National Affairs: The Case of Alger Hiss

He was 25, an honor graduate of Johns Hopkins University and a graduate cum laude of Harvard Law School, where he had been a favorite student of Professor Felix Frankfurter. The year was 1929, and he had won the coveted apprenticeship job of law-clerking for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He married Priscilla Fansler Hobson, 26, a Quaker a divorcee and the mother of a three-year-old son.

In 1933, after practicing law in Boston, he got a job as an attorney in Henry Wallace’s Department of Agriculture. He attracted attention by his personal charm and professional skill, served as an assistant on the Nye Committee, which was investigating the arms manufacturers of World War I, and a year later got a job in the Department of State, serving under Assistant Secretary Francis B. Sayre.

By 1939 he appeared to be well along the road to success, untouched by suspicion of any kind. That was the year Hitler and Stalin made the pact that touched off World War II. Five days after that event, Whittaker Chambers, then a contributing editor of TIME, made a trip to Washington.

The Berle Notes. From 1925 to April 1938, Chambers had been a Communist, a writer of radical literature, an editor of the Communist Daily Worker. He had also been what was then vaguely known as a Communist courier. Abandoning the party in revulsion and despair, he became a determined enemy of Communism. At that critical moment in history he was alarmed at the presence in the U.S. Government of certain men whom he knew to be Reds. He had made his trip to Washington at the urging of a friend, to pass on a warning to Adolf A. Berle Jr., Assistant Secretary of State.

Nine years later, Berle was to testify as to what Chambers had told him. He quoted Chambers as saying that the men he had in mind were not necessarily members of the Communist Party, nor was there any question of espionage. They were merely sympathizers who might be expected to use their positions to help the Soviet cause.

Notes made by Berle after the interview, however, somewhat contradicted Berle’s memory: Berle’s notes, made public at the Hiss trial, indicated that Chambers had charged that at least three former Government attorneys—Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt and John Abt—were members of an “underground group.” Among other items in Berle’s notes was the line: “Plans for two super-battleships secured in 1937—who gave—.” Also from Berle’s notes: “Donald Hiss [brother of Alger], member of C.P. with Pressman and Witt . . .” and—”Alger Hiss, Ass’t. to Sayre—C.P.—1937. Member of Underground Com.—Active.”

Unequivocal Endorsements. Berle, as he later explained, decided that the Chambers evidence was pretty thin. In 1941 he checked on the Hiss brothers by inquiring of their friend Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson and their old mentor Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Both of them, Berle said, gave the Hisses their unequivocal endorsements. Acheson was to testify that his endorsement had only covered Donald Hiss, who was his executive assistant; but he added that Alger Hiss and he were “friends and remain friends.”

Four years after Chambers first spoke to him, Berle turned his notes over to the Department of Justice. FBI agents called on Chambers. A State Department security officer, Ray Murphy, also interviewed him. Chambers told him his story, stating that “much confidential material” had been disclosed by a number of men in Government, among them Alger Hiss.

Persistent Suspicion. Still no action was taken on the charge made by Chambers. By 1946 Alger Hiss had reached a position of some eminence in the Department of State. He had served as executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, as a technical adviser at the Yalta Conference and as secretary general of the founding convention of U.N. Suspicion had brushed him, but the only basis for it was the unsubstantiated word of Chambers.

Secretary of State James Byrnes heard the disturbing rumor that some Congressmen were going to denounce Hiss as a Communist from the floor of the House. Byrnes felt constrained to ask Hiss what about it. When Hiss told him flatly that he was not a Communist, Byrnes advised him to godirectly to the FBI and lay the story to rest. Hiss went to the FBI, which conducted a cursory interview.

Nothing came of it, but still the story was not laid to rest. In 1946 Hiss was elected the $20,000-a-year president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a job held previously by only two men, Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler. The persistent whisper of Hiss’s possible Communist affiliations prompted Carnegie Chairman John Foster Dulles to discuss the matter with him. But Hiss satisfied Dulles that there was nothing to it, and assumed office. A few months later, FBI agents called on Hiss. They asked him if he had ever heard of Whittaker Chambers. He had never heard of him,

Hiss said. There the situation rested until 1948.

Eventual Objective. In the spring of 1948 Thomas Donegan, a special assistant to the Attorney General, spread before a federal grand jury in New York an FBI report on Alger Hiss.

