News an Oxford don has bought into b.s. about Alger Hiss’s innocence sent your editor back to Aram Saroyan’s play, UNAMERICAN, which is based on the public record of the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Hiss. UNAMERICAN is posted below along with the second act of My Confession, Saroyan’s “solo performance play” based on Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her encounters with Stalinists in the 30s (which she published in Encounter in 1954).
I’ve read a couple drafts of Saroyan’s UNAMERICAN and each time I’m struck when, thanks to the Q&A with that odd bird Hiss, I find myself digging Richard Nixon’s (relative) authenticity. This time through, I was also hit by Hiss’s snobbery. There’s that moment just as he’s about to face his accuser Chambers—whom he’d claimed was a stranger to him though his own testimony had indicated they’d once been intimates—when Hiss interrupts the House Committee’s proceedings to piss from a great height on his interrogators:
May I interrupt at this point, because I take it this will take more than 10 or 15 minutes. Would it be possible for one of the members of the committee to call the Harvard Club and leave word that I won’t be there for a 6 o’clock appointment?
Mary McCarthy, the subject of a Saroyan’s other drama of American Communism, gets to the snotty essence of Party animals in My Confession‘s first act:
People sometimes say that they envied the Communists because they were so “sure.” In my case, this was not exactly it…
…I did envy the Communists, or, to be more accurate, wonder whether I ought to envy them. I could not, I saw, be a Communist because I was not “made that way.” Hence, to be a Communist was to possess a sort of privilege. And this privilege, like all privileges, appeared to be a sort of power. Any form of idiocy or aberration can confer this distinction on its owner, at least in our age, which aspires to a “total” experience; in the thirties it was the Communists who seemed fearsomely to be the happy few, not because they had peace or certitude but because they were a mutation—a mutation that threatened, in the words of their own anthem, to become the human race.
There was something arcane in every Communist, and the larger this area was the more we respected him. That was why the literary Communists, who operated in the open, doing the hatchet work on artists’ reputations, were held in such relatively low esteem. An underground worker rated highest with us; next were the theoreticians and oracles; next were the activists, who mostly worked, we heard, on the waterfront. Last came the rank and file, whose work consisted of making speeches, distributing leaflets, attending party and fraction meetings, joining front organizations, marching in parades and demonstrations. These people we dismissed as uninteresting not so much because their work was routine but because the greater part of it was visible. In the same way, among individual comrades, we looked up to those who were close-lipped and stern about their beliefs and we disparaged the more voluble members—the forensic little actors who tried to harangue us in the dressing-rooms. The idea of a double life was what impressed us: the more talkative comrades seemed to have only one life, like us; but even they, we had to remind ourselves, had a secret annex to their personality, which was signified by their Party name. It is hard not to respect somebody who has an alias.
Of fellow-travelers, we had a very low opinion. People who were not willing to “go the whole way” filled us with impatient disdain. The only fellow-travelers who merited our notice were those of whom it was said: the Party prefers that they remain on the outside…
In making these distinctions (which were the very distinctions the Party made), I had no idea, of course, that I was allowing myself to be influenced by the Party in the field where I was most open to suspicion—the field of social snobbery. Yet in fact I was being deterred from forming any political opinions of my own, lest I find I was that despised article, a “mere” socialist or watery liberal, in the same way that a young snob coming to college and seeing who the “right” people are will strive to make no friends rather than be caught with the wrong ones.
For me, the Communist Party was the party, and even though I did not join it, I prided myself on knowing that it was the pinnacle. It is only now that I see the social component in my attitude.
My Confession‘s second act spells out how the American C.P. was made for snobs and nerds with a taste for thug life. (Though the rank and file may not have been full of human horrors.) I’m grateful to Saroyan for allowing First to post it. (You can read the entire play at his website here.) UNAMERICAN follows directly after Saroyan’s play on McCarthy’s confession (which he suggests “would be perfect for Joan Allen”). B.D.
