Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Thomas gaveled the session to order at 10:45 in the morning on Saturday, July 31. Rankin was particularly eager to begin. He had kept close tabs on the New York grand jury investigation and was angered that it had taken so long and produced so little. The proceedings, he thought, had been purposefully and politically delayed by Truman and his ilk. At the same time, he saw the grand jury as a threat to what he liked to think of as HUAC’s exclusive possession of the hunt for subversives. And now, worse yet, the committee had been beaten to the punch by Ferguson the day before. There was no more time to waste.

  The hearings were held in the Ways and Means Committee room, a vast auditorium with banks of seats on either side of a central aisle, a raised platform in the front for the committee members, each with his name etched on a bronze plaque, and, along the window side of the room, a battalion of newsreel cameras and klieg lights. The first witness that morning was Elizabeth Bentley, outfitted conservatively, as the day before, in a simple, dark dress. Although the room was much grander, the crowd much bigger, and the media even more in evidence than the day before, Bentley appeared unintimidated. She had told her story so many times now to so many people for so many years that it must have felt to her like a play for which she had over-rehearsed. But this truly was opening night—or day—and, underneath the composure, underneath the New England sangfroid, she must have felt a sense of excitement and purpose. The spotlight was clearly, sharply, brilliantly on her. She may not have sought this particular spotlight, or even imagined that her talks with the FBI three summers before would lead to something like this. But, at least for the moment, at least until the spotlight burned a hole in her life, she was enjoying the new, meaningful role she was playing. She was the most important person in that room, and she knew it.

  Bentley took her place at the witness table behind the forest of microphones. She sat erect, her spine straight, her hands clasped on the desk in front of her. As in the hearings the day before, she brought no notes or documents to read from or refresh her memory, and she was not accompanied by counsel. The questions began, as they had at the Ferguson hearing, with her background and the reason she turned to communism. Bentley recounted, once again, her New England upbringing and years at Vassar but added a twist at the end: She blamed her education, which she said had included not a single course in American history, for her lack of respect for the American political system that allowed her to embrace communism. Creeping liberalism in education was a favorite target of anticommunists, and her comment interested the committee.

  “So you grew up as a typical young woman, an American child in American schools, went to a very renowned institution…and through all those years, you were never exposed, or put into contact with what American history was, what America stands for, and what our form of government was?” one committee member asked her, making the most of his incredulity.

  “No; I never was,” Bentley replied.

  But before the conversation could go too far afield, the committee’s chief investigator, Robert E. Stripling, brought Bentley back to the real business at hand: spies in the government. Quickly and efficiently, he guided her through the naming of names. Her voice was calm and measured. Silvermaster, Perlo, Ullmann, and White, she told him. Lee, Currie, Remington, and Kramer. “Can you name any other individuals?” Stripling asked, again and again. And again and again, she did: Halperin and Magdoff, Coe and Taylor, Adler, the Golds, Henry Collins, Redmont, Price, Tenney, Silverman, Miller. The list continued. Bentley was more careful with her answers than Stripling and the committee were with their questions. Her responses were almost clinical in their precision. She seemed to parse each question the way a lawyer would, picking it apart, examining its components, making no assumptions, answering narrowly and with care. When she was asked if Silvermaster was a party member while employed at his final government position, she declined to answer—I can only tell you what he was during the time I knew him, she said—even though, knowing Silvermaster’s decades-long devotion to the party, she could have easily made that assumption, or at least hinted at it.

  The committee’s questions, by comparison, seemed sloppy and superficial, so eager were the congressmen to air the names they knew she knew. Bentley was not often asked detailed follow-up questions about the people she named and very often not asked whether she actually knew them. Thus, sources like Silvermaster, Ullmann, Perlo, and Remington, whom she had met and spoken with many times and from whom she had personally received information, were not distinguished from men like Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie, whom she had never met but only heard about from others. Her information might be correct—in fact, Venona later showed it was—but in the context of HUAC in 1948, it was hearsay, and Stripling and the others should have known better.

  Bentley’s version of her years as spy, courier, and network handler had few of the hard edges the committee expected. Her sources were not paid, either by the party or by the Soviets, she told the congressmen. And, according to Bentley, they were not traitors. In fact, in a way, their motives could be seen as noble. “They had been told it was their duty as good communists,” she said to Stripling, when he pressed her about why so many people were so free with presumably confidential information. “They had been told that Russia was our ally, that she was bearing the brunt of the war, that she was not being properly treated as an ally, and it was their duty to do something about it.” And throughout the morning, Bentley positioned herself, as she had since she first came forth to the FBI, as a fallen angel, a foggy-minded liberal led astray both by the idealistic rhetoric of communism and her love for one man.

  Congressman F. Edward Hébert, a fourth-term Louisiana Democrat who would serve another twenty-eight years in the House, at first did not swallow this explanation, confronting Bentley with some of the toughest questions she faced that day.

