Fifties (3 page)

Even members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, who were inclined to believe any accusations about anyone, looked down on Chambers. The House Committee was made nervous, even intimidated, by Hiss’s immediate and complete denial of ever having known Chambers, and seemed on the verge of withdrawing from the case. Only a very junior member, Richard Nixon (Rep. of Calif.), persisted—among other reasons, because he was being fed secret FBI documents—and kept the Committee from backing off completely.

The setting was this: August 3, 1948, the House Committee, which included a large number of the most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons—held hearings in which Whittaker Chambers not only said that he himself was a Communist but that there was a Communist group in the government in the late thirties and that Alger Hiss was a member of it. Hiss denied the accusation and denied under oath that he had ever even known Chambers. His friends rallied round. Dean Acheson, then a law partner of Hiss’s brother, Donald, helped with the early legal planning; William Marbury, a prominent Baltimore attorney and a very old and close personal friend, sent a note to Donald Hiss, who had been similarly accused: “If you and Alger are party members, then you can send me an application.” Hiss himself seemed to play down the seriousness of the charges, and told his wife, Priscilla, “Don’t worry, little one. This will all blow over. I will handle it.”

On August 5, that is precisely what he did. Before the Committee, Hiss seemed imposing, almost imperious, a paragon of the establishment. His appearance caused the British journalist Alistair Cooke to call him “an American gentleman, one of the incomparable human products, all the rarer for the heavy parodies that crowd it out, the glossy tailored caricatures of metropolitan society ... Here was a subject for Henry James; a product of New World courtesy, with a gentle certitude of behavior, a ready warmth, a brighter, naiver grace than the more trenchant, fatigued, confident, or worldlier English prototype.”

“I am not and never have been a member of the Communist party,” he said under oath. When asked by the chairman, Karl
Mundt, if he recognized photos of Chambers, he answered, “I might mistake him for the [acting] chairman of the Committee.” This line received considerable laughter. It was the high-water mark for him in the case. All day he was relaxed and confident. By the end of the day, Mundt congratulated Hiss for his forthright testimony. John Rankin, the virulent racist from Mississippi, came over to shake his hand. “Let’s wash our hands of the whole mess,” said F. Edward Hebert, the Louisiana Democrat. Only Richard Nixon wanted to push on. There was something about Hiss that he did not like and did not trust. Nixon, rejected after his graduation from Duke Law School by all the top New York law firms, was always conscious of social distinctions and East Coast snobbery, and he was irritated rather than impressed by Hiss’s imperiousness. Someone was clearly lying. Why not have the two men confront each other? Nixon suggested. Robert Stripling, the Committee’s chief investigator, later said in an interview that “Nixon had his hat set for Hiss. It was a personal thing. He was no more concerned about whether or not Hiss was [a Communist] than a billygoat.” The confrontation was set for August 17.

Even those who knew and liked Chambers marveled at his paranoia and his need to dramatize almost everything he did. When he went out for a simple lunch with friends, he would have to come up with an elaborate method of exiting the building in case anyone was following him. A Coolidge Republican at the start of his undergraduate years, then a didactic Communist, he eventually became the most unforgiving anti-Communist intellectual in the country.

Anyone who later read his personal memoir,
Witness,
could understand why he was so tortured. His had been a childhood of unrelieved misery. His father was an alcoholic who eventually left home for a homosexual lover. As a boy, Chambers used to say to himself: “I am an outcast. My family is outcast. We have no friends, no social ties, no church, no organization that we claim and that claims us, no community.” In his post-Communist years, as a senior writer at
Time,
it became clear he was a man of considerable talent and one of the most accomplished writers on the Luce publications of that era. He was, the journalist Murray Kempton noted, the perfect writer for a somewhat gloomy news magazine given in those days to portentous warnings about the future of the West and its relationship with the East. “There was no one who could do the drumroll of alarm, of Western civilization come to the brink, like Chambers,” Kempton said.

