7

A Traitor from Harvard

The United States of America

versus

Alger Hiss

A few minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, August 3, 1948, a portly little man walked slowly to the front of the Ways and Means Committee Room in which the House Committee on Un-American Activities was holding an open session. After he had been sworn, he sat down gingerly in a wooden chair that was perched directly in front of a raised platform behind which acting Chairman Karl Mundt and five of his colleagues were ensconced. Robert Stripling, the Committee’s counsel, began the hearing.

Q. Will you state your full name?

A. My name is David Whittaker Chambers.

Q. Where and when were you born?

A. I was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.

Q. How long have you been associated with Time Magazine?

A. Nine years.

Q. Prior to that time, what was your occupation?

A. I was a member of the Communist Party and a paid functionary of the party.

The witness asked if he might read a prepared statement. In a voice that was barely audible at the press table, he told of his fifteen years’ service as a Soviet espionage agent. In 1939, two years after he said that he had “repudiated Marx’ doctrines and Lenin’s tactics,” he had gone to Washington to report what he knew “about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists.” At that time, he had told Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle, Jr., that there was an underground Communist movement in the government. “The head of the underground group at the time I knew it was Nathan Witt, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. Later, John Abt became the leader. Lee Pressman was also a member of this group, as was Alger Hiss, who, as a member of the State Department, later organized the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco, and the United States side of the Yalta Conference.”

In New York City, Alger Hiss, who was in the middle of his second year as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had just returned from a month’s vacation in Vermont. As soon as he heard of Chambers’ charges, he sent a telegram to Chairman Mundt in which he stated, “I do not know Mr. Chambers and insofar as I am aware have never laid eyes on him.” He requested permission to “appear before your Committee to make these statements formally and under oath.” Hiss suggested Thursday, August 5th, and hoped that “that will be a convenient time from the Committee’s point of view for me to appear.” Mundt immediately wired back that it was.

On Thursday morning, Hiss had his chance. In the large Caucus Room in the Old House Office Building, he told the Committee that he had never heard of Whittaker Chambers until 1947 “when two representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had asked me if I knew him.... I said I did not know Chambers. So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so.” As far as Chambers’ accusations were concerned, they were all “complete fabrications.” The witness was willing to let his Government service speak for itself.

On Tuesday, Chambers had testified that, before he had broken with the underground, he had tried to persuade Alger Hiss to do the same. In a tearful scene at the Hiss home, his friend had “absolutely refused to break.” Hiss denied that any such incident had ever occurred and repeated his statement that, as far as he knew, the name Chambers “means absolutely nothing to me.” When he was shown a recent photograph of Chambers, the witness insisted that he “would much rather see the individual.... I would not want to take an oath that I had never seen that man. I would like to see him and then I think that I would be better able to tell whether I had ever seen him.” When Mundt told him that Chambers was not present in the hearing room, Hiss replied, somewhat sharply, that “I hoped he would be.”

Even though the acting chairman wondered publicly “what possible motive a man who edits Time Magazine could have for mentioning Alger Hiss in the same breath as Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, John Abt and Harold Ware, he thanked Mr. Hiss for his “very cooperative attitude” and “forthright statements.” Furthermore, he stated that he had been impressed by the fact that the witness was the first of all the people named by Elizabeth Bentley and the other apostates to come forward voluntarily and deny his guilt. Even Mississippi’s Rankin, who was not known for his kinship with intellectuals, congratulated Hiss for not taking advantage of the Fifth Amendment and for appearing without a lawyer “to tell him what to say.” All in all, it had not been a bad day for the gentleman from New York.

After Hiss had denied knowing Chambers, Stripling informed Mundt that “there is a very sharp contradiction here in the testimony. I certainly suggest Mr. Chambers be brought back before the Committee and clear this up.” The chairman agreed and appointed a sub-committee composed of California’s Nixon, Louisiana’s Hébert and Pennsylvania’s McDowell to question Chambers in executive session. Two days later, the sub-committee met in Room 101 of New York’s United States Courthouse. With Nixon taking the lead, Chambers was questioned closely about his claimed acquaintance with Alger Hiss and his family. The witness’ answers revealed such an intimate knowledge of the Hisses that it was apparent that he had either known them extremely well or done considerable homework.

First of all, Hiss had known him only as Carl, his party name. They had been the best of friends and he had spent a great deal of time at the various Hiss homes in Baltimore and Washington. The witness’ knowledge of what Hiss later referred to as “petty housekeeping details” was apparently inexhaustible. He knew that Mrs. Hiss called her husband “Hilly,” that the Hisses had a cocker spaniel, and that “they both had the same hobby—amateur ornithologists, bird observers.” In fact, he remembered that “once, they saw, to their great excitement, a prothonotary warbler.”

MR. McDOWELL: A very rare specimen?

MR. CHAMBERS: I never saw one. I am also fond of birds.

When he had first met the Hisses, they owned a Ford roadster which, he remembered, “was black and it was very dilapidated.” In 1936, they had purchased a new Plymouth, and J. Peters, the head of the underground organization, had helped them dispose of the Ford through a Communist service station in Washington. He described Hiss as a slender man, “about 5 feet 8 or 9,” who walked with “a slight mince;” Priscilla Hiss was “a short, highly nervous, little woman” who had “a habit of blushing red when she is excited or angry, fiery red.” Timmy Hobson, Mrs. Hiss’ son by a previous marriage, “was a puny little boy, also rather nervous.” The boy’s father was paying for his education but the Hisses were diverting “a large part of that money to the Communist Party.”

MR. NIXON: Hiss told you that?

MR. CHAMBERS: Yes, sir.

MR. NIXON: Did he name the Communist Party as the recipient?

MR. CHAMBERS: Certainly.

MR. NIXON: He might have said simply “the party.” Could it have been the Democratic Party or Socialist Party?

MR. CHAMBERS: No.

Hiss had told him that he had a sister who lived with his mother. In fact “he once drove me past their house, which as I recall, was on or near Linden Street.” But he had never seen either the mother or the sister. As for Hiss’ younger brother, Donald, he had met him “within the same week in which I met Alger Hiss.” But, whereas “my relationship with Alger Hiss quickly transcended our formal relationship,” Chambers’ contact with Donald was confined to collecting party dues from him. He couldn’t remember much about Donald except that he was married to a non-Communist and that “everybody was worried about her.” He had a general impression that the younger Hiss “was much less intelligent than Alger” and that “he was interested in the social climb.”

Mrs. Hiss’ maiden name was Priscilla Fansler and “she came from the Great Valley near Paoli, Pa.” In fact, Chambers had once taken a trip with the family, and Mrs. Hiss had shown him “the road down which their farm lay.”

MR. NIXON: You drove with them?

MR. CHAMBERS: Yes.

MR. NIXON: Did you ever go on a trip with them other than by automobile?

MR. CHAMBERS: No.

MR. NIXON: Did you ever stay overnight on any of these trips?

MR. CHAMBERS: No.

While he was fairly certain that Mr. Hiss did not go to church because he was forbidden to do so, he did not know about his wife who “came from a Quaker family.”

