J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (57 page)

T
he election of Harry S Truman was not FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s only problem.

On August 17, 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee had arranged for a face-to-face confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. Hiss, who had denied knowing anyone named Chambers, now identified his accuser as one George Crosley, a deadbeat to whom he’d sublet an apartment in about 1935, tossing in, since Crosley lacked transportation, his old 1929 Ford, which he said was worth about $25.
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Crosley had skipped out on the rent, and that was the last he’d seen of him. Hiss not only denied that he was or had ever been a Communist; he dared Chambers to repeat his accusations outside the privileged chambers of the House. This Chambers did, on August 27, on “Meet the Press,” and exactly a month later Hiss filed a $50,000 slander suit, charging Chambers with defamation of character.

Up to this point Chambers had—in his 1939 interview with Adolf Berle, one grand-jury appearance, at least fourteen interviews with the FBI, and numerous interviews with HUAC and State Department investigators—made no mention of espionage or the passing of documents. On the contrary, he’d frequently denied any such thing, his latest denial occurring on November 4, 1948, when he was being deposed by Hiss’s attorneys in preparation for the slander suit. Rather he’d claimed that Hiss and six others whom he named were members of a Washington, D.C., Communist cell whose purpose was to infiltrate the U.S. government, gradually advancing into positions where they could influence policy.

But on November 17 Chambers, pressured by his own attorneys to provide some evidence to support his charges, suddenly produced sixty-nine documents, sixty-five of which were typed digests of State Department reports and four small notes in Alger Hiss’s handwriting.
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All of these materials, Chambers said, had been stored in a manila envelope on top of an unused dumbwaiter in the home of his wife’s nephew since 1938.

In addition to launching a massive search for the Hisses’ old typewriter, a Woodstock, on which Chambers said Alger and his wife, Priscilla, had typed the summaries, the newly produced papers posed other problems. Over the years Chambers had stated or testified variously that he had left the Communist party in “1935,” “early 1937,” “at the end of 1937,” and in “the spring of 1937.” Only lately, on August 25, had he testified, “I was a member of the Communist Party from 1924 until about 1937 or 1938, early ’38”; on August 30, he had given his departure date as “late February 1938.” Yet all of the documents were dated between January 5 and April 1, 1938.

To correct these discrepancies, (1) Chambers now changed his story, saying he had not left the party until April 15, 1938, and (2) the FBI suppressed most of his earlier conflicting statements.

Nor was this the only change in his testimony. Of the literally dozens of others, some were major—he now said that Hiss had been supplying the Soviets with documents since 1934, while serving with the Nye committee. Some, while relatively minor, were nevertheless telling—on hearing that Alger Hiss had never learned to type, for example, Chambers now said that Priscilla had typed the digests, often in his presence.

Apparently, up to this time, Hoover had had little personal contact with Richard Nixon, the young freshman congressman and HUAC member who had taken on the Hiss case as his own crusade.
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But the FBI director provided considerable help, albeit indirectly. During the course of the investigation, the special agent Ed Hummer supplied leads and other background information to Father John Cronin, who in turn passed them on to Nixon, thus giving both the FBI and HUAC deniability.

As Father Cronin later admitted to Garry Wills, “Ed would call me every day and tell me what they had turned up; and I told Dick, who then knew just where to look for things, and what he would find.”
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Only on December 1, 1948, it was Congressman Nixon who informed the FBI of a sensational new development, in a late night telephone call to Lou Nichols. Chambers had just admitted that he “did not tell the FBI everything he knew,” Nixon informed Nichols. The sixty-nine documents weren’t the only information the manila envelope had contained; Chambers also had other documents and materials that he said would “substantiate and vindicate his position which have up to this time not become publicly known.”
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As soon as he could obtain a subpoena, Nixon intended to send committee investigators out to Chambers’s farm to obtain the materials.

