Six Crises (6 page)

Why then was he willing to sacrifice this privacy and risk his own financial security by testifying against Hiss and by testifying as he had before our Committee? I told him bluntly that many of those who questioned his credibility believed he must have some personal motive for doing what he had to Hiss.

Chambers replied, “Certainly I wouldn't have a motive which would involve destroying my own career.” He had come forward out of necessity, he said, as a kind of duty to warn his country of the scope, strength, and danger of the Communist conspiracy in the United States. It would be a great pity if the nation continued to look upon this case as simply a clash of personalities between Hiss and himself. Much more was at stake than what happened to either of them as individuals. Turning to me, he said with great feeling, “This is what you must get the country to realize.”

The visit was not too productive in obtaining any additional information about his relationship with Hiss. But one incident occurred to confirm my conviction that when he spoke of Hiss, he was talking about someone he knew rather than someone whose life he had studied. I happened to mention the fact that I was a member of the Society of Friends. He said that he and his family attended the Friends' meeting in Westminster. He recalled that Mrs. Hiss, at the time he knew her, also had been a Friend.

Then his eyes lit up, he snapped his fingers, and he said, “That reminds me of something. Priscilla often used the plain speech in talking to Alger at home.”

I knew from personal experience that my mother never used the plain speech in public but did use it in talking with her sisters and her mother in the privacy of our home. Again I recognized that someone else who knew Priscilla Hiss could have informed Chambers of this habit of hers. But the way he told me about it, rather than what he said, again gave me an intuitive feeling that he was speaking from firsthand rather than second-hand knowledge.

Two days later I asked Bert Andrews to drive with me to Chambers' farm so that I could get his impression as well. Andrews grilled him as only a Washington newspaperman can, and Chambers met the test to Andrews' complete satisfaction. On this visit another small but somewhat significant item came up which seemed to corroborate Chambers' story. I asked him if he had anything in the house which Hiss might have given him during the time that he knew him. Chambers brought out a volume of Audubon prints which he said Hiss had given him one Christmas. As we thumbed through it, he pointed to a drawing of a hooded warbler and said, “As I recall, the Hisses had this in the dining room of one of the houses they lived in.”

As a final test, two days before Hiss was to appear on August 16, I asked Bob Stripling to drive to Westminster with me. Stripling had almost a sixth sense in being able to distinguish the professional “Redbaiters” from those who were honestly trying to help the Committee in its work of exposing the Communist conspiracy. He, too, had been convinced by this time that Chambers knew Hiss. But as we drove back to Washington, he made a most perceptive observation: “I don't think Chambers has yet told us the whole story. He is holding something back. He is trying to protect somebody.”

•  •  •

When our Sub-committee met again in executive session in Washington on August 16, we found a very different Alger Hiss from the confident, poised witness who had appeared before us in public session just ten days before. Then he had succeeded in giving the impression of being completely honest and forthright—trying his best to enlighten some clumsy Congressmen who had either been taken in by a vicious maniac or who were fooled in a terrible case of mistaken identity.

Now he was twisting, turning, evading, and changing his story to fit
the evidence he knew we had. Despite our efforts to keep Chambers' testimony of August 7 secret, Hiss had learned that Chambers had been able to give us intimate details of their association together.

After a few preliminary questions, I had the Committee clerk show Hiss two pictures of Chambers. Then I asked him: “After looking at those pictures, I ask you if you can remember that person, either as Whittaker Chambers or as Carl or as any other individual you have met.”

Ten days before, he had given everyone at the public hearing the distinct impression that the face was completely unfamiliar to him. Now Hiss was to make the first of several subtle but significent changes in his story. He said: “In the public session when I was shown another photograph of Mr. Whittaker Chambers, I testified that I could not swear that I had never seen the man whose picture was shown me. Actually the face has a certain familiarity—I cannot recall any person with distinctness and definiteness whose picture this is, but it is not completely unfamiliar.”

I continued to question him, trying to widen this first tiny crack in his claim that he did not know Chambers. He fought stubbornly and skillfully every inch of the way and his answers became increasingly lengthy and evasive.

He finally began to argue with the Committee. “I have been angered and hurt,” he said to me, “by the attitude you have been taking today that you have a conflict of testimony between two witnesses—one of whom is a confessed former Communist and the other is me—and that you simply have two witnesses saying contradictory things as between whom you find it most difficult to decide on credibility. I do not wish to make it easier for anyone who, for whatever motive I cannot understand, is apparently endeavoring to destroy me. I should not be asked to give details which somehow he may hear and then may be able to use as if he knew them before.”

I replied that the questions I had asked him and Chambers had regard to facts that “could be corroborated by third parties” and that under no circumstances would the Committee use his testimony so that Chambers would be able to “build a web” around him.

Then he attacked on another front. He said: “The issue is not whether this man knew me and I don't remember him. The issue is whether he had a particular conversation that he said he had with me, and which I have denied, and whether I am a member of the Communist
Party or ever was, which he has said and which I have denied.”

But it was Hiss himself who in the public session had deliberately raised the issue of whether Chambers knew him. He had taken a calculated risk in raising that issue, and now he had to pay the price for his bold gamble.

I pressed him on this critical point. “When Mr. Chambers appeared,” I said, “he was instructed that every answer he gave to every question would be material and that answers to a material question would subject him to perjury. Membership in the Communist Party is one thing, because that is a matter which might be and probably would be concealed. But items concerning his alleged relationship with you can be confirmed by third parties, and that is the purpose of these questions.”