Before subsiding, Nixon asked the witness if he had seen Hiss since 1938. Chambers’ answer was as definite as it could be. “No: since the time I went to his house and tried to break him away, I have never seen him since.” Hébert then took over and exhibited a marked interest in the house occupied by the Hiss ménage. When Chambers had first met Hiss “he was living on Twenty-eighth Street.” Some time later, he had moved to a house in Georgetown, possibly “on the corner of P Street.” He had the impression “it was a three-story house with a kind of porch in back where people sat.” After that, “he moved to a house on an up-and-down street, a street that would cross the lettered street, probably just around the corner from the other house and very near to his brother Donald.” This house had a basement, dining room and a small backyard. “I think he was there when I broke with the Communist Party.” When he tried to persuade Hiss to leave the Party, too, the latter had been living in a house “beyond Wisconsin Avenue.”

Before the sub-committee adjourned at 1:10 p.m., Nixon suddenly asked Chambers if he was “willing to submit to a lie detector test on this testimony.” The witness said he would if Nixon thought it was necessary.

MR. NIXON: You are that confident?

MR. CHAMBERS: I am telling the truth.

Before Messrs. Nixon, Hébert and McDowell returned to Washington that afternoon, they had decided to recommend to the full Committee that Hiss be recalled.

On Friday, August 13th, J. Parnell Thomas, the regular chairman, sent a telegram to Hiss, asking him to appear before the Committee the following Monday. That same Friday, Donald Hiss denied at a public hearing “every statement made by Mr. Chambers with respect to me. I am not, and never have been, a member of the Communist Party, or of any formal or informal organization affiliated with, or fronting in any manner whatsoever for, the Communist Party.” He had belonged to nothing more subversive than the Y. M. C. A., the Washington Racquet Club and the Harvard Law School Association. As for his accuser, “I have no recollection of ever having met any person by the name of D. Whittaker Chambers nor do I recognize his photograph which I have seen in the public press.”

MR. NIXON: As I understand your statement, you have made an unqualified statement that you have never known a man by the name of Carl who resembled that man?

DONALD HISS: I have never known that man by the name of Chambers, Carl, or any other name, sir.

When he suggested that whoever was lying ought to go to jail, Mundt seconded the motion.

On August 16th, Alger Hiss faced the Committee once more, this time in executive session. Reassured by the fact that the President of the United States had publicly labeled his case as “a red herring,” deliberately designed to hide the failures of the Eightieth Congress, Hiss eased himself into the witness chair with a visible air of confidence. Again, it was Nixon who asked most of the questions. The first order of business was to try to determine whether Hiss had ever known Chambers, under one name or another. Nixon handed the witness two photographs and asked him “if you can remember that person either as Whittaker Chambers or as Carl or as any other individual you have met.”

This time, Hiss admitted that “the face had a certain familiarity.” Although, he would still like to see Chambers face to face, he was “not prepared to say that I have never seen the man whose pictures are now shown me.” But that was as far as he cared to go until he had the opportunity of “seeing the man, hearing him talk, getting some much more tangible basis for judging the person and the personality.”

MR. NIXON: Would your answer be any different if this individual were described to you as one who had stayed overnight in your house on several occasions?

MR. HISS: I think Mr. Nixon, let me say this: In the course of my service in the government ... I have had a great many people who have visited in my house. If this is a picture of anyone, I would find it very difficult to believe that that individual could have stayed in my house when I was there on several occasions overnight and his face not be more familiar than it is.

When the chairman asked him whether he thought he would recognize a man who had spent a week in his house in the past fifteen years, Hiss was sure that he would “if he hadn’t had a face-lifting.”

MR. THOMAS: No doubt in your mind?

MR. HISS: I have no doubt whatsoever.

After a brief recess, Hiss announced that “I have written a name on this pad in front of me of a person whom I knew in 1933 and 1934 who not only spent some time in my house but sublet my apartment.” The name of this man was George Crosley and the witness remembered him as a free-lance writer who had occasionally interviewed him when he was counsel to the Nye Committee. As he recalled it, “this fellow was writing a series of articles ... which he hoped to sell to one of the magazines.” In June of 1935, when the Hisses had purchased the P Street house, they had rented their Wardman Park apartment to Crosley and his family which consisted of a “strikingly dark” wife and an infant daughter. Because all of Crosley’s furniture hadn’t arrived, “we put them up 2 or 3 nights in a row, his wife and little baby.”

He had also thrown in an old Ford with the apartment. It was an early Model A coupé with “a sassy little trunk on the back.” He had purchased a new car—a Plymouth sedan—and, since Crosley “wanted a way to get around,” he had decided to let him have the Ford.

MR. NIXON: You gave this Ford car to Crosley?

MR. HISS: Threw it in along with the apartment and charged the rent and threw the car in at the same time.

MR. NIXON: In other words, added a little to the rent to cover the car?

MR. HISS: No; I think I charged him exactly what I was paying for the rent and threw the car in in addition. I don’t think I got any compensation.

MR. STRIPLING: You just gave him the car?

MR. HISS: I think the car just went right in with it.

No, he had not given Crosley a bill of sale; “I think I just simply turned it over to him.” He didn’t know whether the writer had recorded the title or not.

He had driven Crosley around Washington in the Ford on several occasions. Once he had given him a lift to New York “when I was going to make a trip to New York City anyway.”

MR. STRIPLING: Was Mrs. Hiss along?

MR. HISS: That I wouldn’t recall. She may have been.

MR. STRIPLING: Did you go to Paoli?

MR. HISS: If Mrs. Hiss was along; yes.

His tenant had left the apartment when the lease expired in September. Although, Crosley had never paid his rent, Hiss had lent him some money but “never got paid back.” He had not heard of him since 1935.

MR. STRIPLING: You wouldn’t say positively George Crosley and this person are the same?

MR. HISS: Not positively.

MR. STRIPLING: You would not say positively?

MR. HISS: I think they are not. That would be my best impression from the photographs.

At one point in the questioning, Hiss stated that both he and his wife were amateur ornithologists. McDowell, who was no mean bird watcher himself, asked him if he had ever seen a prothonotary warbler. The witness replied that he had, “right here on the Potomac.” McDowell replied that he once had observed one in Arlington. Hiss, lost in reverie, seemed to forget that he was in a hearing room. “They come back and nest in those swamps,” he told McDowell. “Beautiful yellow head, a gorgeous bird. Mr. Collins is an ornithologist, Henry Collins. He’s a really good ornithologist, calling them by their Latin names.” Nixon brought him abruptly back to earth with a question about the schools his son had attended from 1934 to 1937.

The three-and a half hour hearing drew to a close with a lawyers’ discussion between Hiss and Nixon as to the reliability of the lie detector test. Nixon had asked the witness whether he was willing to submit to Dr. Leonardo Keeler’s polygraph test, reminding him that Chambers had agreed to do so. Hiss wanted to consult further. He had “talked to people who have seen ... Dr. Keeler’s own test and that the importance of a question registers more emotion than anything else.” While he didn’t want to beg the question, he “would rather have a chance for further consultation before I gave you the answer.” But he would be interested in knowing if Mr. Nixon had ever used the test in his own law practice.

MR. NIXON: No; I have not.

MR. HISS: But you do have confidence in it?

MR. NIXON: Frankly, I have made a study of it in the last week before I put the question. In fact, for the last two weeks I have been studying it and have been in correspondence with Mr. Keeler.