On August 16, Hiss wavered for the first time: Perhaps he had
known the person testifying against him under another name. The picture of Chambers, he said, “is not completely unfamiliar.” Then, rather late in the session, he said that he had written down the name of someone it might be. The name he wrote down was George Crosley. The next day, unbeknownst to Hiss, a confrontation was arranged at Room 1400 of the Commodore Hotel. With Hiss already in the room, Chambers was brought in. “Are you George Crosley?” Hiss asked. “Not to my knowledge,” answered Chambers. Then Chambers added: “You are Alger Hiss, I believe.” “I certainly am,” Hiss said. Hiss asked Chambers to speak, then asked him to speak more loudly, then asked him to open his mouth wider. Have you had any dental work done on your teeth? he asked. Finally, Hiss said that he did not need to ask any more questions, that he had known this man as George Crosley. He thereupon demanded that Chambers make his accusations in a public arena, without the protection from libel offered by the Committee. “I challenge you to do so, and I hope you will do it damn quickly,” he said. Chambers did so on national radio.

Eight days later, their public confrontation took place, and the Hiss case exploded into America’s collective consciousness. At first even the general public thought that Hiss, so eminently respectable, might be wearing the white hat and Chambers, so unattractive, the black, but slowly, as evidence mounted, the tide of public opinion shifted. From the beginning, Nixon was impressed by how steadfast, unflappable, and unbending Chambers was. He did not use a lawyer as Hiss did, he did not study the transcript before each session as Hiss did, and he did not qualify his statements (“to the best of my recollection”) as Hiss often did. He was willing to take a lie-detector test, as Hiss was not.

By August 25, Karl Mundt was saying to Hiss, “You knew this man [Chambers]; you knew him very well. You knew him so well that you trusted him with your apartment; you let him use your furniture; you let him use, or gave him, your automobile. You think you probably took him to New York. You bought him lunches in the Senate Restaurant. You had him staying in your home ... and made him a series of small loans. There seems to be no question about that.” It was a damning moment. At the end of the hearing, Parnell Thomas announced that one of the two men would be tried for perjury. For the liberals, and thoughtful people of any stripe, a dilemma arose: Could it be that this committee—so scabrous, indeed almost farcical, so insensitive to the rights of individuals and which had so often and so carelessly thrown around charges of Communism—was
actually on to something? And if so, was there a larger truth to this? Was the New Deal itself on trial, as Hiss himself was quick to claim? Look who spoke well of Hiss: Dean Acheson; Adlai Stevenson; even John Foster Dulles (at least early on, anyway, until warned privately by Nixon to keep some distance). Two members of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, appeared as character references at his first trial.

The case began to assume dimensions far greater than anyone had ever imagined. “As 1949 went on,” Eric Goldman wrote in
The Crucial Decade,
“Whittaker Chambers receded into the background; the specific testimony was less and less discussed. Even the figure of Alger Hiss, the individual, blurred. Everything was turning into Alger Hiss the symbol.” “There was,” Alistair Cooke once noted, “a strong desire in both those who believed Hiss guilty and those who believed him innocent to make him out to be a more representative Rooseveltian figure than he was.” In fact, Hiss had hardly been a key player in the State Department: He was not a Kennan or a John Paton Davies or a Paul Nitze. He was a high-level clerk. Both sides in the Hiss case, Kempton wrote, overplayed the importance of Hiss as a figure in the government.

The Hiss case broke just as the lines in the Cold War were becoming more sharply drawn. In March 1948, when Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister and an admired symbol of democratic hopes in that country, committed suicide. Then, in the summer of 1948 the West used the Berlin airlift to bypass the Berlin blockade created by the Soviets. As much as anything else, those two events signaled that the wartime alliance between the Soviets and the West was over. A new, edgier, political era had begun.

In response to Hiss’s denials, Chambers began to escalate his charges, now accusing Hiss of partaking of espionage. This was buttressed with dramatic documentary evidence that Chambers said he had squirreled away for just such an occasion some ten years earlier, when he had left the Party. The evidence—State Department documents copied either in Hiss’s handwriting or some documents typed on what was claimed to be Hiss’s typewriter—was particularly incriminating. Whether Hiss actually participated in espionage was never proven and the evidence was, at best, flawed. The government briefly pondered going after him on espionage, decided its case was insufficiently strong, and went instead for a lesser perjury charge.

