THE JUDICIARY: Woman with a Past

For the first 13 days of its second run in Manhattan’s federal court, the perjury trial of Alger Hiss had progressed with a singular absence of melodrama. Whittaker Chambers spent seven days as a witness, much of the time under crossexamination, stepped down with both his testimony and his Buddha-like calm intact. His shocking tale was corroborated as before by his wife and a long list of Government witnesses. Voices were seldom raised; time and repetition had lent a curious matter-of-factness to an incredible affair.

But last week, as Julian Wadleigh, former State Department employee, took the stand, an air of excitement and tension finally came to the courtroom. It was a big moment for Claude Cross, the shrewd, quiet Boston lawyer who had succeeded posturing, lionlike Lloyd Paul Stryker as defense counsel for Hiss. Cross had contended in his opening statement that Wadleigh, and not Alger Hiss, had stolen the famed Pumpkin Papers.

“Remotely Possible.” Shaggy-looking, Oxford-educated Witness Wadleigh admitted that he had been a Communist “collaborator,” that he had carried off State Department documents for Chambers and another underground courier named David Carpenter. He had delivered about 400 of them. But he swore that none of the Government’s exhibits had been among them. Cross questioned him closely and with relish about “stealing” official papers, a word which obviously displeased Wadleigh, then led him to an examination of the 54 documents in evidence. After a long period of questioning and paper-shuffling, Lawyer Cross drew forth an admission calculated to raise a doubt in the jury’s mind: Wadleigh said that he might conceivably have seen eight of the documents while he was in the State Department.

“Is it conceivable that you gave these to Chambers? . . .” demanded Cross. Wadleigh admitted that it was “remotely possible,” but unlikely.

“I Said to Him.” The Government promptly came back with the one sensational new witness of the trial. Over heated objections from the defense it put black-haired, bespectacled Mrs. Hede Massing, ex-wife of Communist Underground Chieftain Gerhart Eisler, on the stand. Mrs. Massing, once a vampish Viennese actress, testified that she had met Alger Hiss in the summer or fall of 1935 at the home of one Noel Field, whom she identified as a Communist member of the State Department.

What had she said, and what had Mr. Hiss said? “I said to him, ‘I understand you are trying to get Noel Field away from my organization and into yours.’ He said to me, ‘So you’re the famous girl who is trying to get Noel Field away from me?’ Then he said, ‘Well, we’ll see who is going to win.’ I said to him, ‘Well, Mr. Hiss, I hope you realize you are competing with a woman.’ Then one of us, I don’t remember whether it was him or myself, said ‘Whoever is going to win, we are both working for the same boss.’ :

It was a major coup for the Government. Mrs. Massing had been barred by the court as a witness in Trial No. 1. For the first time someone other than Whittaker Chambers had given direct testimony that Alger Hiss had been a Communist. This week as big, slow-moving Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy rested his case, the Government seemed on more solid ground than it had been during the original trial.