Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  32 Events decided that I was never to write it. Someone else wrote the published piece. But the lawyer of a well-known biographer, who knew that I had written other pieces in the series and assumed that I had written 1848, threatened suit for plagiarism (and some $50,000) at that moment of supreme nuisance value. The suit never came off, of course. But, together with the Hiss libel suit and the damage claim for my wife’s automobile accident in December 1948, it made me at one point liable for some $150,000 damages. The sum was so far beyond my capacity to pay that it reduced all the claims to a welcome absurdity.

  33 I bad not said that. I assume that Congressman Mundt said it because a newsman had procured, in ways reminiscent of underground methods, a copy of the Berle notes (presumably shortened and garbled), which had then been teen by, or were in the hands of, certain members of the Committee.

  34 Nor must the services of Tom Donegan, a special assistant to the Attorney General, be overlooked. His conduct of the Grand Jury proceedings later on contributed greatly to the indictment of Alger Hiss.

  35 Had this been true, it is unlikely that Hiss would, point by point, confirm parts of my testimony about him as he was soon to do. But there was nothing improbable about the allegation in the climate of that time.

  36 When I began to testify, I was not aware that Alger and Priscilla Hiss had a son, born since I had known them—a fact rather dashing, I should think, to those who still hug the belief that my knowledge of the Hisses was not first-hand, but the result of some prolonged investigation of their private lives.

  37 For the timing, it should be noted that this confrontation in New York came a day after Hiss’s testimony in executive session in Washington, when he had first cautiously suggested that I might be “George Crosley.”

  38 Hiss should have said 28th Street.

  39 Robert Wohlforth, author of Tin Soldiers, a fictional attack on West Point, popular in leftist circles during the 1930’s.

  40 Regardless of whether or not Richard Nixon was mistaken—and there are many who would claim that he was—I believed him, and his words weighed heavily upon me.

  41 Thus, in London, one of my good friends, incidentally, a Harvard man, to his astonishment found himself having to defend me to Lord Beaverbrook.

  42 At his first hearing, when he appeared as a voluntary witness before the Committee, Hiss had been accompanied by William L. Marbury, later his Baltimore lawyer, in the libel suit Hiss filed against me. Hiss was always accompanied by counsel, whenever he appeared publicly and whenever he testified before the Grand Jury. I was never accompanied by counsel anywhere. Indeed, I only once discussed with counsel any important step that I planned to take in the Hiss Case; and that was to insist that, regardless of consequences to myself, I intended to plead truth before the Grand Jury.

  43 Actually, whoever could reach a television set could see us. That was why I had to sit just where I sat on the uncomfortable chair and why two red electric eyes, whose function I did not then understand, were trained on me. So far as I know, the August 25th hearing was the first use of TV to bring congressional hearings into the home that the Kefauver Committee later developed on a greater scale.

  44 If the document had been removed, it was presumably in the custody of a Federal agency.

  45 This is the Washington law firm, two of whose partners were then Donald Hiss and Dean Acheson.

  46 This unidentified partner of the Covington firm is still unidentified.

  47 In the early 1930’s, Hiss had been a member of the International Juridical Association, of which the late Carol King, a habitual attorney for Communists in trouble, was a moving spirit. The International Juridical Association has been cited as subversive by the Attorney General. Also among its members: Lee Pressman, Abraham Isserman (one of the attorneys for the eleven convicted Communist leaders), Max Loewenthal, author of a recent book attacking the F.B.I.

  48 The other was Bert Andrews, chief of the New York Herald Tribune’s, Washington Bureau. Andrews, a Pulitzer prize winner and author of Washington Witch Hunt, a book highly critical of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, had paid a visit to my farm, together with Richard Nixon, shortly after I first appeared before the Committee. Distinctly skeptical of me to begin with, Bert Andrews soon became convinced, as a result of his probing talk with me, and a close scrutiny of the testimony and developments in the case, that Hiss was lying. It was Andrews who first suggested the use of the lie-detector test to the Committee, and he was to play a crucial role in bringing the vacationing Nixon back into action after I had produced the so-called “Baltimore papers” (the State Department documents). Both Bert and his wife were great morale stiffeners to my family and me. I can still hear Nadine Andrews’ voice, exhorting me by long distance at the time when I was testifying at the first Hiss trial: “Drop that Quaker thee and thou stuff, and begin to fight back!”

