Six Crises (10 page)

There was nothing at all I could do about the election results. My mind at that time turned to some purely personal matters. Pat and I had not had a vacation since coming to Washington in January of 1947. Our plans to take one in the summer of 1947 had been washed out when I was appointed a member of the Herter Committee and spent six weeks in Europe on that assignment. And then in 1948 the Hiss case intervened just as we were ready to take off for a few days of relaxation. Now, together with several of our friends in Congress, we had booked passage on the SS
Panama
for a ten-day cruise through the Canal Zone, sailing from New York on December 2.

“This time,” I told Pat the day I brought the tickets home, “absolutely nothing is going to interfere with our vacation.”

She smiled and said, “I hope you're right, but I still have to be shown.”

The day before we were to sail I saw a brief United Press dispatch
in the Washington papers: “The Justice Department is about ready to drop its investigation of the celebrated Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers controversy, it was learned today. Department officials still have under study the question of a possible perjury prosecution. But officials said privately that unless additional evidence is forthcoming they are inclined to forget the whole thing. One Department source said that on the basis of available evidence, officials in charge of the case believe it would be unwise to take it before a Grand Jury.”

I immediately called Stripling on the phone. He had read the same story. He said he had also heard rumors that there was some new evidence in the case which might substantiate Chambers' charges.

Playing a long hunch, I suggested to Stripling that we drive to Westminster at once and talk to Chambers. We arrived late in the afternoon and I showed him a copy of the United Press dispatch. He put down the paper and looked out the window, shaking his head without saying a word for at least a minute. Then he turned to me and said: “This is what I have been afraid of.

“In a deposition hearing two weeks ago, I produced some new evidence in the case—documentary evidence. It was so important that Hiss's attorneys and mine called the Justice Department. Alex Campbell, Chief of the Criminal Division, came to Baltimore and took the documents back to Washington. Before he left he warned everybody present to say nothing whatever about these documents and that if we did divulge any information, we would be guilty of contempt of court. So, I can't tell you what was in the documents. I will only say that they were a real bombshell.”

Stripling and I tried without success to get some inkling of the contents. Then I asked Chambers a pointed question: “Do you mean that Campbell has these documents in his possession and it is completely up to him if anything is done about them?”

He smiled and said, “No, I wouldn't be that foolish. My attorney has photostatic copies, and also I didn't turn over everything I had. I have another bombshell in case they try to suppress this one.”

“You keep that second bombshell,” I said. “Don't give it to anybody except the Committee.” Chambers did not respond but I was sure that he got the point.

As we drove back to Washington that evening, Stripling and I tried to guess what the documents might contain. What intrigued us both was Chambers' use of the word “bombshell.” In his testimony he seldom if ever used flamboyant language. I told Stripling I had an intuitive
feeling that Chambers was trying to tell us something by his deliberate use of that word—not just once but twice.

Under these new circumstances I wondered whether I shouldn't postpone my vacation, scheduled to begin the next day. But I didn't have the heart to tell Pat the bad news. I explained my predicament to Stripling and told him that I would be in Panama within four days and, if necessary, could fly back to Washington if he felt I had to. Taking no chances, however, I stopped off at the Committee office and signed a
subpoena duces tecum
on Chambers for any and all documents in his possession relating to the Committee hearings on the charges he had made against Hiss. Stripling said he would have the subpoena served on Chambers the next day.

And so, the next morning, after taking the train from Washington to New York, Pat and I boarded the
Panama
for what we thought was going to be a pleasant week of cruising through the Canal Zone and back. At dinner the first night out, we remarked to the others that one of the reasons we had taken this cruise was that at sea we could be sure of no interruptions by telephone calls or by mail.

We had not reckoned with radiograms.

The first full day at sea, Friday, December 3, I received a wire that Bert Andrews had sent late Thursday night. It read: “Information here is that Hiss-Chambers case has produced new bombshell. Stop. Indications are that Chambers has offered new evidence. Stop. All concerned silent. Stop. However, Justice Department partially confirms by saying ‘It is too hot for comment.' Stop.”