In the two ensuing trials, even those who were unbiased and who tried to separate the record from their own political biases always had a feeling that there were missing pieces and that each of
the principals was holding back something, whether it was Hiss shielding his wife, as some, including his own lawyers, thought, or a homosexual infatuation on the part of Chambers for Hiss, as others thought. More than forty years later, the pieces still did not entirely add up. If there was a romance, thought Murray Kempton, the
New York Post
columnist who later wrote exceptionally well about the two men, it was platonic, the attraction of what he called “The Other”: Hiss, coming from his airless, aristocratic, tightly controlled background, with the constant need to live up to family expectations; Chambers, and his quasi-adventurous underground life, filled with mystery and intrigue. But, as Kempton said, “each got the other wrong—Hiss was not really an aristocrat, and Chambers was not that much of an adventurer.” The first trial ended in a hung jury; the vote was 8–4 for a perjury conviction against Hiss. That, according to one of Hiss’s friends and lawyers, Helen Buttenweiser, was the only time she had ever seen Alger shocked—stunned by the fact that eight of his fellow citizens did not believe him. In the second trial the jury found Hiss guilty of perjury, and he was sentenced to five years in a federal prison.

Beginning on March 21, 1951, Hiss served forty-four months of his five-year term. Hiss continued to protest his innocence. Forty years later the old divisions caused by the case were very much alive. A coterie of loyalists still believed Hiss innocent. They took heart in 1992 when a top Soviet intelligence officer seemed to exonerate Hiss. But a few weeks later the Russian qualified his statement, saying he had been pushed by friends of Hiss, who asked him to comfort an old man. Chambers’s memoir,
Witness,
was published in 1952, and became a national best-seller. Chambers still brooded about the future and not just Communism, but liberalism, as the enemy. Sidney Hook, reviewing
Witness,
noted of Chambers, “He recklessly lumps Socialists, progressives, liberals, and men of good will together with the Communists. All are bound according to him by the same faith; but only the Communists have the gumption and the guts to live by it and pay the price ... The logic by which he now classifies liberals and humanists with the Communists is not unlike the logic by which, when a Communist, he classified them as Fascists.”

Hiss’s conviction darkened an already bleak period, exacerbating the growing political division over the issue of domestic subversion. Even before the Hiss case Yalta was an issue, a magic word for the Republicans, uttered recklessly in the l946 congressional campaigns, a free and easy chance to attack Roosevelt and the New Deal. Republicans claimed the agreement was the work of a tough and
treacherous Stalin, who duped an exhausted and desperately ill Roosevelt, and that it was filled with secret accords and that we had sold out a free Poland. The reality had been quite different; if anyone had been for the Yalta agreements, it had been the American military, whose top brass was in no way convinced that the atomic bomb would work. Fearing that more than a million Americans might be lost in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, the Joint Chiefs had supposedly pressured Roosevelt to get the Russians to come into the war against Japan.

But now Yalta was an even more powerful and divisive word, a synonym in the new political lexicon for “betrayal.” For
Alger Hiss
had been at Yalta, albeit, as diplomat Chip Bohlen noted, in a rather minor capacity. That didn’t matter. Hiss was soon elevated to a position as a principal architect of the Yalta accords. “The Alger Hiss group,” in the words of Senator William Jenner, one of the more rabid of the right-wing Republicans, “engineered the Yalta sell-out.” To Joseph McCarthy, Yalta and Hiss were something that he could readily seize on: “We know that at Yalta we were betrayed. We know that since Yalta, the leaders of this Government, by design or ignorance, have continued to betray us ... We also know that the same men who betrayed America are still leading America. The traitors must no longer lead the betrayed.”

At Dean Acheson’s confirmation hearings for secretary of state in January 1949, many of the questions seemed to be about Acheson’s relationship with Hiss and Hiss’s role at Yalta. Finally, Senator Tom Connally, one of Acheson’s supporters, said, “It seems that the only argument some persons can present is to holler about Alger Hiss, and then refer to Yalta. They seem to have to dig up something about the dead President of the United States, and then go back to Yalta.”