Ten days later, Hiss wrote to the chairman and informed him that since “no Federal Court in the United States relies upon any ‘lie detector’ ... I do not at present feel in a position to make a final decision with respect to the Committee’s suggestion.”

Before Hiss left Washington, he was asked to return at 10:30 a.m. on August 25th when he and Chambers would “have an opportunity to confront one another.” The next morning, a member of the Committee’s staff telephoned him at his New York office and asked him if he would be able to meet with Mr. McDowell later that afternoon. Hiss replied that he would. Shortly before 5:30 p.m., McDowell called and invited him to come over to Room 1400 of the Hotel Commodore. Hiss asked Charles Dollard, a colleague at the Carnegie Corporation, to accompany him, and the two men walked the few blocks to the Commodore. When they entered the hotel suite, Hiss was asked to sit in a chair facing Nixon and McDowell, the only two members of the Committee present.

A few minutes later, a door behind him opened and Chambers was ushered into the room. Nixon asked the two men to stand and face each other. “Mr. Hiss,” he said, “the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before.”

MR. HISS: May I ask him to speak? Will you ask him to say something?

MR. NIXON: Yes. Mr. Chambers, will you tell us your name and business?

MR. CHAMBERS: My name is Whittaker Chambers.

MR. HISS: Would you mind opening your mouth wider?

Will you go on talking?

MR. CHAMBERS: I am senior editor of Time Magazine.

MR. HISS: May I ask whether his voice, when he testified before, was comparable to this?

MR. McDOWELL: I would say it is about the same now as we have heard.

MR. HISS: I think he is George Crosley, but I would like to hear him talk a little longer.

After Chambers had read a portion of a Newsweek article about Truman’s failure to appoint a new Secretary of Labor to replace Lewis B. Schwellenbach, Hiss announced that, although his voice was less resonant than that of the man he had once known, “I believe ... that he must be George Crosley.” But the man he had known in 1934 and 1935 had had terrible teeth. The teeth of the man he was now asked to identify “look to me as though they have been improved upon or that there has been considerable dental work done since I knew George Crosley.” Nixon asked Chambers whether he had “had any dental work since 1934 of a substantial nature.” It seemed that he had, “some extractions and a plate.”

But Hiss still wasn’t certain. Chambers looked “very different in girth and on other appearances—hair, forehead, and so on, particularly the jowls.” But it was obvious to everyone in the room that he was beating a slow but steady retreat. After Nixon made him go over his previous testimony about subletting the 29th Street Apartment to the “Crosleys,” He asked for—and received—permission to question his accuser.

MR. HISS: Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley?

MR. CHAMBERS: Not to my knowledge.

MR. HISS: You did not?

MR. CHAMBERS: No; I did not.

MR. HISS: Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street?

MR. CHAMBERS: I most certainly did.

MR. HISS: Would you tell how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?

MR. CHAMBERS: Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.

Finally, Hiss was “perfectly prepared to identify this man as George Crosley.” When Stripling asked him if he thought he could produce three people who would swear that they, too, had known Chambers as Crosley, Hiss said that he would try. The only ones he could think of offhand were Stephen Raushenbush, Robert Wohlford and Elsie Gullender who had worked with him on the Nye Committee in 1935. But he couldn’t remember whether Chambers had ever called on any of these people.

McDowell then turned to Chambers and asked him whether he was prepared to identify Hiss as the man “who was a member of the Communist Party at whose home you stayed.” He was.

MR. McDOWELL: You make the identification positive?

MR. CHAMBERS: Positive identification.

While Chambers was talking, Hiss rose from his chair and walked over toward him. Livid with anger, he invited “Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this Committee without their being privileged for suit for libel. I challenge you to do it and I hope you will do it damned quickly.” By the time he had finished hurling his gauntlet, he was so close to Chambers that Louis J. Russell, one of the Committee’s investigators, threw himself between the two men. “I am not going to touch him,” Hiss exclaimed. “You are touching me.” McDowell ordered Hiss to sit down and the hearing was adjourned for a few minutes to clear the air.

The great confrontation was over. Before McDowell brought it to its official close at 7:45 p.m., he announced that, in view of the testimony, the full Committee would meet in Washington on August 25th and that both men would be subpoenaed to appear before it. Hiss told him that he would be happy to show up without putting the Committee to the trouble of serving him with a subpoena. But there was still some unfinished business, he told Messrs. McDowell and Nixon—he had been asked to “make arrangements for Mrs. Hiss to come down from Vermont to meet in executive session with a subcommittee” and he was prepared to oblige if her presence was still required. Because Hiss was uncertain about schedules, it was agreed that he would telephone Mr. Nixon at the Commodore as soon as Mrs. Hiss arrived in town.

MR. HISS: May I come with her?

MR. McDOWELL: Yes.

MR. HISS: Thank you. Am I dismissed? Is the proceeding over?

MR. McDOWELL: Any more questions to ask of Mr. Hiss?

MR. NIXON: I have nothing.

MR. McDOWELL: That is all. Thank you very much.

MR. HISS: I don’t reciprocate.

MR. McDOWELL: Italicize that in the record.

MR. HISS: I wish you would.

Later that evening, Hiss called Nixon and told him that his wife had arrived in town and would be available as originally scheduled. The next morning, the Hisses, accompanied by Dollard, met with Nixon at the Commodore. The hearing took only ten minutes. After Mrs. Hiss had affirmed that she would tell the truth, she stated that she had known a man by the name of George Crosley between 1934 and 1937. She remembered that Crosley and his wife had spent a few days with them before moving into their old apartment on P Street. As far as she could recall, she had never taken a trip with this man whom she described as “a little too smiley.” Before Nixon dismissed her, she informed him that, if he wanted her opinion, the man who had called himself Crosley was nothing but “a sponger.”

The next act in what was rapidly beginning to have all the appearances of a Greek tragedy was scheduled to take place on August 25th in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building. Long before Chairman Thomas gavelled the hearing into being at 10:30 a.m., the chamber was filled to overflowing with more people than it had ever held before. Television cameramen, newspaper photographers, radio commentators, and the less spectacular members of the Fourth Estate crowded every corner of the long room. Thomas welcomed them all in the name of the Committee. “We are glad,” he announced, “to have as many representatives of the American public as is possible to crowd into this room today.” He was also mighty happy to put Hiss and Chambers on view together before a nationwide audience.

The first order of business was to determine whether anyone but Alger Hiss had ever known of George Crosley’s existence. At the Commodore confrontation, Hiss had suggested the names of three former Nye Committee employees whom he thought might have run into Crosley when the latter was scrounging for magazine fodder. Stripling’s investigators had discovered that one was dead, another could not be traced, and the third couldn’t remember ever having met anyone named Crosley. A search of the records of the Library of Congress, the Copyright Division and the Public Catalogue had uncovered only two writers by that name—an obscure 1905 poet and a doctor who had published a treatise on the effects of ultra-violet light. If George Crosley had ever existed, he was now a case for the Missing Persons Bureau.

With Crosley out of the way, the Committee turned to Fords and photostats. Hiss had previously testified that after he had purchased a new Plymouth in the Spring of ’35, he had either given Crosley-Chambers “the use of the car” or “the car outright.” According to the records of the District of Columbia’s Motor Vehicles and Traffic Bureau, Hiss had bought the Plymouth on September 7, 1935. If the dates were correct, then Hiss had given Chambers the old Ford before he had obtained the Plymouth.