That evening Pat and I were having dinner at the Captain's table with Congressman Mike Kirwan of Ohio, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; Congressman Sterling Cole, Republican of New York, who now heads the International Atomic Energy Agency; and their wives. The purser brought me another wire. This one was from Stripling. “Second bombshell obtained by subpoena 1
A.M.
Friday. Case clinched. Information amazing. Heat is on from press and other places. Immediate action appears necessary. Can you possibly get back?”

I knew that Stripling would not have sent such a cable unless the evidence was really of great importance. I read the cable aloud at the table and Pat threw up her hands and said, “Here we go again!”

The following morning, Sunday, I received the clincher—a long cablegram from Andrews. It read, in part: “Documents incredibly hot. Stop. Link to Hiss seems certain. Stop. Link to others inevitable. Stop.
Results should restore faith in need for Committee if not in some members. Stop. New York Jury meets Wednesday. Stop. Could you arrive Tuesday and get day's jump on Grand Jury. Stop. If not, holding hearing early Wednesday. Stop. My liberal friends don't love me no more. Stop. Nor you. Stop. But facts are facts and these facts are dynamite. Stop. Hiss's writing identified on three documents. Stop. Not proof he gave them to Chambers but highly significant. Stop. Stripling says can prove who gave them to Chambers. Stop. Love to Pat. Stop. (Signed) Vacation-Wrecker Andrews.”

I radioed Stripling to make arrangements, if possible, to get me off the ship. By that time we were in the Caribbean near Cuba and the Captain said that if a Coast Guard amphibian PBY would come get me, he could pilot the ship to a stretch of water calm enough for a landing.

In Washington, Stripling took the problem to the naval attaché assigned to Congress. He in turn took the matter up directly with Defense Secretary Forrestal, who issued a personal order to the Coast Guard station in Miami to meet the ship and fly me to the mainland. On Sunday morning the ship dropped anchor on the lee side of an island. A Coast Guard PBY landed on the water nearby. Members of the ship's crew lowered me to the water in a lifeboat and rowed over to the PBY. I climbed aboard and was on my way to Miami.

Reporters and photographers were on hand to meet me. They asked what comment I had on the “pumpkin papers”?

I didn't have the slightest idea what they were talking about and asked, “What is this, a joke?”

They explained that when he was served with our subpoena, Chambers had led the Committee investigators to his pumpkin patch at midnight, taken the top off one of the pumpkins, and produced five rolls of microfilm containing photographs of secret State Department documents.

I simply could not believe my ears. On the seven-hour flight from Miami to Washington, I began to have the same misgivings about Chambers I had had when he first told us his fantastic story. Now, I wondered if we really might have a crazy man on our hands.

Stripling met my plane and took me directly to the Committee office. I soon learned that Chambers was crazy—like a fox. Here is what had happened.

Shortly after I had seen Chambers in November he had gone to
Baltimore to give testimony in the pretrial deposition being taken by Hiss's attorneys. Hiss's chief counsel, William Marbury, a Washington attorney of outstanding reputation, had asked Chambers if he had any letters, documents, or any other communications from Alger Hiss which would prove their alleged relationship. It was obvious to Chambers, as he later told me, that Marbury did not have the slightest expectation that Chambers would produce anything. Hiss, a lawyer himself, had made the fatal mistake no client should ever make—he had not told his own lawyer the full truth about the facts at issue.

In answer to the question, Chambers had said that he would check his files to see if he had any such evidence. When he returned to his home in Westminster, he went through a long period of soul-searching. He knew he had documentary proof, but he didn't know if he should use it.

