As big, brown-mustached U.S. prosecutor Tom Murphy made his second bid to send Alger Hiss off to prison for perjury, spectators had covertly begun eying the gaunt, calm defendant for signs of reaction. It became steadily more obvious that the Government’s case was tighter, more dramatically presented and more damaging than it had been in the first trial. But by last week in Manhattan’s federal court it was just as obvious that Hiss’s defense had improved as well.
Claude Cross, his businesslike little attorney, had new witnesses and new evidence with which to assault peripheral but important segments of the story told by Whittaker Chambers, onetime Communist courier and espionage agent. A Mrs. Margaret Kellog Smith, proprietor of a children’s camp, refuted Chambers’ testimony that Chambers and the Hisses had been together in Peterborough, N.H. on Aug. 10, 1937—she swore that Hiss had been at her camp near Chestertown, Md. Alger Hiss’s brother Donald denied another item of Chambers’ testimony—that Soviet Agent Colonel Bykov wanted Donald to steal State documents too. Donald testified that he had not gone to work for the State Department until six months after the conversation supposedly took place.
A third bit of Chambers’ story—that he and his wife had spent New Year’s Eve 1936 with the Hisses—was contradicted by Alger Hiss himself. He testified that his wife had been in Chappaqua, N.Y. and not in Washington, and produced a letter he had sent her postmarked Dec. 30 to prove it. It read:
“Pross, Darling . . . How too bad! I hope Tim isn’t very sick [Mrs. Hiss’s son Timmy had gotten chicken pox during the visit in Chappaqua] and it won’t spread . . . Sic semper cinema! I wish I were there to help thee. [Hiss explained that since Mrs. Hiss is a Quaker he had written in the “simple” language.] Don’t dream of coming down Saturday . . .” The letter closed with: “My love and commiseration to Sarah and Moll. Dearest love to thee. Thy Hilly.”
Under direct examination, Hiss once more denied Chambers’ story—he had never been a Communist, he had never stolen State Department documents, he had never seen the Government’s exhibits, he had never given Chambers $400 to buy an automobile, and neither he nor any member of his family had copied State secrets on his old Woodstock typewriter.
There still remained the fact that Chambers had notes concerning secret documents in Hiss’s handwriting, and documents typed on Hiss’s Woodstock. These things Hiss had not explained away. This week he would face the most rigorous examination the Government’s Tom Murphy could contrive.
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