Nixon was obviously fascinated by the business of the cars. Would Mr. Hiss enlighten him as to whether he had sold, or given the car to Crosley?

MR. HISS: I gave Crosley, according to my best recollection....

MR. NIXON: Well, now, just a moment on that point. I don’t want to interrupt you on that ‘to the best of my recollection’ but you certainly can testify ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ as to whether you gave Crosley a car. How many cars have you given away in your life, Mr. Hiss?

MR. HISS: I have only had one old car of a financial value of $25 in my life. That is the car that I let Crosley have the use of.

When Mundt reminded the witness that, a week earlier, he had sworn that he had “sold him an automobile,” Hiss promptly swallowed his words and conceded that, if that’s what the transcript said, it must be correct.

After Nixon had read into the record most of Hiss’ previous testimony about the Ford roadster, he confessed to the chairman that he was “amazed to hear Mr. Hiss say this morning that he can only testify to the best of his recollection as to whether he ever gave Crosley a car at all, that he is not sure as to whether or not he transferred the car to Crosley, that he might have given it to him for his use only, and that he is not even sure when the transaction occurred....” As far as he was concerned, Hiss ought to “tell us exactly what did happen to that car.”

The witness was only too happy to oblige. His testimony, “based upon the best recollection I have, is that I gave Crosley the use of the car, as I gave him the use of the apartment.” He thought that the transfer had taken place at the same time as he had subleased the apartment to the Crosleys but it could have taken place “several months after the rental transaction.” When Mundt asked him whether he had ever given the Ford “to anybody else in any way besides to Mr. George Crosley,” Hiss insisted that he could not answer the question “without consulting the records.”

The reason for the Committee’s preoccupation with the Ford’s disposition became clear when Stripling called Louis Russell, one of its own investigators. Russell testified that he had checked the records of the District’s Director of Vehicles and Traffic and that he had discovered that one Alger Hiss had assigned a 1929 Ford automobile to the Cherner Motor Company on July 23, 1936. He identified a photostatic copy of the assignment of title as a copy of the original document which he had seen on file. It was signed by Hiss and notarized by W. Marvin Smith, an attorney in the Solicitor General’s office.

After some shilly-shallying about “photostatic signatures,” Hiss admitted that “it looks like my signature to me, Mr. Chairman.” He was also prepared to go a little further and own that Mr. Smith had indeed notarized his signature. When Stripling produced a sales slip which indicated that the vehicle had been sold by the Cherner Motor Company to one William Rosen a few hours after Hiss had turned it in, that was the last trace of the saucy little car that was carrying the Committee to glory.

Just before the noon recess, Hébert wanted to ask a question.

MR. HÉBERT: Mr. Hiss, now that your memory has been refreshed by the development of the last few minutes, do you recall the transaction whereby you disposed of that Ford that you could not remember this morning?

MR. HISS: No, I have no present recollection of the disposition of the Ford, Mr. Hébert.

MR. HÉBERT: In view of the refreshing of your memory that has been presented here this morning?

MR. HISS: In view of that, and in view of all the other developments.

MR. HÉBERT: You are a remarkable and agile young man, Mr. Hiss.

In the afternoon, Hiss read a letter he had written to Chairman Thomas the preceding day. After spelling out for the Committee his record as a public servant, he read a list of questions which he wanted Chambers to answer in public. He was informed that Chambers would “take the stand directly after you finish on the stand today.” Before he subsided, Hiss challenged Chambers “to make the statements about me with respect to Communism in public that he has made under privilege of this Committee.”

It had grown dark when Chambers took the stand, and Thomas ordered the lights turned on. Led by Nixon and Stripling, the portly witness repeated much of his former testimony about Hiss and Communism. Since his predecessor on the stand had raised a question about the editor’s mental condition, Nixon asked him whether he had ever been “treated for mental illness.”

MR. CHAMBERS: Yes; I have never been treated for a mental illness—period.

MR. NIXON: You have never been treated in a mental institution?

MR. CHAMBERS: Never.

MR. NIXON: Never. Have you ever been treated for a mental illness or been in an institution during the past four years, which was the charge made?

MR. CHAMBERS: Of course, not; and anyone at Time Magazine can tell you that.

Just before eight o’clock, Nixon wanted to know if Mr. Hiss was the witness’ closest friend. Chambers replied that he “was certainly the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party.”

MR. NIXON: Mr. Chambers, can you search your memory now to see what motive you can have for accusing Mr. Hiss of being a Communist at the present time?

MR. CHAMBERS: What motive can I have?

MR. NIXON: Yes, I mean do you—is there any grudge that you have against Mr. Hiss over anything that he has done to you?

MR. CHAMBERS: The story has spread that, in testifying against Mr. Hiss, I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.

The chairman’s gavel signified the end of the hearing.

Two days later, Chambers accepted Hiss’s challenge to repeat his accusations in public. When he appeared on the Meet the Press radio program, Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post asked him, “are you willing to say ... that Alger Hiss is or ever was a Communist?” When Chambers replied that “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now,” Folliard wanted to know if he was “prepared to go to court to answer a suit for libel or slander?” The answer was short and to the point. “I don’t think Hiss will go to court.”

On September 27th, Hiss proved him wrong by filing a $75,000 defamation suit in a Baltimore federal court. Although Chambers announced that he welcomed the litigation, he became convinced during some pre-trial hearings that, unless he could document some of his charges, he was reasonably sure of losing the suit. However, hidden behind a dumbwaiter shaft in the Brooklyn home of Nathan Levine, one of his nephews, was a bulky manila envelope. In it, were forty-seven typed copies of State Department reports, five rolls of microfilm, and four memoranda in Hiss’s handwriting. Chambers counted on these to save him from a civil judgment. They didn’t fail him.

William Marbury, Hiss’ attorney in the Baltimore libel suit, had asked Chambers whether he could produce “any documentary proof of your assertions?” On November 17th, Chambers complied by dumping the copies of official documents and the Hiss memos on the long conference table in Marbury’s office. These, he claimed, Hiss had turned over to him in 1937 after meeting a Colonel Bykov, a Soviet secret agent. Hiss would bring classified reports home for his wife to type. He would return the originals to the files the next morning while the typed copies would be delivered to Chambers for transmission to Bykov.

Hiss immediately directed his attorneys to turn the documents over to the Department of Justice. Alexander Campbell, chief of Justice’s Criminal Division, rushed up to Baltimore and took possession of all the papers. At the same time, he ordered John F. X. McGohey, the United States Attorney in New York, to convene the Federal Grand Jury. But, with the exception of a provocative little item in Jerry Kluttz’ column in the Washington Post that “some startling information” had been uncovered in the Baltimore libel suit, what Chambers was later to refer to as his “lifeline” didn’t seem to have made much of a stir.

Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune thought that he smelled a rather large rat. He decided to play his hunch and, on December 1st, cabled Nixon, who was on the high seas bound for a Central American vacation, that a “bombshell” had exploded in Baltimore. Nixon ordered Stripling to visit Chambers at his Maryland farm where the latter blandly admitted that he had been less than frank with the Committee. Twenty-four hours later, Nixon, with the help of the Coast Guard, was back in Washington, and Chambers had turned over the five rolls of microfilm which he had cached in a pumpkin in his backyard to William Wheeler and Donald T. Appell, two Committee investigators. Three of the rolls, which had not yet been developed, were still in their aluminum cylinders while the developed rolls were wrapped in oilpaper bags.