Not long before, Chambers had been called before the New York Grand Jury investigating Communist activities and had been asked if he had any information involving Soviet espionage. He had weighed the implications of that question and had answered, “No.” This answer was untrue. In his book,
Witness,
Chambers explained that while he wanted to expose Communist underground activities in the United States, he did not want to destroy Hiss and others who had been his friends and associates with his evidence of espionage. He had hoped that, once he testified, they too would admit their former activities and join him in exposing Communist subversion.

But at the pretrial proceedings, Hiss's attorneys had been raking over every aspect of his life in an attempt to discredit and destroy him. Under the circumstances, Chambers wondered if he should not counterattack in kind. One day his wife, Esther, was cross-examined so unmercifully by Hiss's attorneys that she broke into tears. This incident made his decision for him. If this was to be, in effect, total war, he would use the ultimate weapons available to him.

The next Sunday, November 14, Chambers went to Brooklyn to reclaim a package he had left with his wife's nephew, Nathan Levine, after his break with the Communist Party in 1938. Because he feared assassination, he had told his nephew to hide the package and to make its contents public only if he, Chambers, met with a violent death. Now, ten years later, he and Levine went together to the hiding place—an unused dumb-waiter in the Brooklyn apartment of Levine's mother. There they found Chambers' large sealed envelope, covered
now with ten years' accumulation of dust and cobwebs. Inside the envelope were sixty-five typed pages of copies and summaries of confidential State Department documents, three memoranda in Hiss's handwriting, two strips of developed microfilm, three cylinders of undeveloped microfilm, and an eight-page memo of confidential Treasury Department information in the handwriting of Harry Dexter White. These documents had been stolen not only from the State Department but also from the Communist Party. Rather than turning over this final haul to his Communist superiors, Chambers had kept them for “life insurance.”

Three days later, Hiss's attorneys again made their demand for documentary evidence, and Chambers handed over the sixty-five pages of typewritten State Department papers—many of which were later identified as having been typed on Hiss's Woodstock machine—the memos in Hiss's own handwriting, and the old envelope which had contained the documents. This was Chambers' first “bombshell.” The second was the microfilm—the so-called “pumpkin papers.”

The story of the “pumpkin papers” was typical of how a seemingly fantastic incident in the life of Whittaker Chambers could have a simple explanation. The rolls of microfilm had not been kept in a pumpkin for ten years, as many people have been led to believe. They remained hidden in the unused dumb-waiter until Chambers recovered them and then kept them in his house. Only on the last day did he change the hiding place. Fearing that they might be found in his house by Hiss's investigators, whom he had seen near his farm, he stashed the rolls of microfilm away in a hollowed-out pumpkin and replaced the pumpkin in its original place in the patch. It was a fine hiding place—but it was used only for one day, not ten years!

•  •  •

When Stripling and I arrived at the Committee office, it was already past ten in the evening. And we stayed there until dawn, studying the photostats of typewritten and handwritten documents which Chambers had turned over to the Justice Department at the deposition hearing on November 17, and the hundreds of pages of photostats of State Department documents developed from the five rolls of microfilm.

Both Stripling and I had heard literally thousands of words of testimony before the Committee on Un-American Activities charging that Communist agents were guilty of espionage against the United States Government. But for the first time we had before us absolute proof of
those charges. It was no longer a case of one man's word against another. Here was physical evidence that no words could deny.

Our major problem, on which we made a critical decision that night, was what role the Committee should now play in the case.

The Justice Department had finally begun to move on Chambers' charges as a result of the production of the “pumpkin papers.” Chambers had been subpoenaed to appear before the Grand Jury in New York later that day—Monday, December 6. Should we turn over the microfilm to the Justice Department and leave the responsibility for further investigation completely in its hands? We decided not to do this. On the basis of the record to date, we simply did not have confidence that the Justice Department would resist the political pressures being brought to bear in behalf of Hiss and against Chambers. Several reasons led us to this conclusion.

In the two-week period between November 17—when Chambers turned over the typewritten and handwritten documents to Justice Department officials in Baltimore—and December 1, no one from the Department had appeared to follow up this disclosure or even to question Chambers.