My Confession (Pt. 2)
Post-intermission, Mary McCarthy takes up her story where she’d left off—out West (in Reno) where she’d believed she was “blossoming” as a radical, hewing closer to the CP’s line. (Though, in fact, she was out of step: “All the fellow-travellers would be voting, not for Browder as I was now prepared to do—if only I remembered to register—but for Roosevelt.”)…
Well, then. Where were we—? [fingers her papers] Oh yes… “Book Bites Mary,” wrote back a surprised literary editor when I sent him, from Reno, a radiant review of a novel about the Paris Commune that ended with the heroine sitting down to read the Communist Manifesto. In Seattle, when I came to stay with my grandparents, I found a strike on and instantly wired the Nation to ask if I could cover it. Every night I was off to the Labor Temple or a longshoreman’s hall while my grandparents took comfort from the fact that I seemed to be against Roosevelt, the Democrats, and the tsars of the A. F. of L.—they did not quite grasp my explanation, that I was criticizing “from the left.”
Right here, I come up against a puzzle: why didn’t I take the next step? But it is only a puzzle if one thinks of me not as a concrete entity but as a term in a logical operation: you agree with the Communist Party; ergo, you join it. I reasoned that way but I did not behave so. There was something in me that capriciously resisted being a term in logic, and the very fact that I cannot elicit any specific reason why I did not join the Party shows that I was never really contemplating it, though I can still hear my own voice, raised very authoritatively at a cafeteria-table at the Central Park Zoo, pointing out to a group of young intellectuals that if we were serious we would join the Communists.
This was in September and I was back in New York. The Spanish Civil War had begun. The pay-as-you-go parties were now all for the Loyalists, and young men were volunteering to go and fight in Spain. I read the paper every morning with tears of exaltation in my eyes, and my sympathies rained equally on Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, and the brave Catholic Basques. My heart was tense and swollen with Popular Front solidarity. I applauded the Lincoln Battalion, protested non-intervention, hurried into Wanamaker’s to look for cotton-lace stockings: I was boycotting silk on account of Japan in China. I was careful to smoke only union-made cigarettes; the white package with Sir Walter Raleigh’s portrait came proudly out of my pocketbook to rebuke Chesterfields and Luckies.
It was a period of intense happiness; the news from the battlefront was often encouraging and the practice of virtue was surprisingly easy. I moved into a one-room apartment on a crooked street in Greenwich Village and exulted in being poor and alone. I had a part-time job and read manuscripts for a publisher; the very riskiness of my situation was zestful—I had decided not to get married. The first month or so was scarifyingly lonely, but I survived this, and, starting early in November, I began to feel the first stirrings of popularity. A new set of people, rather smart and moneyed, young Communists with a little “name,” progressive hosts and modernist hostesses, had discovered me. The fact that I was poor and lived in such a funny little apartment increased the interest felt: I was passed from hand to hand, as a novelty, like Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians. During those first days in November, I was chiefly conscious of what a wonderful time I was starting to have. All this while, I had remained ignorant of the fissure that was opening. Nobody had told me of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamnev—the trial of the sixteen—or of the new trial that was being prepared in Moscow, the trial of Pyatakov and Radek.
Then, one afternoon in November, I was taken to a cocktail party, in honour of Art Young, the old Masses cartoonist, whose book, The Best of Art Young, was being published that day. It was the first publisher’s party I had ever been to, and my immediate sensation was one of disappointment: nearly all these people were strangers and, to me, quite unattractive. Art Young, a white-haired little kewpie, sitting in a corner, was pointed out to me, and I turned a respectful gaze on him, though I had no clear idea who he was or how he had distinguished himself. I presumed he was a veteran Communist, like a number of the stalwarts in the room, survivors of the old Masses and the Liberator magazines. Their names were whispered to me and I nodded; this seemed to be a commemorative occasion, and the young men hovered in groups around the old men, as if to catch a word for posterity. On the outskirts of certain groups I noticed a few poorly dressed young men, bolder spirits, nervously flexing their lips, framing sentences that would propel them into the conversational centre, like actors with a single line to speak.
The solemnity of these proceedings made me feel terribly ill-at-ease. It was some time before I became aware that it was not just me who was nervous: the whole room was under a constraint. Some groups were avoiding other groups, and now and then an arrow of sarcasm would wing like a sniper’s bullet from one conversation to another.