Nixon had called Nichols so that the FBI would be alerted in advance to this development, and to ask a favor. With Truman’s unexpected election the previous month, the Justice Department remained under Democratic control. Fearing that the materials might be suppressed if the department got them first, Nixon wanted Hoover to keep this development secret from his boss, the attorney general, until he could reveal it during HUAC’s next scheduled session, on December 18.

It was not like Hoover to give someone else the glory. Yet, not knowing what materials Chambers had retained, he faced the very real danger that their seizure might backfire, embarrassing the FBI. Obviously feeling that it was safer to let HUAC take the chances, Hoover agreed to Nixon’s request and said nothing to the AG.

That same night Chambers took two HUAC investigators out to his pumpkin patch. Reaching into a hollowed-out pumpkin, where he said he’d placed them for safekeeping from the Hiss investigators, he extracted five rolls of microfilm, two of which had already been developed.
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Hoover didn’t need to keep the secret long. Within days every newspaper in the United States had the “pumpkin papers” story, illustrated with a photograph of Congressman Nixon peering through a magnifying glass at a strip of microfilm.

On December 15, 1948, a New York grand jury, after considering the newly revealed evidence, indicted Alger Hiss on two counts of perjury—for falsely denying that he had passed State Department documents to Chambers and for similarly denying that he had met with Chambers after January 1, 1937—but declined to indict his wife, Priscilla. Perjury had been charged rather than espionage, the three-year statute of limitations on the latter having run out.

Chambers had still more surprises. In late January 1949, while preparing their key witness for Hiss’s trial, agents of the New York office sent a panicked telex to the director. Chambers was refusing to name Hiss as a member of the Washington Communist cell. Asked by an alarmed Hoover for clarification, the agents reported back that Chambers “had not put Hiss in the group because he was not sure Alger Hiss was in the group.” Even more disturbing, Chambers also refused to testify that he had received documents from Hiss. In a February 2, 1949, pretrial memorandum, the agents summed up their dilemma: “It is not clear at this time if Chambers can testify that he received these particular 69 documents from Hiss, but upon establishing the facts of this situation, decision can therefore be reached as to who is in the position to introduce these documents.”
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By the time of the trial, however, Chambers had again changed his mind and testified that Hiss belonged to the Washington group and that he had indeed given him the documents.

Nor was this Whittaker Chambers’s only surprise. On February 15, 1949, he handed an agent an envelope and told him he was to read its contents after he left the room. Inside was a lengthy confession. Not only was he an ex-Communist, Chambers said; he was also an ex-homosexual, having “conquered” his “affliction” at the same time he left the party.
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After much soul-searching he wanted the FBI to know about this in case the Hiss defense discovered his secret and tried to use it to impugn his testimony. He had never had sex with Alger Hiss or any other party member, he added.

But having learned much earlier that Hiss’s stepson had been discharged from the Navy in 1945 for psychiatric reasons, including alleged homosexuality, the FBI was able to neutralize this threat rather easily. When questioning the youth, the agents asked about his discharge, thus dropping a broad hint that if the defense chose to make an issue of Chambers’s rumored homosexuality, his would not go unmentioned, so the subject was never raised in court. Hiss would not even let his stepson take the stand—although he wanted to, and could have testified to the family search for the old Woodstock typewriter—for fear he would be publicly shamed.

By the time of the trial, the Hiss Woodstock—or one resembling it
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been found and was introduced into evidence, but it played almost no part in the proceedings, except for its visible presence among the exhibits, the prosecution having decided instead to introduce comparisons between the typed documents and what became known as the “Hiss standards,” letters known to have been typed by Priscilla Hiss between January 1933 and May 1937. (The Hisses claimed to have given away the old machine, which was in poor condition, in December 1937, on moving to a new apartment.) Believing that to challenge the famed infallibility of the FBI Laboratory would be futile, the defense made the serious mistake of letting this evidence go uncontested.

On May 10, three weeks before the start of the trial, J. Edgar Hoover celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agents were encouraged to send something silver, lists kept of approximate costs for inclusion in personnel folders. The director’s office was banked with floral tributes. Waist deep in gladioli, Hoover and Tolson, both clad in white suits, posed for photographs. Among the invited guests was U.S. District Judge Alexander Holtzoff, a former Justice Department official and staunch defender of the FBI.

