Murphy. In the whirling atmosphere of that courtroom,91 with Lloyd Paul Stryker spinning and flailing like a dervish, and Judge Kaufman snapping “Denied” to most of the Government motions, the last thing I took much thought of was the Government’s prosecutor. But his summation to the jury impressed me greatly. More important, it seems to have impressed the jury.

  Then, between the Hiss trials, Murphy visited the farm again. To me he seemed almost another man. His grasp of the intricacies of the Hiss Case was now firm and supple. He was at ease with it with the relaxed authority of a man who has mastered an art and now wants to practice it. He understood the Case, not only as a problem in law. He understood it in its fullest religious, moral, human and historical meaning. I saw that he had in him one of the rarest of human seeds-the faculty for growth, combined with a faculty almost as rare—a singular magnanimity of spirit. Into me, battered and gray of mood after a year of private struggle and public mauling, he infused new heart, not only because of what he was, but because he was the first man from the Government who said to me in effect: “I understand.” I needed no more.

  The whole nation now gratefully knows that six-foot-four, stalwart figure, with the mild but firm face, and the moustache. It knows what he has done. It watched him do it. I cannot add to that knowledge, except to point out this.

  When Thomas Murphy decided, somewhat reluctantly, to take the Hiss Case, almost nobody had ever heard of him. Within the Justice Department he was known as a man who had never lost a case. Otherwise, he was a man who jostled no one, for he seemed without ambition beyond his immediate work. And he was so little caught in the enveloping atmosphere of politics that he was presently discovered not even to belong to a political club.92 Yet when the historic moment came, Murphy was waiting there at the one point in time and place where he could bring all that he was and all that life had made him to bear with decisive effect for the nation.

  It is inconceivable to me that any other man could have replaced him. That is why I can think of his role only in this way: “It pleased God to have in readiness a man.”

  III

  Those were the forces—Thomas Murphy, Richard Nixon,93 the men of the F.B.I.—who, together with the two grand juries and Tom Donegan and the two trial juries, finally won the Hiss Case for the nation. It is important to look hard at them for a moment, and this book would not be complete without such a glance. For the contrast between them and the glittering Hiss forces is about the same as between the glittering French chivalry and the somewhat tattered English bowmen who won at Agincourt. The inclusive fact about them is that, in contrast to the pro-Hiss rally, most of them, regardless of what they had made of themselves, came from the wrong side of the railroad tracks. I use the expression as the highest measure of praise, as Lincoln noted that God must love the common people; He made so many of them. For, in America, most of us begin on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. The meaning of America, what made it the wonder of history and the hope of mankind, was that we were free not to stay on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. If within us there was something that empowered us to grow, we were free to grow and go where we could. Only, we were not free ever to forget, ever to despise our origins. They were our roots. They made us a nation.

  No feature of the Hiss Case is more obvious, or more troubling as history, than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those who affected to act, think and speak for them. It was, not invariably, but in general, the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to almost any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.

  It was the great body of the nation, which, not invariably, but in general, kept open its mind in the Hiss Case, waiting for the returns to come in. It was they who suspected what forces disastrous to the nation were at work in the Hiss Case, and had suspected that they were at work long before there was a Hiss Case, while most of the forces of enlightenment were poohpoohing the Communist danger and calling every allusion to it a witch hunt. It was they who, when the battle was over, first caught its real meaning.94 It was they who almost unfailingly understood the nature of the witness that I was seeking to make, as I have tested beyond question whenever I have talked to any group of them. And it was they who, in the persons of the men I have cited, produced the forces that could win a struggle whose conspicuous feature is that it was almost without leadership. From the very outset, I was in touch with that enormous force, for which I was making the effort, and from which I drew strength. Often I lost touch with it or doubted it, cut off from it in the cities, or plunged in the depths of the struggle. But when I came back to it, it was always there. It reached me in letters and messages of encouragement and solicitude, understanding, stirring, sometimes wringing the heart. But even when they did not understand, my people were always about me. I had only to look around me to see them-on the farms, on the streets, in homes, in shops, in the day coaches of trains. My people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness, in common forgiveness, because all felt bowed to
gether under the common weight of life.

  And at the very end of the Hiss Case, I heard their speaking voice, like themselves, anonymous, and speaking not to me as an individual, but to me in the name of all those who made the struggle.

  On the afternoon of January 21, 1950, one of the wire services first telephoned me in Maryland to say that the jury in New York had found Alger Hiss guilty of perjury as charged on both counts. I had not turned away from the phone before it rang again. An excited voice, apparently that of an elderly man, asked if I were Whittaker Chambers. In turn, I asked who he was. “Nobody. It doesn’t matter,” said the voice. “But I know that your telephone will be ringing every minute now and I had to reach you first. I had to say: ‘God bless you! God bless you! Oh, God bless you!’ ” He hung up.

  “What is the matter?” my wife called, seeing me turn away from the people who were already filling the kitchen, and walk quickly into another room.

  15

  TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

  I

  I have been seeing a good deal of the stars of late because, several times, in the course of writing this book, I have changed my working hours in an effort to fix the schedule by which I could best concentrate for the longest continuous time. Through this late fall of 1951, I have been rising, as a rule, about four o‘clock in the morning, leaving the house at five and returning to it about seven o’clock at night. Thus, I see both the evening and the morning stars.

  In the evening, in the east, the Pleiades are glittering in their faint way in the shoulder of the Bull. But Orion has not yet cleared the horizon for his nightly hunting with the big and little Dogs. In the morning, when I leave the sleeping house, Jupiter hangs tremendous in the east, while, by the nightly turn of the earth, Orion has swung far to the west with what I take to be Venus not far off. For I am not even an amateur star-gazer and know the more conspicuous constellations chiefly as a countryman to whom they are a rough timepiece and a guide, telling him something about the hour of the night and his direction if he is unsure in the dark.