Six Crises (2 page)

From my own experience, the bigger the problem, the broader its consequences, the less does an individual think of himself. He has to devote his entire concentration to the much larger problem which confronts him. “Selflessness” is the greatest asset an individual can have in a time of crisis. “Selfishness” (in its literal rather than its lay sense) is the greatest liability. The very fact that the crisis is bigger than the man himself takes his mind off his own problems. The natural symptoms of stress in a period of crisis do not become self-destructive as a result of his worrying about himself but, on the other hand, become positive forces for creative action.

A second general point can best be illustrated by an anecdote. Shortly after I returned from South America in 1958, I attended a Washington reception for Congressional Medal of Honor winners. One of the guests of honor came up to me and, pointing to his ribbon, said, “You should be wearing this, not I. I could never have done what you did in Caracas.” I answered: “And I could never have done what you did during the Battle of the Bulge.” Perhaps we were both wrong. No one really knows what he is capable of until he is tested to the full by events over which he may have no control. That is why this book is an account not of great men but rather of great events—and how one man responded to them.

I do not believe, for example, that some men are just “naturally” cool, courageous, and decisive in handling crisis situations, while others are not. “He doesn't have a nerve in his body” is a popular cliché. Of course some men may be stronger, less emotional, quicker, smarter, bolder than others. But I think these attributes are for the most part acquired and not inherited, and many times acquired suddenly under stress. The public likes to glamorize its leaders, and most leaders like to glamorize themselves. We tend to think of some men as “born leaders.” But I have found that leaders are subject to all the human frailties: they lose their tempers, become depressed, experience the other symptoms of tension. Sometimes even strong men will cry.

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I should like finally to list some of the lessons I have learned from the six crises described in this book. I offer them not as inflexible rules, but only as tentative guides.

Confidence in crisis depends in great part on adequacy of preparation—where preparation is possible.

Coolness—or perhaps the better word is “serenity”—in battle is a product of faith. And faith, apart from that which stems from religious heritage and moral training, comes to an individual after he has gone through a necessary period of indecision, of doubt and soul-searching, and resolves that his cause is right and determines that he must fight the battle to the finish.

Courage—or, putting it more accurately, lack of fear—is a result of discipline. Any man who claims never to have known fear is either lying or else he is stupid. But by an act of will, he refuses to think of the reasons for fear and so concentrates entirely on winning the battle.

Experience is a vitally important factor. When a man has been through even a minor crisis, he learns not to worry when his muscles tense up, his breathing comes faster, his nerves tingle, his stomach churns, his temper becomes short, his nights are sleepless. He recognizes such symptoms as the natural and healthy signs that his system is keyed up for battle. Far from worrying when this happens, he should worry when it does not. Because he knows from experience that once the battle is joined, all these symptoms will disappear—unless he insists on thinking primarily of himself rather than the problem he must confront.

A man will look forward to the end of the battle. He thinks, “Just as soon as this is over I'll feel great.” But except for a brief period of exhilaration if the fight ended in victory, he will then begin to feel the full effects of what he has been through. He may even be physically sore and mentally depressed. What has happened, of course, is that he is just too spent emotionally, physically, and mentally to enjoy the fruits of victory he so eagerly anticipated.

The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself. The most difficult is the period of indecision—whether to fight or run away. And the most dangerous period is the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.

I find it especially difficult to answer the question, does a man “enjoy” crises? I certainly did not enjoy the ones described in this book in the sense that they were “fun.” And yet, life is surely more than simply the search for enjoyment in the popular sense. We are all tempted to stay on the sidelines, to live like vegetables, to concentrate all our efforts on living at greater leisure, living longer, and leaving
behind a bigger estate. But meeting crises involves creativity. It engages all a man's talents. When he looks back on life, he has to answer the question: did he live up to his capabilities as fully as he could? Or were only part of his abilities ever called into action?

One man may have opportunities that others do not. But what counts is whether the individual used what chances he had. Did he risk all when the stakes were such that he might win or lose all? Did he affirmatively seek the opportunities to use his talents to the utmost in causes that went beyond personal and family considerations?

A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.

Crisis can indeed be agony. But it is the exquisite agony which a man might not want to experience again—yet would not for the world have missed.

And since we live in an age in which individual reaction to crisis may bear on the fate of mankind for centuries to come, we must spare no effort to learn all we can and thus sharpen our responses. If the record of one man's experience in meeting crises—including both his failures and his successes—can help in this respect, then this book may serve a useful purpose.

The ability to be cool, confident, and decisive in crisis is not an inherited characteristic but is the direct result of how well the individual has prepared himself for the battle.

“IF it hadn't been for the Hiss case, you would have been elected President of the United States.” This was the conclusion of one of my best friends after the election of 1960.

But another good friend told me just as sincerely, “If it hadn't been for the Hiss case, you never would have been Vice President of the United States or candidate for President.”

Ironically, both of my friends may have been right.