On December 3rd, the day before Nixon & Company announced its strike, the New York Federal Grand Jury was called back into session. Its first step was to subpoena both Hiss and Chambers, a step that forced the Committee—most regretfully—to cancel a scheduled public hearing. On December 15th, the grand jurors, by one more than a bare majority, returned a two-count indictment against Alger Hiss. In it, it was charged that he had lied twice in his testimony: once, when he denied that he had turned State Department documents over to Whittaker Chambers, and again when he swore that he had not seen his rotund accuser “after January 1, 1937.” According to the grand jury, Hiss had delivered Government reports to Chambers in February and March of 1938 and had seen him during those months.

Hiss’ trial was originally scheduled for January 24, 1949 but, because of six adjournments, it was not until May 31st that it officially began with the selection of a ten man—two woman jury. McGohey had entrusted the case for the prosecution to the hands of Thomas F. Murphy, an Assistant United States Attorney noted for the thickest and droopiest mustache in New York County. Hiss had selected Lloyd Paul Stryker, a white-haired veteran of the criminal courts, as his attorney-in-chief. There were others—Thomas J. Donegan, who had been sent by the Attorney General to lend a helping hand, and Edward C. McLean, who used up a chair at the defense table—but it was Murphy and Stryker who carried the biggest swords. The judge was Samuel H. Kaufman, a wizened little man who could hardly see over the edge of the bench without rising from his abundantly stuffed chair.

The jury had been selected in less than three hours. Early on the afternoon of the trial’s first day, Murphy heaved his 6’ 4” bulk out of his chair and opened the Government’s case. He was going to prove, he announced, that Hiss had lied as the grand jury charged. Although he intended to corroborate Mr. Chambers’ testimony, he admitted, somewhat over-generously, that “if you don’t believe Mr. Chambers’ story, we have no case under the Federal perjury rule.” Stryker was more than willing to do battle on these terms and he assured the jury that he would do everything in his power to prove to their satisfaction that the man who accused Alger Hiss could only be described by the term used “in the warm southern countries” to warn of the approach of lepers—‘Unclean, unclean!’

Chambers was the Government’s first witness. Dressed in a baggy blue suit, he wearily repeated the testimony he had given on so many occasions in the past. He described his years in the Communist underground, his intimate friendship with the Hisses, the help the defendant had given him in obtaining secret State Department papers, and his own torturous break with the Party in 1938. This was all old hat to those who had followed the House Committee hearings, but suddenly Chambers added something new. He swore that Hiss had lent him $400.00 in the fall of 1937 to buy a new car for a trip to Florida, a trip that was to mark his disappearance from the Communist scene.

After Chambers had identified the Baltimore documents and the pumpkin papers as having been received from Hiss, Murphy asked him when he had last seen the defendant.

A. I saw Alger Hiss around Christmas, 1938.

Q. And where did you see him?

A. I saw him at his home on Volta Place.

The Hisses had lived at 3415 Volta Place in northwest Washington from December 29, 1937 to November 1, 1943, and Chambers claimed that it was at this house that he would pick up the reports that Hiss had pilfered from State’s files. At first, all papers were photographed in Baltimore by a man named Felix Inslerman, but the procedure was changed in late ’37 when Bykov ordered Priscilla Hiss to type copies of the reports.

On his last trip to Volta Place, he had tried to convince Hiss to join him in breaking with the underground. His friend had told him that he was sorry that Chambers, whom he knew only as Carl, was leaving the party because he had heard that “a new and more important post was to be given to me.” Before they had said goodbye, Hiss gave Chambers a wooden rolling-pin as a Christmas present for the latter’s infant daughter. One year later, in a conversation with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr., he had named Hiss “as a member of the Communist Party.”

Stryker didn’t waste any time beating around the bush when Murphy turned the witness over to him. He wanted to know if Mr. Chambers knew what an oath was. His man did. “An oath is a declaration which a man makes when he promises to tell the truth.” He agreed with Stryker that “in our courts it is an affirmation made by a man who calls on Almighty God to witness the truth of what he says.” But, Stryker thundered, wasn’t it a fact that he had taken an oath in 1937 to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies?” He had.

Q. That was false from the beginning to the end, was it not, Mr. Chambers?

A. Of course.

Q. And it was perjury, wasn’t it?

A. If you like.

Q. And you did it in order to deceive and cheat the United States Government ... is that not true?

A. That is correct.

Q. You were an underhanded enemy of this country doing what you could to aid a foreign country and overthrow our constitution by force and violence?

A. Yes.

Chambers admitted that he had used more than seven aliases between 1924 and 1938 when he was in the underground. Furthermore, he had lied to the Dean of Columbia University, had stolen books from numerous libraries, and had lived with several women including a New Orleans whore with the fanciful name of “One-Eyed Annie.” While he was at Columbia, he had written an anti-religious play that was so offensive that he had been expelled from the university.

Chambers was prepared to admit everything—that he had been a liar, a thief, an atheist, a spy and a cheat. But he insisted that he had repented when he broke with the Communists in April of 1938. This was the opening Stryker had been waiting for.

Q. Did you have a high, God-fearing man’s regard for an oath in August of 1948?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you in October, 1948, testify before the grand jury in this building?

A. I did.

Q. When you testified before the grand jury, you were asked whether there was any espionage and you answered that there was not?

A. I answered I had no knowledge of it.

Q. Was that answer true or false?

A. That answer was false.

Q. Then you admit that you testified falsely and committed perjury before the grand jury in this building, is that right?

A. That is right.

After getting his pliable witness to admit that he had written erotic poetry and that his brother Dick had committed suicide after two previous attempts, Stryker called it a day. Murphy tried to repair some of the damage by asking Chambers to explain why he had perjured himself before the grand jury as late as 1948. The ex-Time editor (he had resigned on December 10th), maintained that he had done so “to preserve from injury in so far as I could all individuals in the past in that conspiracy.... I was particularly anxious not to injure Mr. Hiss any more than necessary out of grounds of past friendship and because he is by widespread consent a very able man. Therefore, I chose to jeopardize myself rather than reveal the full extent of his activities and those of others.” Perjury was never more nobly explained away.

Before he called Esther Chambers, Murphy put a variety of witnesses on the stand to buttress the accuser’s story. A bank official testified that Mrs. Hiss had withdrawn $400.00 from a joint account on November 17, 1937, while an automobile salesman said that Mrs. Chambers had purchased a Ford sedan four days later. After some typewritten notes and reports sent to various people by the Hisses were identified, an Oriental rug dealer by the name of Edward H. Touloukian said that he had delivered four Bokhara rugs to a Dr. Meyer Schapiro just after Christmas of 1936. Since Chambers had sworn that he had been ordered by Colonel Bykov to give the defendant a rug, Dr. Schapiro’s testimony that he had bought the rugs from Touloukian at the editor’s request and with his money was of more than passing interest.

