Six Crises (5 page)

He had first met Hiss in 1935 and had seen him on scores of occasions through 1937.

He had collected Communist Party dues from him.

He had stayed at the Hiss home on several occasions, once for a week.

Hiss and his wife had a cocker spaniel dog which they had boarded at a kennel on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington when they went on vacations to Maryland's eastern shore.

Hiss was called “Hilly” by his wife; he called her “Dilly”; friends commonly referred to them as “Hilly” and “Dilly,” but not in their presence.

He described Mrs. Hiss as a short, highly nervous woman with a habit of blushing bright red when she was excited or angry. He told us Mrs. Hiss's maiden name, her birthplace, her background.

He described Hiss's stepson.

He told us of Hiss's boyhood hobby of fetching spring water from Druid Hill Park and selling it in Baltimore.

He described the interiors and exteriors of three different houses the Hisses lived in while he knew them.

All of this information, I realized, he might have obtained by studying Hiss's life without actually knowing him. But some of the answers had a personal ring of truth about them, beyond the bare facts themselves.
³

For instance, when I asked him how the Hiss family lived and about the kind of meals they served, he replied, “I think you get here into something else. Hiss is a man of great simplicity and a great gentleness and sweetness of character, and they lived with extreme simplicity. I had the impression that the furniture in that house [on Twenty-eighth Street in Washington] was kind of pulled together from here or there. Maybe they got it from their mother or something like that, nothing lavish about it whatsoever, quite simple. Their food was in the same pattern, and they cared nothing about food. It was not a primary interest in their lives.”

I got a similar impression when I asked him, “Did he have any hobbies?”

“Yes, he did. They both had the same hobby—amateur ornithologists, bird observers. They used to get up early in the morning and go to Glen Echo out the canal, to observe birds. I recall once they saw, to their great excitement, a prothonotary warbler.”

John McDowell, a bird fancier himself, interrupted to comment, “A very rare specimen.” And Chambers said, “I never saw one. I am also fond of birds.”

But while testimony like this was very convincing, some of the things Chambers told us that day were so close to unbelievable that they raised a doubt in our minds about all the rest.

For example, I asked him, “Did they have a car?”

“Yes, they did,” Chambers replied. He described a 1929 Ford roadster, black and dilapidated, which had windshield wipers that had to be worked by hand. Then he told what seemed to be an unlikely story of how Alger Hiss bought another car in 1936 and wanted to give the old Ford to the Communist Party. “It was against all the rules of the underground organization—and I think this investigation has proved how right the Communists are in such matters. But Hiss insisted. Much against Peters' [J. Peters was at that time the head of the Communist underground in the United States] better judgment, he finally got us to permit him to do this thing,” Chambers said.

Hiss turned the car over to a Communist in a Washington service station and it was later transferred to another Party member. “I should think the records of that transfer would be traceable,” Chambers concluded.

As he came to the end of his testimony, I asked, “Would you be willing to submit to a lie detector on this testimony?”

“Yes, if necessary,” he answered, without hesitation.

“You have that much confidence?”

“I am telling the truth,” he said quietly.

While listening to Chambers testify that Saturday afternoon, I felt sure that he was telling the truth. But on the train ride back to Washington, some of my doubts began to return.

Could Chambers, by making a careful study of Hiss's life, have concocted the whole story for the purpose of destroying Hiss—for some motive we did not know?

It was difficult back in 1948, before the scope of the Communist underground movement had become generally known, to believe a man like Chambers over a man like Hiss. Consider Chambers' background. He had been a City Editor of the
Daily Worker,
written for the
New Masses,
and served as a paid functionary of the Communist Party underground, then had repudiated the Party, and for months had slept with a gun under his pillow for fear of assassination. Could such a man be believed? Wasn't it more plausible to conclude that he was bent on destroying an innocent man?

Hiss, on the other hand, had come from a fine family, had made an outstanding record at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, had been honored by being selected for the staff of a great justice of the Supreme Court, had served as Executive Secretary to the big international monetary conference at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944, had accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta, and had held a key post at the conference establishing the United Nations at San Francisco. Was it possible that a man with this background could have been a Communist whose allegiance was to the Soviet Union, even during the period when the Communists and Nazis had been allies, in 1939–41?

The Committee could not go off half-cocked again, particularly with such great stakes involved. We had a grave responsibility to be sure of our facts before any more charges were aired in public.

In the next nine days, from August 8 to August 16, the Committee staff under Stripling's direction worked round the clock in a search for documentary or other proof, if it existed, of Chambers' story. They questioned real estate agents for leases pertaining to the three houses in which Chambers said Hiss lived from 1935 to 1937. They found the dog kennel in Georgetown where the Hisses had left their cocker spaniel when they went on vacation. They searched for anyone who might possibly have seen the two men together in the neighborhoods where
Hiss had lived. And in detail after detail, where the Chambers story could be checked with third parties, it proved to be true. But they were unsuccessful in their search for one vitally important piece of documentation: they could not find the Motor Vehicle records to substantiate Chambers' strange story about Hiss's giving his car to a Communist Party functionary.

In this same period, I tried to resolve some of my own doubts by reading and rereading Chambers' testimony and by seeking counsel from men of varying views whose opinions I respected. The question I asked over and over again was whether Chambers' testimony constituted a prima facie case against Hiss, justifying a further pursuit of the investigation. Or should I agree with the Committee's original inclination after hearing Hiss testify that we turn the case over to the Justice Department?

