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.”