At last, the stage was set for Mrs. Chambers’ appearance. A tiny forty-nine-year-old woman dressed in an ill-fitting gray suit, she perched nervously in the witness chair, waiting for the indignities she was sure were in the offing. Under Murphy’s gentle questioning, she revealed a wealth of domestic detail about the Hisses that complemented the story told by her husband. The two families had been the best of friends, and she could even recall a wonderful New Year’s Eve party at Volta Place in 1937. Alger and Priscilla called her Lisa and her husband, Carl. When the judge asked her what their last name had been during this period of friendship, the witness stated, “We never had a last name to them.”

Stryker spent two days trying to destroy a woman who had much more endurance than her frail physique would have suggested. While she admitted that she didn’t have “a very good head for figures or dates,” she insisted that the Hisses and the Chamberses had known each other intimately and that she had once painted a portrait of Timmy Hobson. The relationship had been so close that Priscilla Hiss had willingly permitted one of her best linen towels to be used as a diaper by one of the Chambers infants.

During most of Stryker’s cross-examination, Mrs. Chambers, although frequently close to tears, managed to maintain her composure. It was only when the defense attorney began to attack her husband that her voice rose above a whisper. In October of 1937, when she had applied for a scholarship for her daughter, she had referred to Chambers as a “freelance writer and translator.” When Stryker asked her whether she “didn’t think it was much of a misrepresentation to present your husband to this school as a decent citizen,” she snapped back: “I resent that. My husband is a decent citizen, a great man.”

Q. Was he a great decent citizen in October, 1937?

A. When he was in the underground?

Q. I just asked a simple question. Was he a great and decent citizen in October, 1937, yes or no?

A. Yes, and always.

On her direct examination, Mrs. Chambers had first testified that the New Year’s Eve party at Volta Place had taken place at the end of 1936. When it was pointed out to her that the Hisses hadn’t moved to that address until December 29, 1937, she had pushed the date one year ahead. On cross, she was sure that the New Year’s Eve party which she had in mind had taken place at 1245 30th Street and not at Volta Place. She now remembered that it was a housewarming that had occurred at the latter house.

After Mrs. Chambers had stepped down, Murphy decided that it was time to introduce the State Department documents. Photographic enlargements were exhibited on a platform which was set up on the witness box. Walter Anderson, the chief of State’s records branch, identified the typewritten papers as cables received by Foggy Bottom during the first three months of 1938 from American diplomats scattered from Tokyo to Buenos Aires. They covered subjects as unconnected as Manchukuoan finances, Nazi relations with Austria, and British ship construction plans. The microfilm documents were, in the main, interdepartmental papers from the files of the Trade Agreements Section.

After a Miss Eunice A. Lincoln, Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre’s private secretary, had identified four of the Baltimore memos as being in the defendant’s handwriting, Murphy called Ramos S. Feehan, an FBI typewriter expert. It was the latter’s opinion that all but one of the Baltimore documents had been typed on the same machine as letters written by the Hisses during the thirties. Stryker was not prepared to dispute Feehan’s conclusions and conceded their accuracy.

With the documents out of the way, Murphy turned to the task of connecting Chambers with their theft from the State Department. For this purpose, he summoned Henry Julian Wadleigh, an Oxford alumnus, who freely admitted that he had begun “to take out documents and give them to unauthorized people as soon as I joined the State Department.” Although he had not given any of the papers in evidence to Whittaker Chambers, he had turned others over to him. However, he insisted that he had limited his thievery to papers which passed over his desk in the Trade Agreements Section. He, too, had been given a rug by Chambers in 1937.

It took Murphy three weeks to put in his case. Stryker’s defense was confined to showing 1.) that Hiss was a man of sterling character, and 2.) that Chambers was as chronic a liar as had ever lived. To prove the first proposition, he paraded to the stand as impressive a group of character witnesses as ever graced an American court. There was John W. Davis, the unsuccessful 1924 Democratic Presidential candidate, Charles Fahy, a former Solicitor General, Admiral Richard Hepburn, and Supreme Court Justices Felix Franfurter and Stanley Reed. They all agreed that Alger Hiss’s reputation “for integrity, loyalty and veracity” was excellent.

These imposing luminaries were followed by Mrs. Claudie Catlett, a rather stout Negress, who had worked as a maid for the Hisses during their early days in Washington. She remembered that Chambers had come to the P Street house once and that he had given his name as “Crosby, like in Bing.” When her employers had moved to either Thirtieth Street or Volta Place, they had given her children an old typewriter. But Murphy forced her to admit that “I don’t remember nothing about the typewriter.” In fact, it hadn’t been until 1949 that one of her sons told her that they had received a typewriter from the Hisses.

The Catlett boys, Raymond and Perry, succeeded their mother. Raymond had helped Ed McLean trace the machine—an ancient Woodstock—to one Ira Lockey’s house where the lawyer had purchased it on April 16, 1949, for $15.00. Raymond had kept the typewriter for a year or two after the Hisses gave it to him and then he had let his brother’s wife take it. She had transferred it to his sister and he lost track of it after that until it had been found in Lockey’s house. But he was unable to tell Murphy in what month or year he had received the machine. “I haven’t got no papers, no secretary to copy all that stuff down,” he explained.

Perry Catlett recalled that the Woodstock had been broken when he first saw it. He had taken it to a repair shop on K Street but some man there had told him that it wasn’t worth fixing. He was certain that the typewriter had been given to his family when the Hisses moved to Volta Street on December 29, 1936. But when Murphy asked him, “What if I tell you that the shop on K Street wasn’t opened for business until September, 1938?,” Perry shook his head and replied, “I don’t know the time.”

When Hiss, neatly dressed in a tan summer suit, finally took the stand, he denied almost everything that Chambers had said on his direct examination. He said that he had known a man named Crosley between 1934 and 1936 but that he had never, until the summer of 1948, ever associated him with Whittaker Chambers. When Stryker asked him if he had ever been a member of the Communist party “or a fellow traveler or a sympathizer,” he quietly answered, “I am not and never have been.” He had never given any “restricted, secret or confidential documents of the State Department of any kind” to Chambers “or any other unauthorized person.” Stryker, after taking his client from his birth in Baltimore to the high point of his government career as General Secretary to the San Francisco Conference, wound up with a crescendo.

Q. Mr. Hiss, you have entered your formal and solemn plea of not guilty to the charges here against you, have you not?

A. I have.

Q. And in truth and in fact you are not guilty?

A. I am not guilty.

With a perfunctory “your witness,” Stryker returned to the counsel table.

Never once during his cross-examination did the prosecutor refer to the defendant as anything but “Mr. Witness.” He took Hiss through the entire period of his acquaintance with Crosley-Chambers, pointing up, in the process, what he obviously regarded as a bold-faced fabrication—the gift of the Twenty-eighth Street apartment and the Ford. As for the Woodstock typewriter, didn’t Hiss tell the FBI agents, who had questioned him on December 4, 1948, that he thought that his wife had given it away “subsequent to 1938?” He might have said that but “my knowledge today is that we gave the typewriter to the Catletts at the time when we moved from 30th Street to Volta Place in December, 1937.” Finally, after eight long hours, at the end of which he was trying to make some hay out of the fact that the witness had not insisted on a lie detector test, Murphy was through.