  “How old were you when you started this maneuvering, this espionage?” Hébert asked.

  “That was about seven years ago,” said Bentley.

  “I want to know whether or not you were a mature individual.”

  “I think you may be physically mature, but many times you are not mentally mature,” Bentley responded carefully.

  “I do not think that Columbia or Vassar would like for their graduates to say they were not mentally mature…” Hébert countered.

  Bentley had no good reply for this, and the congressman pressed on. Didn’t it ever dawn on her during “these secret meetings, and this super-duper secret stuff” that she was performing a disservice to her country? No, Bentley replied. She was convinced she was helping to build a decent world in the future. Even if she was betraying her own government? Hébert persisted. Bentley parried: “I did not think it was betraying my own government.” Bentley told him that communism was almost a religion. One did not question it; one followed its precepts on faith. Hébert clearly did not like the analogy, but he did warm to the idea that Bentley’s actions were motivated by emotion rather than reason, since, as far as he was concerned, there was no rational explanation for why one would embrace communism.

  “Who spurred this emotionalism on you?” he asked Bentley, guiding her just where she wanted to go anyway. “Was it this man Golos?”

  “Yes,” Bentley said.

  “Was it that you were devoted to him so much that you followed him blindly and were blind to everything else?”

  “Yes; it was,” Bentley said.

  “And it blinded you to your traitorous acts against your country?”

  “That is right,” Bentley said.

  Her testimony continued through the afternoon, interrupted at various points by the political posturing of the committee. At one point, Congressman Rankin, overcome by a combustible mixture of anger and enthusiasm, demanded that every communist in the United States be shipped out “by the boatload” and that spies in the government be shot.

  Congressman Nixon, on the other hand, stayed focused on the political purpose of the hearing—the attack on the Democrat
s. He questioned Bentley closely about exactly when she had first come forth with her story of espionage. When she told him it had been nearly three years ago—a fact he surely knew from the files to which the committee had access, both legally and through leaks—he expressed disbelief. Do you mean to tell me, he asked Bentley, that the investigative agencies of this country, the Department of Justice, were fully aware of all this testimony that you have given us today? Yes, Bentley said, that is correct. Nixon then turned to chairman Thomas.

  “In other words, it is quite apparent, Mr. Chairman, that this information has been available to these government employees for a period of…years,” he said, implying that the Truman administration had sat on the material out of lack of interest or fear or perhaps even collusion.

  Congressman Mundt of South Dakota jumped in immediately. “It is also quite apparent that we need a new attorney general,” he said, providing the punchline.

  “Does that apply to Mr. Remington, too?” Rankin put in, not to be bested. The congressmen laughed.

  When the afternoon session was over—Bentley would be back throughout August to answer additional questions—the congressmen were quick to sing the praises of their star witness. Hébert called her a “reformed saint.” Congressman John McDowell from Pennsylvania, who had been silent throughout most of the day, praised her as “an American citizen who…has the courage…to place herself in a highly dangerous position.” Rankin, who had been the most contentious that day, tempered his compliments. “I think you are rather late in seeing the light,” he told Bentley. But he did, nonetheless, “commend the lady very highly for coming here.” Chairman Thomas sympathized with her for having had a “grueling time. Your ability to stand up under it in the way you have is certainly something to be proud of,” he said, thanking her again in the committee’s name.

  But at least one person in the room that Saturday was not quite so pleased. Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator, the man who had led the questioning throughout the day, found Bentley’s story “too hard to believe.” He had been warned by the Justice Department—which was out of the loop and knew nothing of the deciphered Venona messages—that there was no evidence to substantiate Bentley’s tale, and he believed the HUAC investigation, like the others that preceded it, would go nowhere if based solely on her testimony. Nothing he had heard that day changed his mind. Yes, Bentley had presented detailed, forthright testimony. She had been calm, composed, and articulate. And certainly the congressmen were eager to believe her. But Stripling knew this was not enough. The star witness was still just a woman telling stories. In the absence of any tangible evidence that could support Bentley’s story—a document, a roll of film, a receipt book, anything—Stripling needed another witness, someone who might be able to corroborate any part of Bentley’s tale. That’s when he remembered a man named Whittaker Chambers, a former communist and self-confessed courier for a Washington, D.C., spy network who had defected from the party in 1938 and told his story to the government the following year. There had never been any follow-up. Chambers went on with his life—he was now a senior editor at Time magazine—and had never been called to publicly testify. But, thought Stripling, if Chambers could tell the committee of his own work in the late thirties, perhaps there would be links connecting his activities with Bentley’s. It was worth a try.