I was to learn during this period a lesson about the nature of crisis which would serve me for years to come.

Making the decision to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself. One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or to fly from it. It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers. A leader is one who has the emotional, mental, and physical strength to withstand the pressures and tensions created by necessary doubts and then, at the critical moment, to make a choice and to act decisively. The men who fail are those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee to avoid meeting the problem at all.

On the other hand, if one is to act and to lead responsibly he must necessarily go through this period of soul-searching and testing of alternate courses of action. Otherwise he shoots from the hip, misses the target, and loses the battle through sheer recklessness.

Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between Communism and freedom, there are gray areas. But there are intrinsic principles which must be adhered to. Anyone who shirks this inner debate in waging this struggle acts irresponsibly. It is this soul-searching and testing which ultimately gives a man the confidence, calmness, and toughness with which to act decisively.

•  •  •

In the period between August 7 and August 16, when Hiss was to
testify again, I not only insisted that the Committee staff, by the most intensive possible investigation, try to establish the truth or falsity of Chambers' testimony by corroborative evidence but, in addition, I tried to check the objectivity of my own judgment against the opinions of men whom I respected.

I asked Bert Andrews, chief Washington correspondent of the New York
Herald Tribune,
to come to my office. I felt he would be predisposed to believe Hiss rather than Chambers. He had recently won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles attacking the fairness of the State Department's loyalty program. Along with James Reston of the New York
Times,
he had recommended Hiss to Dulles for the Carnegie post. From my brief acquaintance with Andrews and from his reputation among his colleagues in the press corps, I was convinced he would be objective. He had the rare quality which distinguishes a great reporter from just a good one—he never allowed his prejudices or emotions to get in the way in his search for and reporting of the truth. He once told me, “An editor has the right to write from his heart. But a reporter must never allow his heart to override what his head tells him are the facts. The trouble with too many reporters who cover the State Department, for example, is that they forget that their job is to write
about
the Secretary of State and they proceed to write as if they
were
the Secretary of State.”

I asked Andrews to read the testimony, with the understanding that he could write nothing about it until it was released for publication to all papers. When he finished his reading, he turned to me and said, “I wouldn't have believed it, after hearing Hiss the other day. But there's no doubt about it. Chambers knew Hiss.”

The next day I asked William P. Rogers, who was then chief counsel for the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee investigating the Bentley charges, to read the testimony. Rogers, who was later to become Attorney General, had made a brilliant record as one of Tom Dewey's young prosecutors in New York, and I felt that he would be a good judge of Chambers' credibility. He reached the same conclusion as Andrews.

That night I had dinner with Congressman Charles J. Kersten, Republican of Wisconsin, with whom I served as a member of the Labor Committee and who was a keen analyst of Communist tactics and strategy. After Kersten read the testimony he made a suggestion which was not only to have a great bearing on my own conduct of this case
but on the course of my career in the years ahead. He told me he had heard that Hiss was trying to get John Foster Dulles and other members of the Carnegie board to make statements in his behalf. He suggested that I should give Dulles the opportunity to read the testimony.

The following morning, August 11, I telephoned Dulles and he said he would be willing to see me that night at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where he was working on the Dewey presidential campaign. Kersten and I took the train to New York that afternoon and met Dulles in his hotel suite. His brother Allen, who later was to become head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was also there. Both men read the testimony. When they had finished, Foster Dulles paced the floor, his hands crossed behind him. It was a characteristic I was to see many times in the years ahead when we discussed important issues. He stopped finally and said, “There's no question about it. It's almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.” Allen Dulles reached the same conclusion.

I asked Foster Dulles whether he thought I was justified in going ahead with the investigation. He replied without hesitation, “In view of the facts Chambers has testified to, you'd be derelict in your duty as a Congressman if you did not see the case through to a conclusion.”

I was so wrapped up with the problems of making my own decision that I did not fully realize at the time the political courage and integrity Dulles demonstrated by this statement. He was Dewey's chief foreign policy adviser in the campaign. If and when Dewey was elected President, which most people thought was pretty certain at that time, it was generally assumed that Foster Dulles would be named Secretary of State. As Chairman of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment he had approved the appointment of Hiss to his present position. It would be acutely embarrassing to him if Hiss should be discredited—or worse, proved to be a Communist. He could have suggested that I delay the proceedings until after the election. But both Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, in this instance and in every case in which I was to work with either of them during my years as Vice President, put the cause of justice and the national interest above any personal or political considerations.

Still I was not satisfied. I decided to see Chambers again, this time alone and informally, not so much to get more information from him as to gain a more intimate impression of what kind of man he really was. I thought that if I could talk to him alone, I would be better able to
sense whether or not he was telling the truth. To avoid any publicity, I made the two-hour trip from Washington to his farm by car. We sat on some dilapidated rocking chairs on his front porch overlooking the rolling Maryland countryside. It was the first of many long and rewarding conversations I was to have with him during the period of the Hiss case, and through the years until his death in 1961. Like most men of quality, he made a deeper impression personally than he did in public. Within minutes, the caricature drawn by the rumormongers of the drunkard, the unstable and unsavory character, faded away. Here was a man of extraordinary intelligence, speaking from great depth of understanding; a sensitive, shy man who had turned from complete dedication to Communism to a new religious faith and a kind of fatalism about the future. One thing that especially impressed me was his almost absolute passion for personal privacy. He seemed particularly to want to spare his children any embarrassment from what he had hoped was a closed chapter in his life. His wife, Esther, was exactly like him in this respect.