Priscilla Hiss, a thin, graying woman, followed her husband. She, too, denied any intimacy with the Chamberses as well as any typing of State Department documents. She identified the Woodstock, which sat on the defense table, as the machine her father had given her in the twenties, but insisted that she had never used it after buying a portable in the fall of 1937. Although she had told the Federal Grand Jury that she had given the Woodstock to either a junk dealer or the Salvation Army, the Catletts’ testimony had reminded her that she had turned it over to them just before the move to Volta Place.

Murphy scored early. After the witness denied that she had been a Socialist in 1932, he produced photostats of her registration showing that he had indeed enrolled as such that year. When he asked her whether she knew “that the records of the Socialist Party Morningside Branch list you as a member,” she replied, with some heat, that she did not. Lastly, remembering that Mrs. Chambers had sworn that Prossy, as she called her, had enrolled at Baltimore’s Mercy Hospital “to learn nursing,” he asked Mrs. Hiss whether this was true. It was not. Then how did she explain a letter which she had written on May 25th to the University of Maryland, applying for admission to a course in inorganic chemistry as a prerequisite for “Mercy Hospital’s training course in medical technology?” All the witness could say was that “medical technology” was different than “nursing.”

Stryker’s last witness was a mysterious man who had been sitting just behind the courtroom’s rail making copious notes as Chambers was testifying. At Murphy’s request, he had been identified on the trial’s third day as Dr. Carl Binger, a psychiatrist. After posing a hypothetical question which included every dereliction in Chambers’ past life, the defense attorney asked Binger, “now, assuming the facts as stated in the question to be true and taking into account your knowledge of his writings and translations, have you as a psychiatrist an opinion within the bounds of reasonable certainty as to the mental condition of Whittaker Chambers?” Before Binger could answer, Murphy stormed up to the bench to remind Kaufman that Chambers’ credibility was the central issue of the case and that the psychiatrist’s answer would be a usurpation of the jury’s function. The judge agreed and the good doctor walked out of the courtroom with the answer to Stryker’s question locked behind his beetled brow.

The defense promptly rested and Murphy called Burnetta Catlett, Claudie Catlett’s daughter, as his first rebuttal witness. Burnetta had begun working for a Doctor Easter when she was still in high school and had taken the Woodstock with her to type her homework.

When her employer died, she had left the machine at his house. A Vernon Marlow had found it among the doctor’s effects and finally passed it on to Ira Lockey in return for a hauling job the latter had done for him. Lockey had turned it over to his daughter who had used it to practice typing until she moved to New York in October of 1948. Finally, Ed McLean, Stryker’s cocounsel, had bought it from Lockey for fifteen dollars barely two months before the trial.

Since Perry Catlett had testified that he had taken the Woodstock to a repair shop on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street, Murphy produced one Henri P. Henry, a real estate operator who managed the building. Henry was sure that there had been no typewriter repair stores on Connecticut Avenue at the time, although he did remember that the Woodstock Typewriter Company had rented a second-floor office on September 15, 1938 for two years. When the defense intimated that the company may also have had an office on K Street, a block or so away, just before it moved into Henry’s building, Murphy produced another real estate man who swore that it had done nothing more than sign a lease for the K Street quarters which had been cancelled on June 18, 1938.

John Foster Dulles was easily the Government’s most impressive witness. He said that he had sounded out Hiss at the end of 1945, when both men were en route to England for the first meeting of the United Nations, as to whether he contemplated leaving public life. Although it was Hiss’s recollection that Dulles had, during this voyage, “asked me whether I would be interested in becoming President of the Carnegie Endowment,” the latter denied that he had done so. “I don’t think,” he testified, “I discussed at that time with him the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment, because I was only one of twenty or more trustees, and the trustees did not until their main meeting take up definitely the matter of seeking a president.”

In December of 1946, after Hiss’ election as President of the Carnegie Endowment had been announced, Alfred Kohlberg, the late publisher of Plain Talk, wrote to Mr. Dulles that he had reason to believe that Hiss had been a Communist. Although Hiss had testified that Dulles had contacted him at once and asked him for help in preparing an answer to Kohlberg, the witness insisted that “I did not discuss with Mr. Hiss about the letter ... until some days later on.” As far as the letter’s writer was concerned, “I never wrote a letter to Mr. Kohlberg.”

Nothing daunted, Kohlberg wrote two more letters to Dulles who then asked Hiss to come to his office for a conference. At that meeting, Hiss had testified, Dulles had told him that Kohlberg was the author of the letters he had received. In his testimony, Dulles didn’t say whether he had mentioned Kohlberg’s name or not. As he remembered the conversation, Hiss had informed him that he had just testified before the Federal Grand Jury and that “he had been asked ... of an acquaintanceship with a number of people.”

On the evening of August 3, 1948, the day on which Chambers first testified before the House Committee, Hiss (if he was to be believed) had telephoned Dulles, who was then Chairman of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment. In view of Chambers’ testimony, he had offered to resign if Mr. Dulles thought that his fellow trustees would be unduly disturbed by the allegations that the Time editor was making. Although Dulles could not remember any such conversation, he did recall that he had had a discussion with Hiss late in August. “Mr. Hiss said ... that he had come to the conclusion that he had probably better resign, but that it would be questionable whether he ought to resign while the hearings were going on, because that might seem to be some admission on his part—and I quite agreed with him that any action like his resignation ought not to take place while the hearings were going on.” Hiss did indeed tender his resignation on December 12, 1948, but it was not accepted and he had remained as President until his term expired on May 31, 1949.

After Murphy tried—unsuccessfully—to put Hede Massing, the former wife of Communist Gerhard Eisler, on the stand, the trial ground to a halt in a welter of minor rebuttal witnesses on both sides of the fence, none of whom contributed a great deal to anyone’s store of essential information. An FBI agent who had interviewed Hiss in 1946, the assistant registrar of the University of Maryland, a counselor at a camp attended by Hiss’ stepson, and the proprietor of a small summer hotel in Chestertown, Maryland, who, because of illness, testified by deposition, did little more than add a few hours to a trial that was already into its sixth sweltering week.

Stryker’s summations lasted more than four hours. As far as he was concerned, it was simply a question of Chambers’ credibility. Murphy, he reminded the jury, had summed it up best himself in his opening when he had said that “... if you don’t believe Chambers then we have no case under the federal perjury rule.” And who could believe a chronic perjurer, a fornicator, a confessed spy, an atheist, a pornographic poet and a blasphemer? “The case comes down to this,” he told his twelve auditors, “who is telling the truth? Alger Hiss or Chambers?” There was no doubt as to how he had answered this question for himself. “I would not believe Chambers on a stack of Bibles if the FBI stacked them as high as this building!”

Toward the end, Stryker’s face was as red as the hand with which he relentlessly pounded the rail of the jury box. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begged them, “if I have done anything that you don’t like, if I have offended you, any one of you, in any way, hold it against me, not against Alger Hiss.” Exhausted and shaken, he turned slowly and looked toward the counsel table where his impassive client sat. “Alger Hiss, this long nightmare is drawing to a close. Rest well. Your case, your life, your liberty are in good hands. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”

Murphy, retreating somewhat from his ill-chosen definition of the federal perjury rule, confessed that he wasn’t resting his case on Chambers alone. There were the documents and the Woodstock. If Hiss’ contradictions about the apartment and the car he had turned over to Chambers weren’t convincing enough, how could the handwritten documents be explained away? Even the defense’s location of the missing typewriter was suspect—if the FBI couldn’t find it, why was it so ridiculously easy for Ed McLean to trace it to Ira Lockey’s house? “I submit that two things must be clear; one, that the typewriter was in the possession of the Hiss family until at least Mr. Chambers’ defection, until he left the Party; and two, that the Catletts had the typewriter for some time after that....”