  On Tuesday, August 3, when the hearings resumed, Whittaker Chambers took the stand. Unlike Bentley, with her confident, orderly air, Chambers was an uncomfortable witness, a big, shambling, disheveled man, soft-spoken and reticent, whose shyness quickly turned to nervousness in the witness chair. He got flustered. He mumbled. He perspired profusely. But Stripling led him along, and slowly his story emerged. Chambers had joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s and had established himself as a journalist of the proletariat, working first for the Daily Worker, then the New Masses, before being recruited for secret work in the spring of 1932. From then until his defection six years later, he had served as a liaison between sources in the federal government and Soviet contacts, including the same man, Itzhak Akhmerov (“Bill”) who had been one of Bentley’s contacts. As it turned out, Chambers had helped develop and oversee one of the networks Bentley took over almost ten years later, the old Ware apparatus, which became the Perlo Group. Chambers was somewhat vague and circumspect about his own spy activities that day, perhaps out of nervousness, perhaps out of an unwillingness to delve into a life he had renounced almost a decade before. But because his story overlapped somewhat with Bentley’s, he came up with some of the same names she did, notably Perlo, Kramer, White, Collins, and Abt.

  This was good news for Stripling and the committee. The additional testimony could help strengthen the committee’s stance when these men were subpoenaed to testify later in the month. But the congressmen didn’t really get excited until Chambers began talking about a certain State Department source from whom he claimed to have collected secret information, a man named Alger Hiss. “Mr. Hiss,” Chambers told the committee, “represents the concealed enemy against which we are fighting.” And it seemed to HUAC that this was absolutely right, that Hiss, a golden boy who had sailed through Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, a protégé of both Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the bright stars in the New Deal galaxy, did indeed represent the enemy. Here was a man who had helped coordinate U.S. foreign policy, a man who had helped establish the United Nations, a man who was now president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. If he was a Red, if he had been a spy, this would go a long way to discredit not just the New Deal, with its policies and agencies so hated by the conservatives, but also the direction America had taken after the war. For a moment, Elizabeth Bentley was all but forgotten, and Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers took center stage.

  The drama was irresistible—to the committee, to the media, and to the country. Here was Whittaker Chambers, rumpled, overweight, and sweaty, telling traitorous tales about Alger Hiss, the lean, handsome, well-spoken Ivy Leaguer, cream of the New Deal aristocracy. The day after Chambers testified, Hiss appeared before the committee to deny everything. Then the committee heard Chambers again, first in executive session, then in public. A week later, they were back, first Hiss, then Chambers, both sticking to their stories. Then, on August 25, HUAC engineered a dramatic confrontation, bringing the two together in the same room to testify once again. The yes-you-did-no-I-didn’t war of words that had become a public spectacle under the aegis of HUAC might never have advanced further—just as Bentley’s grand jury testimony and the subsequent denials of those she named had not advanced further—had not Chambers, some months later, come forth with something Bentley never had: evidence.

  It seemed that when Chambers was extricating himself from clandestine work, he had squirreled away copies of documents and rolls of film as insurance against retribution by his Soviet contacts, “life preservers,” as he called them. Included in the batch of material, which was at first hidden at a relative’s house and then in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Chambers’s Maryland farm, were a number of secret State Department documents he claimed Hiss had given him. There were four handwritten notes, sixty-five single-spaced pages of retyped cables, and three rolls of microfilm, enough to eventually convict Hiss in what was called “the trial of the century.” But that August, it was still just a war of words that captured the attention of HUAC, threatening to take over the entire hearings. As it was, nine of the twenty-one public sessions were devoted to Chambers and Hiss, including all of the final six. But through mid-August, in between the appearances of the two men, it was still Elizabeth Bentley’s show.

  On August 4, the day after Chambers first appeared to offer corroboration for Bentley’s story, the committee subpoenaed Nathan Gregory Silvermaster. He was the first of seventeen federal government employees named by Bentley whom the congressmen would question that month, and his testimony set the tone for many of the others. After he was sworn in, Silvermaster immediately asked
to read a prepared statement, which the committee examined and then allowed. In it, he called himself “a loyal American” and a “faithful government employee.” The FBI had investigated him, he reminded the committee, and so had a grand jury. There had been no action taken against him. That was because, Silvermaster said, his voice rising, the charges made by Bentley were “false and fantastic” and that she was “a neurotic liar.” He would, on the advice of his attorney, refuse to testify further on these matters. He would invoke his constitutional privilege under the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer on the grounds that anything he said might tend to be self-incriminating.

  Silvermaster then proceeded to stonewall the committee, refusing to answer any questions other than those pertaining to his work record. He even refused to answer whether he knew Bentley, who was sitting in the back of the hearings room and, in a dramatic moment, asked by the chairman to stand. Throughout the long and unproductive session, various members of the committee attempted to shake Silvermaster’s resolve. Rankin pounded on him, equating taking the Fifth with an admission of guilt. When the witness refused to answer whether he was a member of the Communist Party, Rankin shot back: “If you were not a member of the Communist Party, it would certainly not incriminate you to say ‘No.’ Now why do you refuse to answer that question?”