  49 I never at any time asked for, or received, a copy of my own testimony, reading it first. like everybody else, as a printed public document.

  50 A few weeks later, W. Marvin Smith committed suicide by plunging several floors into the stairwell of the Justice Department building in Washington. I have never seen any published explanation for his act. Justice Department officials have said in my hearing that his reasons were purely personal

  51 Aldo Marzani, alias: Tony Wales, State Department employe convicted of perjury circa 1946 for denying his membership in the Communist Parts.

  52 Congressman Mundt meant to say “members of the Communist Party.”

  53 Lest there be any question at all, exhaustive investigation, both by the Government and the Hiss defense, has established, as definitely as any fact can be established on earth, that I have never been in a mental institution, that I have never consulted a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst.

  54 During the second Hiss trial, one of the defense psychiatrists, Dr. Henry A. Murray, head of Harvard’s psychiatry department, was to pick up my literary lapse. He found a dark implication (never, so far as I know, illumined) in the fact that I had never written a book. It is worth pausing a moment over Dr. Murray, because he typifies one important aspect of the Hiss Case. At first Dr. Murray made an impressive witness. Repeatedly, he testified under oath that he had reached his psychiatric conclusions about me wholly and solely from a study of my writings in Time, Life and elsewhere (he had never met me). He named a date when his conclusions had crystallized. In cross-examination Prosecutor Murphy carefully led Dr. Murray to repeat these statements. Then Murphy asked these questions: Was it not true that well before the date on which Dr. Murray said he had made his diagnosis solely on the basis of my writing, he had in person visited a former Time writer to question him about me? Was it not true that he had himself then drawn such a picture of me as a drunken and unstable character that the Time writer had exclaimed: “But Chambers is not like that at all”? Was it not true that Dr. Murray had then answered angrily: “Oh, you’re just trying to whitewash Chambers”? The distinguished head of Harvard’s psychiatry department admitted that it was all true.

  55 Then the chief editorial writer for Life magazine; now one of the editors of The Freeman.

  56 Three other forces and a man, also deeply rooted in the nation, were necessary before the nation could win its Case. The forces were the second Grand Jury (that which first indicted William Remington); the jury in the first Hiss trial, which stood eight to four for his conviction; the jury in the second Hiss trial, which was unanimous for his conviction. The man was the Government’s Prosecutor, Thomas F. Murphy, without whose grasp of the legal strategy of the trials, but, above all. his grasp of the total moral and historical meaning of the Case, all might still have been for nothing. meaning of the

  57 A few days after the August 25th hearing, one of my Time friends found herself in conversation with another mother at their daughters’ progressive school. The Hiss Case came up. The second mother was well aware of Alger Hiss, but my name had left no impression on her. “Chambers?” she said. �
��Chambers? Oh, you mean the little man who came from behind!” Neither my friend nor I had ever heard this racetrack term, but it seemed the almost perfect expression for the attitude of millions of people toward the Hiss Case at that time.

  58 Judge Murphy has pointed out to me something that I had missed and that I believe most others have missed. Hiss’s question to the Committee at the Commodore—” May I ask if his voice, when he testified before, was comparable to this?”—which at the time seemed merely pompous and silly, really had a purpose. For through it Hiss was probing to find out whether I had told the Committee that he had once taken me for a European because of my inflection. If I had done so, that was a clue to Hiss that I had told the Committee a great deal more.

  59 Congressman Nixon, somewhat upset by the Westminster development, was to introduce him to newsmen with the startling announcement: “This is Mr. Hiss’s young son.”