Hiss obviously recognized that he had come to the end of the road of detours. “I have written a name on this pad in front of me of a person I knew in 1933 and 1934 who not only spent some time in my home but sublet my apartment,” he said. “I do not recognize the photographs as possibly being this man. I have given the name to two friends of mine before I came to this hearing. I don't think in my present frame of mind that it is fair to my position that I be asked to put down here a record of personal facts about myself which, if they came to the ears of someone who had for no reason I can understand a desire to injure me, would assist him in that endeavor.”

For fifteen minutes he sparred with me and with Stripling. He kept insisting that if he answered our questions—questions to which Chambers had already replied, on the record and under oath, in great detail—Chambers would somehow learn what his answers had been and use this information against him.

At this point, Ed Hébert burst out with what to Hiss must have felt like a blockbuster. Hébert, a Democrat from Louisiana, was respected by both Republicans and Democrats in the Congress because, while he always fought hard for his party's positions, he had made it known on several issues in the past that he was no rubber stamp for Democratic administrations. He had been a member of the Sub-committee which had questioned Chambers in New York on August 7. After that hearing, he had made it clear that he still had great doubts about Chambers' credibility.

But now he had had enough. He said: “Mr. Hiss, let me say this to you now—and this is removed from all technicalities, it's just a man-to-man impression of the whole situation. . . . I will tell you exactly what I told Mr. Chambers so that it will be a matter of record,
too: either you or Mr. Chambers is lying . . . and whichever one of you is lying is the greatest actor that America has ever produced. Now, I have not come to the conclusion yet which one of you is lying and I am trying to find the facts. Up to a few moments ago you have been very open, very co-operative. Now, you have hedged.

“We met Mr. Chambers forty-eight hours after you testified in open session. Mr. Chambers did not know or have any indication as to the questions that we were going to ask him and we probed him for hours . . . and we literally ran out of questions. There wasn't a thing that came to our minds that we didn't ask him about, those little details to probe his own testimony or rather to test his own credibility.

“Now if we can get the help from you and, as I say, if I were in your position, I certainly would give all the help I could, because it is a most fantastic story. What motive would Chambers have? You say you are in a bad position, but don't you think that Chambers destroys himself if he is proven a liar? What motive would he have to pitch a $25,000 position as a respected Senior Editor of
Time
magazine out the window?”

Hiss was shaken to his toes by this blast. Up to this time he had, not without considerable support from the press and from President Truman himself, tried to imply that the entire hearing was a “Republican plot” to smear the New Deal. Now for the first time, a Democrat had begun to question his story. Hiss reacted by counterattacking Hébert as hard as he could.

“It is difficult for me to control myself,” he exclaimed. “That you can sit there, Mr. Hébert, and say to me casually that you have heard that man and you have heard me and you just have no basis for judging which one is telling the truth. I don't think a judge determines the credibility of witnesses on that basis.”

But Hébert, not to be cowed, fired back: “I absolutely have an open mind and am trying to give you as fair a hearing as I could possibly give Chambers or yourself. The fact that Mr. Chambers is a self-confessed traitor . . . and a self-confessed former member of the Communist Party—has no bearing at all on the alleged facts that he has told . . .”

“Has no bearing on his credibility?” interrupted Hiss.

“No, because, Mr. Hiss, I recognize the fact that maybe my background is a little different from yours,” replied Hébert, who had been a New Orleans newspaper editor for many years. “But I do know police
methods, and you show me a good police force and I will show you the stool pigeon who turned them in. We have to have people like Chambers to come in and tell us. I am not giving Mr. Chambers any great credit for his previous life. I am trying to find out if he is reformed. Some of the greatest saints in history were pretty bad before they were saints. Are you going to take away their sainthood because of their previous lives? Are you not going to believe them after they have reformed? I don't care who gives the facts to me, whether a confessed liar, thief, or murderer—if it is facts. That is all I'm interested in.”

Hiss had a bear by the tail. He tried to change the subject. “I would like to raise a separate point,” he said. The real issue, he again insisted, was not whether Chambers knew him or he knew Chambers; it was whether he and Chambers had had the one particular conversation to which Chambers had testified.

I answered by saying, “If Chambers' credibility on the question of whether he knew you or not is destroyed, obviously you can see that this statement that he had a conversation with you and that you were a member of the Communist Party, which was made on the basis of this knowledge, would also be destroyed. And that is exactly the basis upon which this questioning is being conducted. If we prove that he is a perjurer on the basis of his testimony now, the necessity of going into the rest of the matter will be obviated.”

After a few more questions, I asked Chairman J. Parnell Thomas to declare a recess so that Hiss could phone his wife, Priscilla, and make arrangements for her to appear before the Committee.

Five minutes later, when Hiss returned to the Committee room, he was ready to talk. He said: “The name of the man I brought in—and he may have no relation to this whole nightmare—is a man named George Crosley. I met him when I was working for the Nye Committee. He was a writer. He hoped to sell articles to magazines about the munitions industry.”

This man Crosley, he went on, had sublet his apartment on Twenty-eighth Street and had moved in with his wife and “one little baby.” “My recollection is that he spent several nights in my house because his furniture van was delayed. The apartment wasn't very expensive and I think I let him have it at exact cost.”

“His wife and he and little baby did spend several nights in the house with you?”

“This man Crosley, yes,” Hiss replied.

“Can you describe his wife?” I asked.

“Yes, he answered. “She was a rather strikingly dark person. Very strikingly dark.”

I was the only one in the room to whom that answer was significant. I had seen Esther Chambers and I knew that she was indeed strikingly dark.

Hiss insisted, however, that he could not say that Crosley and Chambers were one and the same person. He described Crosley as a “dead-beat” who stayed in the apartment during the summer months of 1935 and never paid any rent.

“What kind of automobile did that fellow have?” Stripling asked.