“We have shown you here,” he thundered at the jury, “the typewriter, the original State Department documents, the documents in this case—three solid witnesses.” The dozen or so character witnesses the defendant had put on the stand couldn’t change that. “Mr. Stryker said that he was going to call the shade of Oliver Wendell Holmes and have the ghost of that revered Justice testify on behalf of the defendant. And I said to myself, if he is going to call the shade of Justice Holmes, there are a couple of shades that I would like to call here. One man’s name was Judas Iscariot and the other’s Major General Benedict Arnold.” He paused a moment to let that sink in. “But let me dwell a moment on reputation. I dare say that Judas Iscariot had a fairly good reputation. He was one of the Twelve. He was next to God, and we know what he did. Benedict Arnold came from a fine family. He was made a major general and sold out West Point. He wasn’t caught. But, if he had been caught, don’t you think he could have had George Washington as a reputation witness?”

He was almost through. “You are the second jury to hear this story,” he told them. “The Grand Jury heard the same story. The Grand Jury heard this traitor and Mr. Chambers, and that Grand Jury indicted Hiss. It indicted Hiss because he lied. He lied to them and I submit he lied to you. The Grand Jury said he lied twice on December 15th. And as a representative of 150,000,000 people of this country, I ask you to concur in that charge of the Grand Jury. I ask you as a representative of the United States Government to come back and put the lie in that man’s face.”

The jury retired at 4:20 on the afternoon of July 7th. Six hours later, after their foreman had informed Kaufman that there was no possibility of reaching a verdict that night, the jurors were sent to a hotel. At noon the next day, they filed back into the jury box to listen to Kaufman’s repetition of the portion of his charge dealing with corroborative and circumstantial evidence. Three hours later, the foreman asked a bailiff to deliver a note to the judge informing him that “the jury feels that it cannot arrive at a verdict.” At 4:45, he forwarded a similar communication. Kaufman begged them to try once more, but at 8:55 they announced that “the jury finds it impossible to reach a verdict.” This was enough for Kaufman who discharged them “with the thanks of the court.” The trial was over.

Four months later, the United States of America versus Alger Hiss encored, this time with District Judge Henry W. Goddard at the helm. Tom Murphy was still around but Stryker had yielded to Claude B. Cross, a quiet, unassuming Boston elder who looked as if he had never pounded a counsel table in his life. A jury of seven women and five men was quickly selected and, on the afternoon of November 19, 1949, the Government began its second go-round in its attempt to convict Alger Hiss of perjury.

With only minor discrepancies, most of the witnesses who had testified at the first trial repeated their stories. But there were parvenus. Goddard was determined to admit any evidence that was vaguely relevant and several of the witnesses who had been rejected by Kaufman were permitted to tell their once-verboten stories. Hede Massing, for instance, said that she had met the defendant in 1935 at the Washington home of Noel Fields, an erstwhile League of Nations official. Mrs. Massing, an ex-Communist, who admitted that “I have a bad memory,” stated that she and Hiss had had a conversation as to which one of them was going to win Fields for his cell.

Henrikas Rabinavicius, a former Lithuanian diplomat, later testified for the defense against Mrs. Massing. According to him, he had met her at the home of Eugene Lyons in the Fall of 1949. There, she told him that, during the early thirties, she had been assigned by the Party “to endeavor to contact young men in the Department of State.” She had carefully concealed her Communist affiliation from her “young men,” she had told him, “because that would have frightened them away from her.” When Rabinavicius had intimated that he doubted the truth of her remarks, she threatened to write a devastating article about him.

William Rosen, the elusive vice-president of the Cherner Motor Company, to which the old Hiss Ford had been transferred, had been located by Murphy in California after the first trial. He proved to be a far from loquacious witness. Outside of admitting that he did not know either J. Peters or Alger Hiss, he refused to answer every question Murphy threw at him on the ground that “any answer I may give may tend to incriminate me.” When Rosen stepped down, Goddard warned the jury it was not to draw any inference unfavorable to Hiss because the witness had claimed his constitutional immunity.

Sergeant George Norman Roulhac had been stationed in the Aleutians during the first trial. Murphy now called him to prove that the Woodstock had not been in the Catletts’ possession until after the date of the most of the typewritten documents and not on December 29, 1937, as Priscilla Hiss had claimed. Roulhac had signed the lease for Mrs. Catlett when she had moved to P Street on January 17, 1938, because the rental agent would not deal with a colored lady. He was sure that he had not seen any typewriter at P Street until “about three months after we lived there.” The machine he had seen in a downstairs hallway was “the same design” as the Woodstock he had been shown in court.

Cross called Dr. Binger back to the wars. The answer to the famous hypothetical question that Kaufman had blocked in July was about to be delivered with Goddard’s blessing. Binger waited patiently until the question was in the record, and then, with his eyes on the ceiling, opined that “Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as a psychopathic personality, a disorder of character the distinguishing features of which are amoral and social behaviour.” One of the most significant symptoms of this malady were “chronic, persistent, and repetitive lying and a tendency to make false accusations.” However, he admitted to Murphy that doctors frequently disagreed on diagnosis and that he had been wrong more than once in his own professional life.

On the trial’s last day, Murphy produced his one surprise witness—Edith Murray who had worked as a maid for the Chamberses at their two homes in Baltimore from the Fall of 1934 to the Spring of 1936. She swore that she had seen Mrs. Hiss there four times and the defendant once. However, when she had first been shown a photograph of Mrs. Hiss by FBI agents, she was not quite sure of her identity. “They asked me did I know this lady, and I said it looks like someone that I know. It looked like—I thought maybe it was an actress or something. I say it looks like someone I know, but I just couldn’t remember at that time.”

On November 17th, the first day of the trial, she had been stationed in the corridor outside of the courtroom. She was told by the FBI agents who had brought her to New York that “all they wanted to do was bring me up here to see if I could recognize the woman that was in the picture and the man on the picture.... I just stood out in the hall and it was a crowd of people. They asked me did I see anybody in the crowd that I know, and I looked around, and I didn’t see anyone at this time, and stood there; so then, after a while, in the back of me where I was standing was an elevator, in the back of me, like, and I looked around, and then I see Mr. and Mrs. Hiss come over, and right away I knew them.”

The jury filed out at 2:50 p.m. on January 20th. On the afternoon of the next day, it found the defendant “guilty on the first count and guilty on the second.” Four days later, Goddard sentenced him to five years on each count, the terms to run concurrently. A few minutes earlier, Hiss had thanked his Honor for allowing him to say a few words. He denied again that he was guilty of the charges against him and promised that “in the future the full facts of how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.”

Goddard set $10,000 bail and paroled Hiss in Cross’ custody. In December, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the conviction. When the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene, the last door was closed. On March 22, 1951, Alger Hiss entered the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut. What Whittaker Chambers once called “the spectacle of tragedy” had run its course.