Hiss was subpoenaed and questioned. He denied knowing Chambers. Before the grand jury could reach any conclusions, the House Un-American Activities Committee caught the scent and acted. The committee subpoenaed Elizabeth Bentley, graduate of Vassar and, like Chambers, an ex-Communist courier. She named Government officials who, she said, had passed secret documents to her. Then the committee subpoenaed Chambers. He generally corroborated Miss Bentley’s story, testified that Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, whom she named, was at the least a dupe of the C.P., and repeated not all but a number of the names he had given Berle. He said that espionage was not the primary purpose of the group, but “espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives.” He testified that Priscilla Hiss was also a member of the party. He said that when he broke from the party he had tried to persuade Alger Hiss to break with him. “He cried when we separated,” Chambers said, “. . . but he absolutely refused to break.” Most of the people he named stood on their constitutional rights and refused to answer the question whether they were Communists. Donald Hiss categorically denied being a Red. Alger Hiss also denied the accusations, and added once more that as far as he could recall he had never in his life seen Chambers, said that he did not recognize his photograph, and declared that he had never even heard of the man until FBI agents asked him about Chambers in 1947. Ailing, 55-year-old Harry White, who also denied that he had ever been a Communist, died a few days later of a heart attack. The

Prothonotary Warbler. The House Committee probed deeper. In secret session, Chambers told them details of some of the Hisses’ Washington apartments, of the Hisses’ habits and hobbies. Alger Hiss was an amateur ornithologist, Chambers said, and once had told Chambers how he had seen a prothonotary warbler on the banks of the Potomac. In another session with Hiss the com mittee again pressed him. Did he still insist that he did not know Chambers? Would he recognize a man who once spent a week in his house? Hiss at length said that he might have known Chambers after all, but as a free-lance writer—he pulled a notation from his pocket—named “George Crosley.” Back in 1934, he now recalled, he had given some help to Crosley. Under questioning he did recall other circumstances of his relationship with Crosley; that he had taken Crosley, his wife and baby into the Hisses’ house for a few days; that he sublet his apartment to Crosley but never received any rent from him; that he had let him use his old Ford roadster “with a sassy little trunk on the back”; that he had probably taken Crosley along on one of his trips to New York. They asked Hiss about his hobbies. Ornithology was one, Hiss said. He remembered how once he had seen a prothonotary warbler—on the banks of the Potomac.

Committeemen brought Hiss and Chambers face to face in a New York hotel room. Hiss examined Chambers from every angle, listened to his voice. He had him open his mouth so that he could look at his teeth. He decided finally: “I am now perfectly prepared to identify this man as George Crosley.”

The Documents. In an open hearing before the committee he denied that he had known that Crosley was a Communist, or that he, Hiss, had any Communist connections, and challenged Chambers to make his charges outside of the hearing room where he could be sued. Chambers said flatly: “Mr. Hiss is lying.” Chambers had no personal grudge, he said. “Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity.” Two nights later Chambers repeated his charges over the radio. A month later Hiss brought a $50,000 (later increased to $75,000) suit against Chambers for libel. The case vanished briefly behind the closed doors of the New York grand jury, where Chambers appeared and seven times denied that any actual espionage had been involved; behind the closed doors of Hiss’s lawyer’s office in Baltimore, where Chambers began making pre-trial depositions in the libel suit.

One night Chambers left one of these meetings and went home to his Westminster, Md. farm convinced that “Hiss was determined to destroy me—and my wife, if possible.” From the house of a relative in Brooklyn, he recovered a dusty manila envelope which had been hidden there for ten years. He had given it to the relative in 1938 when he broke from the party, with instructions to open it if anything should happen to him or his wife, Esther. In the envelope were 43 typed copies of State Department documents and four memoranda in Alger Hiss’s handwriting. Several nights later, from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm where he had hidden them, Chambers produced five rolls of microfilm. When developed, they produced a three-ft. stack of highly confidential Government dispatches which Chambers said Hiss had given him.

The Indictment. Over this monumental evidence Chambers and Hiss faced each other. Chambers, after perjuring himself many times, now admitted everything.

From 1932 to 1938, he said, he had had a regular flow of documents from Communist sympathizers not only in the Department of State but in the Bureau of Standards, the Navy and at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He had had them photo graphed on microfilm and had turned over the films to the Soviet spy apparatus. He said he had had two sources in the State Department: one, it developed later, was Henry Julian Wadleigh; the other, he said, was Alger Hiss.