I was standing, rather bleakly, by the refreshment table, when a question was thrust at me: Did I think Trotsky was entitled to a hearing? It was a novelist friend of mine, dimple-faced, shaggy-headed, earnest, with a whole train of people, like a deputation, behind him. Trotsky? I glanced for help at a sour little man I had been talking with, but he merely shrugged. My friend made a beckoning gesture and a circle closed in. What had Trotsky done? Alas, I had to ask. A tumult of voices proffered explanations. My friend raised a hand for silence. Leaning on the table, he supplied the background, speaking very slowly, in his dragging, disconsolate voice, like a school-teacher wearied of his subject. Trotsky, it appeared, had been accused of fostering a counter-revolutionary plot in the Soviet Union—organizing terrorist centres and conspiring with the Gestapo to murder the Soviet leaders. Sixteen old Bolsheviks had confessed and implicated him. It had been in the press since August.
I blushed; everybody seemed to be looking at me strangely. “Where has she been?” said a voice. I made a violent effort to take in what had been said. The enormity of the charge dazed me, and I supposed that some sort of poll was being taken and that I was being asked to pronounce on whether Trotsky was guilty or innocent. I could tell from my friend’s low, even, melancholy tone that he regarded the charges as derisory.
“What do you want me to say?” I protested. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“Trotsky denies the charges,” patiently intoned my friend. “He declares it’s a GPU fabrication. Do you think he’s entitled to a hearing?”
My mind cleared. “Why, of course.” I laughed—were there people who would say that Trotsky was not entitled to a hearing?
But my friend’s voice tolled a rebuke to this levity. “She says Trotsky is entitled to his day in court.”
The sour little man beside me made a peculiar sucking noise. “You disagree?” I demanded, wonderingly.
“I’m smart,” he retorted. “I don’t let anybody ask me. You notice, he doesn’t ask me?”
“Shut up, George,” said my novelist friend impatiently. “I’m asking her. One thing more, Mary,” he continued gravely. “Do you believe that Trotsky should have the right of asylum?”
The right of asylum! I looked for someone to share my amusement— were we in ancient Greece or the Middle Ages? I was sure the U.S. Government would be delighted to harbour such a distinguished foreigner. But nobody smiled back. Everybody watched dispassionately, as for form’s sake I assented to the phrasing: yes, Trotsky, in my opinion, was entitled to the right of asylum.
I went home with the serene feeling that all these people were slightly crazy. Right of asylum, his day in court!—in a few hours I had forgotten the whole thing.
Four days later I tore open an envelope addressed to me by something that called itself “Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky,” and idly scanned the contents. “We demand for Leon Trotsky the right of a fair hearing and the right of asylum.” Who were these demanders, I wondered, and, glancing down the letterhead, I discovered my own name. I sat down on my unmade studio couch, shaking. How dared they help themselves to my signature? This was the kind of thing the Communists were always being accused of pulling; apparently, Trotsky’s admirers had gone to the same school. I had paid so little heed to the incident at the party that a connection was slow to establish itself. Reading over the list of signers, I recognized “names” that had been present there and remembered my novelist-friend going from person to person, methodically polling. . .
How were they feeling, I wondered, when they opened their mail this morning? My own feelings were crisp. In two minutes I had decided to withdraw my name and write a note of protest. Trotsky had a right to a hearing, but I had a right to my signature. For even if there had been a legitimate misunderstanding (it occurred to me that perhaps I had been the only person there not to see the import of my answers), nothing I had said committed me to Trotsky’s defence.
The “decision” was made, but according to my habit I procrastinated. The severe letter I proposed to write got put off till the next day and then the next. Probably I was not eager to offend somebody who had been a good friend to me. Nevertheless, the letter would undoubtedly have been written, had I been left to myself. But within the next forty-eight hours the phone calls began. People whom I had not seen for months or whom I knew very slightly telephoned to advise me to get off the newly formed Committee. These calls were not precisely threatening. Indeed, the caller often sounded terribly weak and awkward, as if he did not like the mission he had been assigned. But they were peculiar. For one thing, they always came after nightfall and sometimes quite late, when I was already in bed. Another thing, there was no real effort at persuasion: the caller stated his purpose in standardized phrases, usually plaintive in tone (the Committee was the tool of reaction, and all liberal people should dissociate themselves from its activities, which were an unwarranted intervention in the domestic affairs of the Soviet Union), and then hung up, almost immediately, before I had a proper chance to answer. Odd too the voices were not those of my Communist friends but of virtual strangers. These people who admonished me to “think about it” were not people whose individual opinions could have had any weight with me. And when I did think about it, this very fact took on an ominous character: I was not being appealed to personally but impersonally warned.