The Hiss case was the first major crisis of my political life. My name, my reputation, and my career were ever to be linked with the decisions I made and the actions I took in that case, as a thirty-five-year-old freshman Congressman in 1948. Yet, when I was telling my fifteen-year-old daughter, Tricia, one day about the subjects I was covering in this book, she interrupted me to ask, “What was the Hiss case?”

I realized for the first time that a whole new generation of Americans was growing up who had not even heard of the Hiss case. And now, in retrospect, I wonder how many of my own generation really knew the facts and implications of that emotional controversy that rocked the nation twelve years ago.

It is not my purpose here to relate the complete story. What I shall try to do in these pages is to tell it as I experienced it—not only as an acute personal crisis but as a vivid case study of the continuing crisis of our times, a crisis with which we shall be confronted as long as aggressive international Communism is on the loose in the world.

The Hiss case began for me personally on a hot, sultry Washington morning—Tuesday, August 3, 1948—in the Ways and Means Committee hearing room of the New House Office Building. David Whittaker Chambers appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify on Communist infiltration into the federal government. Never in the stormy history of the Committee was a more sensational investigation started by a less impressive witness.

Chambers did not ask to come before the Committee so that he could single out and attack Alger Hiss, as much of the mythology which has since grown up around the case has implied. The Committee had subpoenaed him in its search for witnesses who might be able to corroborate the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley. Miss Bentley had caused a sensation three days earlier when she named thirty-two government officials who she said had supplied her with classified documents which she, as courier for a Soviet spy ring, had then put on microfilm and passed to Russian agents in New York for transmittal to Moscow. The individuals named by Miss Bentley had been called before the Committee. The majority of them refused to answer questions on the ground that the answers would tend to incriminate them. Others categorically denied having given assistance to any spy ring. The charges were significant and sensational—but unsubstantiated.

We then learned from other sources that Whittaker Chambers, a Senior Editor of
Time,
had been a Communist functionary in the 1930's, and we subpoenaed him to testify on August 3. I first saw Chambers in a brief executive session which was held in the Committee office prior to the public hearing. Both in appearance and in what he had to say, he made very little impression on me or the other Committee members. He was short and pudgy. His clothes were unpressed. His shirt collar was curled up over his jacket. He spoke in a rather bored monotone. At first, he seemed an indifferent if not a reluctant witness. But his answers to the few questions we asked him in executive session convinced us that he was no crackpot. And so we decided to save time by going at once into a public session. None of us thought his testimony was going to be especially important. I remember that I considered for a moment the possibility of skipping the public hearing altogether, so that I could return to my office and get out some mail.

There were relatively few in the hearing room when Chambers began his public testimony. The spectator section was less than one-third full and the only reporters present were those who covered the Committee as a regular beat. The public address system was out of order
and Chambers constantly had to be reminded to keep his voice up so that the Committee members and the press could hear what he was saying. He identified himself and began reading a prepared statement in a rather detached way, as if he had an unpleasant chore to do which he wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible. As he droned on, I found my thoughts wandering to other subjects. He was halfway through the statement before I realized that he had some extraordinary quality which raised him far above the run of witnesses who had appeared before our Committee. It was not how he spoke; it was, rather, the sheer, almost stark eloquence of phrases that needed no histrionic embellishment.

He explained that he had joined the Communist Party in 1924 because he had become convinced that Communism was the only sure way to progress, and that he had left the Party in 1937, at the risk of his life, when he became convinced that it was a form of totalitarianism which meant slavery to all mankind.
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And then, speaking with what seemed to me almost a sense of sadness and resignation, he said: “Yet so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples that I could still say to [my wife] at the time—‘I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.'” From that moment, I came more and more to realize that despite his unpretentious appearance, Chambers was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts and one who had inner strength and depth. Here was no headline-seeker but rather a thoughtful, introspective man, careful with his words, speaking with what sounded like the ring of truth.

Chambers went on in his statement to name four members of his underground Communist group whose purpose, he said, was not espionage but rather “Communist infiltration of the American government.” The four were: Nathan Witt, former Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board; John Abt, former Labor Department attorney; Lee Pressman, former Assistant General Counsel for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, later Counsel for the Works Progress Administration, and later still, General Counsel for the CIO; and Alger Hiss who, as a State Department official, had had the responsibility for organizing the Dumbarton Oaks world monetary conferences,
the U. S. side of the Yalta Conference, and the meeting at San Francisco where the UN Charter was written and adopted.

Under further questioning, Chambers also identified two more as Communists: Donald Hiss, Alger's brother, who had been in the Labor Department; and Henry Collins, who had also been in the Labor Department, and later served with the U. S. Occupation Forces in Germany. He named as a “fellow traveler” Harry Dexter White, who had reached the position of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury before leaving government service. Most of the questioning that day, in fact, pertained to White because Elizabeth Bentley had also named him and because he had held the highest government position of all those she had accused of espionage activity. Chambers said that Mrs. Alger Hiss, too, was a Communist, but just as categorically he stated that Mrs. Donald Hiss was not. This was not a man who was throwing his charges about loosely and recklessly. Still, because his accusations did not involve espionage, they made little impression on me or the other Committee members.