  60 By then, or shortly after, PM had suffered a corporate, but not an editorial change into the New York Star.

  61 The spokesman of the four jurors who were against Hiss’s conviction was the foreman of the jury. Shortly after the opening of the trial, his wife was in a hospital She told the elderly woman in the next bed that her husband had already decided that Hiss was innocent. The elderly woman happened to be Tom Donegan’s mother. Thus, the prosecution knew almost from the beginning that the foreman had already made up his mind. To have asked for a mistrial would have given Alger Hiss a perfect defense of double jeopardy in any subsequent trial. For the jurors had already been sworn and evidence taken. Therefore, the Government suggested to Judge Samuel H. Kaufman that he excuse the foreman and substitute one of the alternates. But Lloyd Paul Stryker, Hiss’s trial lawyer, felt that the foreman made an excellent juror and should not be disturbed. Judge Kaufman concurred-

  62 Peters obviously stood high on the list of those who would be of interest to me if Hiss filed a libel suit against me. Just before the first Hiss trial began, he was suddenly permitted to leave the United States. He made a quick departure in a Dutch plane. It has been pointed out to me that since Peters would plead self-incrimination and would refuse to answer questions, he was of no value to anyone as a witness. But perhaps it is not unduly strange that in those taut days, I should have drawn only the unhappiest inferences from the dispatch with which, after he had been under surveillance for years, he was suddenly hustled from the scene. Few knew so much about the Hiss Case as he. For Peters had been in charge of everything. He had known everybody. Everybody....

  63 Carol King (she has died since this was written) received her early legal training in the office of Max Loewenthal, close friend of Justice Felix Frankfurter, and author of a recent book attacking the F.B.I. At the death of Joseph Brodsky, she succeeded him as a veteran counsel for Communists in trouble with the law. She was the sister of Louis S. Weiss of the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Wharton and Garrison. Weiss has since died. This firm had other curious connections with the Hiss Case. Not only was Weiss the brother of Carol King. Garrison was the brother-in-law of Dr. Carl Binger, the defense psychiatrist in both Hiss trials. Like her friend, Priscilla Hiss, Mrs. Binger is a Bryn Mawr alumna.

  64 The damages claimed by Hiss remained at this $75,000 figure until shortly after his conviction, when Judge W. Calvin Chestnut dismissed the libel suit with prejudice. That is the legal way of saying that Hiss could not again bring suit against me on the same grounds.

  65 The Dies Irae: Whatever is hidden, shall be brought out; nothing shall remain unpunished.

  66 History has proved that my concern was, above all, ironic. Most of the Communists in the Hiss Case, like most of those in the Bentley Case, are going about their affairs much as always. It is not the Communists, but the ex-Communisb who have co-operated with the Government, who have chiefly suffered. All of the ex-Communists who co-operated with the Government had broken with the party entirely as a result of their own conscience years before the Hiss Case began. It is worth noting that not one Communist was moved to break with Communism under the pressures of the Hiss case. Let those who wonder about Communism and the power of its faith, ponder upon that fact.

  67 Their business was not to pry into Hiss’s family history or finances—matters that were never publicly touched upon by any member of my counsel, by the Government’s prosecutor or by me, and that not because no startling facts came to light. My investigators worked almost wholly to locate witnesses who could corroborate my story about Hiss. Nearly always, they found that Hiss’s investigators had been there first and that possible witnesses had sometimes suffered strange black-outs of recollection. My investigators soon passed out of the picture.

  68 One of the few amusing stories of the Hiss Case, told me by a man with a rich Maryland Inflection, concerns this purpose. “Well,” said a fellow diner of Marbury’s at the Merchant’s Club after Hiss’s conviction, “Bill went on a fishing expedition, and, by God, he caught the whole damn sea bottom.”

