Six Crises (12 page)

We returned to Washington the next day convinced that Chambers' case was so airtight that the Justice Department had no choice but to ask for an indictment of Hiss. And furthermore, we had great confidence in Tom Donegan, a former FBI agent who was the Justice Department attorney assigned to present the case to the Grand Jury. We knew that if he had his way there would be no question about the outcome.

But Hiss and his legion of supporters within the Administration still had an ace up their sleeves. They did not reckon, however, with some of the Justice Department employees in lower echelons who were so infuriated by their superiors' handling of the case that they apprised the Committee staff of every action that was being taken.

Thus, we learned on the morning of December 8 that some Justice Department officials were advocating that the Grand Jury be asked to indict not Hiss but Chambers for lying when he had denied under oath any knowledge of espionage. It would be a technically valid indictment. Chambers had lied before the Grand Jury on that point. But he also was the star witness in any case against Hiss. If Chambers were indicted, the case against Hiss would be destroyed.

This was shocking news to members of the Committee. The problem
was whether or not to expose this Justice Department strategy publicly and risk the political consequences. I decided to take the risk of an open fight with the Justice Department, in the hope that public opinion on so clear an issue would force the Department's hand in seeking an indictment against Hiss.

That evening, at a public hearing of the Committee well attended by the press, I interrupted the testimony of a witness to declare: “We have learned from unimpeachable sources that the Justice Department now plans to indict Chambers for perjury before any of the other people named by Chambers in this conspiracy are indicted. It is clear that the Justice Department does not want this Committee to hear any witnesses scheduled to go before the Federal Grand Jury and is bringing pressure on the Committee to drop its investigation. Chambers has confessed. He is in the open. He is no longer a danger to our security. If Chambers is indicted first, Hiss and the others will go free because the witness against them will have been discredited as a perjurer. The Administration is trying to silence this Committee. But we will not entrust to the Justice Department and to the Administration the sole responsibility for protecting the national security in this case. We intend to do everything we can to see that the Department does not use the device of indicting Chambers as an excuse for not proceeding against Hiss who has continued to decline to tell any of the truth up to this time.”

President Truman countered the next day, December 9, by again labeling the Hiss-Chambers investigation a “red herring” in his press conference. But by this time not even the immense power of a President who had just won re-election could stop the march of truth.

My gamble in exposing the Administration's plan to indict Chambers rather than Hiss paid off. On December 10, the Washington
Post
said: “The President's attitude suggests a desire to suppress the whole business and the indictment of Mr. Chambers at this time would certainly be a step in that direction. If this is the Administration's policy, it is incredibly shortsighted.” This editorial coming from the
Post,
which was decidedly not an anti-Administration paper, represented the overwhelming opinion in the nation.

Only six days remained before the term of the Grand Jury would expire. But now the FBI finally was given the go-ahead signal to dig out the facts in the case. A massive search was initiated for the key “witness” in the case—the old Woodstock typewriter on which Chambers
said Mrs. Hiss had typed the incriminating documents. FBI agents were unable to find the typewriter, but they did find some old letters which Priscilla Hiss admitted having typed on the Woodstock.
⁷

On December 13, I appeared before the Grand Jury with the microfilm. Justice Department officials demanded that I leave the microfilm with them. By this time, I believed that they would prosecute the case with diligence, but the full Committee had given me instructions that under no circumstances was I to surrender the microfilm without Committee approval. Alex Campbell threatened to ask the Judge to cite me for contempt. I, in turn, warned him of the constitutional question that would be raised if a member of Congress, appearing voluntarily before a Grand Jury, were so cited while carrying out a mandate of the Committee which he represented. After a few anxious moments, I was allowed to return to Washington with the microfilm still in my possession but with the understanding that, in the event Hiss was indicted, I would take the responsibility of seeing that the Committee would make the microfilm available as evidence in the trial.

It was still touch and go. Hiss and his lawyers fought down to the end. Just before the life of the Grand Jury expired on December 15, an expert from the FBI demonstrated conclusively that the typeface on the letters, admittedly written by Mrs. Hiss, matched exactly the typeface on the documents produced by Chambers. Every typewriter, like a fingerprint, is different and cannot be duplicated unless the same machine is used. The evidence was unanswerable.

Grand Jury proceedings are, of course, secret. But reports leaked out as to what happened when the prosecutor asked Hiss for an explanation. He said: “Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.” A ripple of laughter went through the jury room.

All nineteen members voted to indict Hiss on two counts of perjury: one, that he had lied when he testified that he had not unlawfully removed copies of numerous secret, confidential, and restricted documents from the State Department in February and March 1938, and given them to one David Whittaker Chambers; and two, that he had willfully and knowingly lied when he had testified that he had not seen Chambers after January 1, 1937.

I was in Washington in my office when my secretary brought the news which had just come in over the wire. I had a great sense of
relief. Now, I thought, the fight was really over. But again I was to learn that where Communists are concerned, the battle is never over so long as they are still able to fight.

After six postponements, the case came to trial on May 31, 1949, before Federal Judge Samuel H. Kaufman in New York City. It ended July 8, with a hung jury, eight to four for conviction.

The second trial began November 17, 1949, and ended January 21, 1950. The jury found Hiss guilty on both counts. Judge Henry W. Goddard sentenced him to five years in prison. The verdict and sentence were appealed but they were upheld by the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals on December 7 of that year. On March 12, 1951, the U. S. Supreme Court refused to review the case.

