JUDICIARY: The Stumps

Across the abyss of a dozen years, Alger and Priscilla Hiss made their careful and precise defense to the accusations of Whittaker and Esther Chambers. Step by step, four quiet, middle-aged people were drawing near the climax of their tragedy.

They approached it amidst no new sensational disclosures. Instead, the trial in a Manhattan Federal Court took a quieter, tenser turn. FBI agents, in endless search, had followed countless trails from New York to Washington to Baltimore. They had dug through old files, turning up bills of sale, bank accounts, letters—even the fragmentary, casual conversations of years past, now of utmost importance. With these minutiae, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy fought his duel with Alger and Priscilla Hiss and Defense Attorney Lloyd Stryker. With these minutiae, Murphy sought to convict Alger Hiss, once-bright star of the State Department, of charges that he had perjured himself when he told a grand jury that he had never given State Department secrets to ex-Communist Courier Chambers, and that he had never seen Chambers after 1936.

Gentle Inquisitor. Lawyer Hiss, already vouched for by two Supreme Court justices, was a sure-footed witness, with a lawyer’s skill with words. Were there conflicts between previous testimony and his story now? He pleaded a faulty previous recollection. He had “no independent recollection” of some points. Of one admitted confusion in his previous testimony, he said coolly: “One could always possibly be mistaken.”

On one point he erred. He denied that, after Chambers’ first charges against him, John Foster Dulles had asked him to resign as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dulles came later to the stand to correct Hiss’s recollection. With his memory bolstered by a written record of the conversation, Dulles, chairman of the trustees of the endowment, swore that he had told Hiss he thought he should resign.

Cool and demure, Priscilla Hiss corroborated almost everything her husband had said. She denied any part of the Chamberses’ story which might tie her husband into any Communist plot. Occasionally she rested her white-gloved hands on the arms of the chair, where Esther Chambers, angry eyes snapping through spectacles, had rested her work-hardened hands.

Only when Murphy began cross-examining Mrs. Hiss did her voice tighten. In contrast to Stryker’s lashing attack on Esther Chambers, Murphy was a gentle, polite inquisitor. More than once Priscilla Hiss was on the edge of tears. She left the stand looking pale and tired—but with her story, like her husband’s, not shaken in most of its details.

Shop on K Street. But when they had finished, several points did stand out like stumps in a clearing. One of these was the stark evidence of the State Department documents which Chambers had had in his possession. On the basis of an FBI expert’s testimony (never challenged by the defense) they had been typed on the Hisses’ old Woodstock typewriter.

Try as it might, the defense was never able to get rid of that typewriter. It had called Mrs. Claudie (“Clytie”) Catlett, the Hisses’ onetime Negro maid, to testify that the Hisses had given the machine to her sons, had tried to show that the machine was not in the Hiss household when the treasonous act was committed. But neither Clytie Catlett and her sons, uncertain witnesses at best, nor the Hisses were able definitely to remember just when the Catletts got the machine. Pat Catlett remembered that when he got it, he took it forthwith to a typewriter repair shop at K Street and Connecticut Avenue. Last week a Washington real-estate agent testified that the shop was not opened for business until Sept. 15, 1938, more than six months after the documents were typed.

The other stumps were some of those almost forgotten records which FBI agents had turned up. Hiss had said firmly that the last time he saw Chambers was in “May or June of 1936.” Against that statement were the Chamberses’ recollections and two facts established some time ago but now assuming vital proportions:

¶Esther Chambers had testified that Priscilla Hiss was trying to get into a “nursing course” at Baltimore’s Mercy Hospital. Priscilla Hiss denied ever discussing such a plan with Esther Chambers. A letter, which on cross-examination she admitted writing, showed that she had applied for admission to a course in inorganic chemistry at the University of Maryland on May 25, 1937, so that she could get credits she needed to get into a training course at Mercy Hospital.

¶ Chambers had testified that in the fall of 1937, Hiss lent him $400 to buy a car. Records of a Baltimore automobile company showed that Esther Chambers bought a car on Nov. 23, 1937. The Government looked at the Hisses’ Washington bank account, found it showed a withdrawal of $400 on Nov. 19, 1937. The Hiss explanation was that they used the money to buy furniture. The importance of these bits of documentary evidence to the Government was that they established the Chamberses’ intimate knowledge of the Hisses’ private affairs more than a year after Hiss testified they had broken off.

This week, Murphy, with his minutiae, Stryker, with his clients’ stubborn avowal of innocence, faced the jury of two women, ten white-collar workers and businessmen. What Chambers had called a “tragedy of history” was near judgment and the bitter end.