“When I walked in,” Holtzoff recalled, “the director grabbed me and took me by the hand past all those flowers. ‘I want to show you something,’ he said. On his desk he had one little flower which he showed to me proudly. It meant more to him than all the rest, because an employee of the FBI had grown it in his garden.”
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The tributes, in both houses of Congress, filled the
Congressional Record
and were later reprinted in a special commemorative edition for the director and his friends, while a bipartisan group of senators and representatives introduced a bill to establish a model school for rejected boys, to be named in Hoover’s honor. “For,” as his friend Drew Pearson wrote in his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, “his work among boys has been one of his greatest contributions.”
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A J. Edgar Hoover Foundation was established and a nationwide fund-raising drive launched to purchase a 530-acre farm near the upper Potomac in
Maryland as the site for the school for juvenile delinquents. The State Department’s Voice of America beamed a special broadcast to Europe, about a police chief who was not feared and hated, but was so loved and respected that the American people were building a boys school in his honor.

But the FBI director had declined that honor, Pearson sadly reported in his May 28 column, modestly stating that “he does not think a memorial should be built to a living man.”
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There were no accolades six weeks later when the Hiss trial ended with a hung jury, four members voting for acquittal and eight for conviction.

Hoover, who badly needed a victory to make up for the
Amerasia
debacle and for the extremely serious problems he was having with still another spy case, that of Judith Coplon, blamed nearly everyone, from his agents (four were censured) to the prosecution. Only Congressman Richard Nixon escaped the director’s wrath, possibly because his had been one of the most flowery tributes on the director’s anniversary but most likely because he seemed even angrier than Hoover: he’d not only asked that the Hiss case judge be impeached; he was even threatening to subpoena the four dissenting jurors to testify before HUAC.

That November, Hiss was retried on the same two charges, but with additional evidence, including the testimony of Hede Massing, a known Soviet agent and former wife of the Communist Gerhart Eisler, who stated that in 1935 she and Hiss had met in the apartment of a mutual friend, Noel Field, and had argued over which one of them was going to recruit their host. This time, however, Hiss was convicted on both counts.

Queried later, the jurors seemed particularly impressed with Chambers’s almost encyclopedic knowledge of Hiss’s personal life (he knew, for example, that Hiss, an amateur ornithologist, had once spotted a rare prothonotary warbler; he could describe each of the Hiss residences, down to the placement of furniture and the color of wallpaper; and he knew that in private Hiss called his wife Dilly or Pros and that she called him Hilly). They were unaware that for over two years the FBI had tapped the Hisses’ home phone, checked their bank accounts and tax returns, investigated their family, friends, associates, baby-sitters, and housekeepers (turning one of the latter into an informant), and in the process obtained more details of their lives than even the Hisses themselves remembered; threatened Massing with deportation if she didn’t testify; knew Field had been imprisoned behind the iron curtain during one of Stalin’s purges and so couldn’t contradict her testimony (upon his release, he did, but by then it was much too late); bugged Hiss’s conversations with his attorney; arranged to have his attorney’s taxes audited at a crucial point in the case; planted an informant among the private detectives the Hiss defense had
hired; suborned perjury by supplying witnesses it knew were lying; suppressed evidence not only of the prior inconsistencies in Chambers’s statements but even of how many statements there had been (the defense was told that Chambers had been interviewed three times by the FBI and was given summaries of two of those interviews, when, between January and April 1949 alone, Chambers had been interviewed on thirty-nine separate occasions by the special agents Thomas Spencer and Francis X. Plant). Nor did the jurors know that each of them had been the subject of an FBI name check, with the discovery that two had relatives who were employees of the FBI. Apprised of this fact by the New York ASAC Alan Belmont on November 21, 1949, at the start of the trial, the prosecution “expressed appreciation” upon receiving the information “and requested that it be kept quiet.” It was.
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