The libel suit in Baltimore was dismissed following the conviction. Alger Hiss served three years and eight months of his sentence, with time off for good behavior, in the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Federal Prison. He was released in November 1954, at the age of fifty, and drifted into obscurity, having found employment as a stationery salesman.

Whittaker Chambers, after leaving
Time,
retired to his Westminster farm where he wrote his autobiography,
Witness,
and lived out his remaining years. He died July 9, 1961, at the age of sixty.
⁸

•  •  •

Now, I would like to attempt an answer to the question my daughter, Tricia, asked me.

“What was the Hiss case?”

Whittaker Chambers, with typical insight, perhaps came closest to the truth when he wrote in
Witness
that the situation which involved Alger Hiss and himself was not simply “human tragedy,” not just “another fat folder in the sad files of the police,” but rather was a “tragedy of history.” Here, “the two irreconcilable faiths of our time, Communism and Freedom, came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men.”

In this sentence, he compressed whole chapters of world history: the
rise, development, and—as some would argue—partial decay of the philosophy called “liberalism”; the parallel emergence of a liberal heresy called Communism; the assumption of world leadership by two superpowers, America and Russia, each wedded to a competing faith and each strengthened and yet limited thereby; and, finally, the present confrontation of these two faiths and these two superpowers at specific times and places in every part of the world. The issue at stake, to put it starkly, is this: whose hand will write the next several chapters of human history?

The Hiss case aroused the nation for the first time to the existence and character of the Communist conspiracy within the United States. It focused attention sharply on the conspiratorial aspects of the Party. The prevailing opinion in the country prior to the Hiss-Chambers case was probably that the Communists were nothing but a handful of noisy but relatively harmless left-wingers attempting to exercise their rights of free speech and political action. A substantial number of Americans believed the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities were “Red-baiting” for partisan purposes only.

The unpopularity of the Committee, whatever the reasons, caused many political leaders and opinion-makers to dismiss without investigation anything the Committee might discover and disclose about Communism in the United States. Upon learning that Communists and fellow-travelers were holding important positions in government, in education, or in labor, many people simply responded—“so what! All they are doing is exercising their legitimate freedom of speech and political opinion.” Some went even further and charged that the members of the Committee, and their allies, were really “Fascist agents,” bent on denying free expression to “unpopular views.”

The Hiss case, for the first time, forcibly demonstrated to the American people that domestic Communism was a real and present danger to the security of the nation.

As Herbert Hoover wrote me after Hiss's conviction, “At last the stream of treason that has existed in our government has been exposed in a fashion all may believe.” Chambers testified that his espionage ring was only one of several that had infiltrated the American government. Yet he had turned over to the Committee and the Justice Department hundreds of pages of confidential and secret documents from the State Department and other government agencies. And he testified that on at least seventy different occasions, the members of his ring had obtained
a like number of documents—all of which he had transmitted to Soviet agents.

Hiss was just one of the members of the group from which Chambers obtained government documents. Chambers' contacts included four men in the State Department, two in the Treasury Department, two in the Bureau of Standards, one in the Aberdeen and one in the Pica-tinny Arsenal, two in the Electric Boat Company, one in the Remington Rand Company, and one in the Illinois Steel Company. The individuals he named, almost without exception, held positions of influence where they had access to confidential and secret information.

But the purpose of the Hiss-Chambers group was not limited to stealing documents and passing information to Soviet agents like common spies. Some, like Hiss, reached positions so high in government that they could influence policy directly. As I said in a speech in the House of Representatives in 1950, this type of activity “permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy; it disarms and dooms our diplomats to defeat in advance, before they go to conferences; traitors in the high councils of our own government make sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side of the diplomatic table.”

The Hiss case thus demonstrated the necessity of screening federal employees in sensitive positions for loyalty and security—rigorously, fairly, and with sophisticated insight into the many-sided Communist apparatus.

The Hiss case exposed the blindness of the Truman Administration and its predecessors to the problem of Communist subversion in government. It demonstrated the need for congressional investigatory bodies, like the Committee on Un-American Activities, which could expose such laxity and, with the help of a mobilized public opinion, could force the Executive branch to adopt policies adequate for dealing with the problem.

The record of negligence was almost too flagrant to believe. Chambers first made his charges in 1939 and he repeated them to government officials several times thereafter. Yet as far as the public record is concerned, the only action taken on his charges until the Committee started its investigation in 1948, was to promote each of the individuals he named to higher positions of power and influence within the government. The most damning proof of negligence on the part of the Executive branch was that Hiss himself had to be indicted and convicted not for espionage, the crime of which he was originally guilty, but for
perjury—for lying when he denied committing espionage. The statute of limitations, requiring prosecution for espionage within three years after the crime had been committed, had already long expired.

The conduct of President Truman in this case was particularly hard to understand. No one would question the tough-minded anti-Communism of the man who had so boldly initiated the program of Greek-Turkish aid and the Marshall Plan. One can understand why he might have felt justified in terming the case a “red herring” when Hiss first testified before the Committee. But he did a disservice to the nation and to his own party by stubbornly maintaining that position as evidence to the contrary piled up. His error was sheer stubbornness in refusing to admit a mistake. He viewed the Hiss case only in its political implications and he chose to handle the crisis which faced his Administration with an outworn political rule of thumb: leave the political skeletons hidden in the closet and keep the door locked. He denied outright the evidence in front of him and he stumped the 1948 political trail flailing away at the “red herring,” thus putting himself in a needlessly untenable position on an important issue and—of infinitely graver consequence—leading a large segment of the public away from a deeper understanding of the true threat of the Communist conspiracy in America.