  69 No relative of Isaac Don Levine.

  70 This was the memo that Richard Nixon read into the Congressional Record in hit speech after Hiss’s conviction.

  71 Mr. Justice Frankfurter was a voluntary witness; Mr. Justice Reed, who, as Solicitor General of the United States, had appointed Alger Hiss to be his assistant, testified in response to a subpoena.

  72 Were it not for a socialist cyst within it, mere political expediency would scarcely stop any party from cleaning house of its Communists, a project that, pushed with vigor and sincerity, could only redound to its credit.

  73 A journalistic passion for alliteration has transformed the contents of the pumpkin into the “pumpkin papers.” There were no papers in the pumpkin, there was film

  74 Among other “helpful” things, Hiss informed the F.B.I. that he had sold his Woodstock typewriter (on which the State Department documents had been copied), while Mrs. Hiss informed them that her former maid, Claudia Catlett, was dead. Mrs. Catlett was, of course, very much alive (she appeared as a Hiss witness at both trials). It was to her sons that, in 1938, shortly after my break with the Communist Party, Hiss had given the Woodstock typewriter.

  75 My fears were not far out. Just before the second Hiss trial, two strangers, identifying themselves only as “friends of Alger Hiss,” came to the house and demanded that my wife turn over to them a passport and related papers. They had no subpoena or warrant and offered no credentials of any kind.

  76 Callahan has a special claim to my gratitude for the quiet sympathy and helpfulness with which he took care of my wife after the public mayhem inflicted on her by Lloyd Paul Stryker during the first Hiss trial. Another agent who similarly won my gratitude at the same time was James Shinners, who, with a tact beyond any mere duty, found the restorative words to revive my wife after her ordeal.

  77 Not entirely, however. No sooner had I resigned from Time than John William Eckenrode of Westminster, Md., wrote, offering me an excellent editorial job with his highly successful book-selling and publishing business, the Newman Bookshop and the Newman Press—a Catholic enterprise. At that time Eckenrode had never met me. He merely understood what the Hiss Case was about. I was in no position to accept his offer. I declined with the gratitude that a man feels toward someone who has taken thought of what so many never think of: how a man is to feed his family. As our capital streamed away through the chinks of the complete disorganization of our lives by the Hiss Case, I began to wonder. For two years I had earned nothing at all, and the farm was running at a loss. I cannot forget the pleasure I felt, when just after the second Hiss trial, Richard F. Lewis, Jr., the owner of Station WINC (Winchester, Va.). made it possible for me to earn my first money since I left Time.

  78 One would-be witness whom I was not to see until the first Hiss trial was a tall, saturnine, bespectacled figure who might have been the psychiatrist in a Holly, wood comedy. He was Dr. Carl Binger, who even in those early days, when so far as I know, he had never set eyes on me, was urging Tom Donegan to let him testify to t
he Grand Jury that I was a psychopathic case and that my testimony was worthless. Donegan refused.

  79 Their customary fee would have been beyond my individual ability to pay at any time. Now they asked of me a fee so nominal as to be little more than a token. As my resources dwindled away in the course of two workless years, with the farm disorganized as a result of the pressures on us, Cleveland and Macmillan offered to defend the libel suit without fee, should it come to trial. In the last hours of the second Hiss trial, Richard Cleveland answered a question from the press: “If Alger Hiss is acquitted, I will spend the rest of my life vindicating Whittaker Chambers, for he is telling the truth.”

  80 Medina advised me to get in touch with the New York law firm of Minton and McNulty. Both of these men helped me greatly through some very troubled hours. They were never called upon to act for me, and they never accompanied me while I was before the Grand Juries. But they counseled me, in my vast ignorance even of small matters of law and procedure; and my confidence in them, and simply the knowledge that they were standing by, was a great comfort.

  81 In fairness to the Justice Department, it should be noted that, with a highly controversial case before the Grand Jury, it had every reason to dread that ventilation of evidence in the press that almost invariably followed a Committee hearing. The press was one of the Committee’s few tactical weapons.