Chambers resigned from TIME, stating: “When TIME hired me in 1939, its editors knew that I was an ex-Communist; they did not know that espionage was involved . . .” He was compelled now to “stand up” and tell the facts. “I cannot share this indispensable ordeal with anyone.” He prepared himself to face the consequences.

Alger Hiss also resigned his Carnegie post, although the trustees declined to accept his resignation until some six months later. Either he had been criminally maligned, or he was carrying a terrifying burden of concealed guilt—in which case he was facing an ordeal even more unnerving than Chambers’.

He still admitted only to passing acquaintance with Chambers (or Crosley, as he still insisted). He was called back before the grand jury and asked two questions :

Had he, Alger Hiss, or his wife, ever turned over any of these documents to Chambers? Said Hiss: “Never.” Would Hiss say that he had never seen Chambers after Jan. 1, 1937? Said Hiss: “Yes.” On the basis of those two answers, and on the basis of the evidence already presented, the grand jury indicted Hiss for perjury. In June 1949, he was brought to trial.

The Corroborative Evidence. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Murphy had declared in the beginning: “If you don’t believe Chambers we have no case under the federal perjury law.” Later he amended this: the Government would present evidence to corroborate Chambers’ word. For many people, however, it was still simply Chambers’ word against Hiss’s, and defense attorneys spared no effort to discredit the stocky, 50-year-old editor, writer and farmer, who was himself an admitted perjurer, who had once betrayed his country. The defense attorney in the first trial called Chambers a “moral leper,” in the second, with the help of psychiatric testimony, a “pathological liar.”

Against him stood Hiss, handsome and confident-looking, vouched for by more than a score of character witnesses, including Supreme Court Justices Frankfurter and Reed (at the first trial; they did not reappear at the second). Many people agreed with Hiss, who had once said: “It is inconceivable that there could have been on my part, during 15 years or more in public office . . . any departure from the highest rectitude without its being known.” Where did the truth lie—with the admitted perjurer or with the man of rectitude?

The jury examined Murphy’s corroborative case. There were the 42 documents unquestionably typed on the Hisses’ Woodstock typewriter; the four notes in Hiss’s handwriting, the dates on the documents (the first three months of 1938); the evidence that the typewriter must have been in the Hisses’ possession during that time; Chambers’ testimony that Hiss had lent him $400 to buy a car in November 1937, and the withdrawal of $400 from Hiss’s bank account just a few days before; the Chamberses’ detailed accounts of the Hiss homes which the Chamberses said they had visited during those critical years; the Chamberses’ onetime maid who identified Alger and Priscilla Hiss as callers.

The defense had explanations for some of these points. It was able to challenge the accuracy of the Chambers memory in some details. It was able to raise doubts about others. But it was not able to destroy the overall effect of Murphy’s whole, corroborative case. In particular, the defense was never able to explain away the documents and the Woodstock typewriter. The second jury found Hiss guilty.

Hiss made one last statement: “I am confident that in the future the full facts showing how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be developed.” Federal Judge Henry Goddard, who had told the jury it had rendered a just verdict, made no comment to Hiss, quietly sentenced him to five years in prison.

Men of Good Will. So ended the trial. Reactions ranged from complete agreement with the verdict to the feeling that justice, in some extraordinary way, must have miscarried. There were people who could not bring themselves emotionally to accept the outcome. If their minds accepted it, their stomachs did not. How could such a man be guilty of this perjury and —worse—of the betrayal of a trust which he had tried to hide by his lies? By his looks, on his record, by his accomplishments, wasn’t he the picture of a decent man?

Old friends, former colleagues in the Administration, former associates in the field of foreign affairs, finding Hiss’s guilt so hard to believe, refused to believe, or tried to explain how it might have come about, or simply said: “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”

So ended the trial. There could be no ending to the story, yet; it was, as Chambers had said, part of the “tragedy of history” and of the conflict in which modern society was absorbed. Hiss and Chambers, if the evidence could be believed, had been caught in the tragedy. Two intellectuals, they had been lured by Communism’s fair promises, had seen its evil face too late.

It was a face that disguised itself behind the mask of humanitarianism, and lost itself in the crowd. Men of good will on the left often did not recognize it in their midst; other men of good will, farther to the right politically, often did not discriminate between the face of the enemy and honest liberalism. The face had to be sought out, isolated from the people it traveled with—without harming the innocent, who would have to keep their eyes open as well as their hearts.