Behind these phone calls there was a sense of massed power, as if all over the city the Party were wheeling its forces into disciplined formations, like a fleet or an army manœuvring. This, I later found, was true: a systematic telephone campaign was going on to dislodge members from the Committee. The phone calls generally came after dark and sometimes (especially when the recipient was elderly) in the small hours of the morning. The more prominent signers got anonymous messages and threats.
And in the morning papers and the columns of the liberal magazines I saw the results. During the first week, name after name fell off the Committee’s letterhead. Prominent liberals and literary figures issued statements deploring their mistake. And a number of people protested that their names had been used without permission.
There, but for the grace of God, went I, I whispered, awestruck, to myself, hugging my guilty knowledge. Only Heaven—I plainly saw—by making me delay had preserved me from joining this sorry band. Here was the occasion when I should have been wrestling with my conscience or standing, floodlit, at the crossroads of choice. But in fact I was only aware that I had had a providential escape. I had been saved from having to decide about the Committee; I did not decide it—the Communists with their pressure tactics took the matter out of my hands. We all have an instinct that makes us side with the weak, if we do not stop to reason about it, the instinct that makes a householder shield a wounded fugitive without first conducting an inquiry into the rights and wrongs of his case. Such “decisions” are simple reflexes; they do not require courage; if they did, there would be fewer of them. When I saw what was happening, I rebounded to the defence of the Committee without a single hesitation—it was nobody’s business, I felt, how I happened to be on it, and if anybody had asked me, I should have lied without a scruple.
Of course, I did not foresee the far-reaching consequences of my act—how it would change my life. I had no notion that I was now an anti-Communist, where before I had been either indifferent or pro-Communist. I did, however, soon recognize that I was in a rather awkward predicament—not a moral quandary but a social one. I knew nothing about the cause I had espoused; I had never read a word of Lenin or Trotsky, nothing of Marx but the Communist Manifesto, nothing of Soviet history; the very names of the old Bolsheviks who had confessed were strange and almost barbarous in my cars. As for Trotsky, the only thing that made me think that he might be innocent was the odd behaviour of the Communists and the fellow-traveling liberals, who seemed to be infuriated at the idea of a free inquiry. All around me, in the fashionable Stalinist circles I was now frequenting, I began to meet with suppressed excitement and just-withheld disapproval. Jeweled lady-authors turned white and shook their bracelets angrily when I came into a soirée; rising young men in publishing or advertising tightened their neckties dubiously when I urged them to examine the case for themselves; out dancing in a night-club, tall, collegiate young Party members would press me to their shirt bosoms and tell me not to be silly, honey.
And since I seemed to meet more Stalinists every day, I saw that I was going to have to get some arguments with which to defend myself. It was not enough, apparently, to say you were for a fair hearing; you had to rebut the entire case of the prosecution to get anybody to incline an ear in your direction. I began to read, headlong, the literature on the case— the pamphlets issued by Trotsky’s adherents, the Verbatim Report of the second trial published by the Soviet Union, the “bourgeois” press, the Communist press, the radical press. To my astonishment (for I had scarcely dared think it), the trials did indeed seem to be a monstrous frame-up. The defendant, Pyatakov, flew to Oslo to “conspire” with Trotsky during a winter when, according to the authorities, no planes landed at the Oslo airfield; the defendant, Holtzmann, met Trotsky’s son, Sedov, in 1936, at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, which had burned down in 1912; the witness, Romm, met Trotsky in Paris at a time when numerous depositions testified that he had been in Royan, among clouds of witnesses, or on the way there from the south of France.
These were only the most glaring discrepancies—the ones that got in the newspapers. Everywhere you touched the case something crumbled. The carelessness of the case’s manufacture was to me its most terrifying aspect; the slovenly disregard for credibility defied the credence, in its turn. How did they dare? I think I was more shaken by finding that I was on the right side than I would have been the other way round. And yet, except for a very few people, nobody seemed to mind whether the Hotel Bristol had burned down or not, whether a real plane had landed, whether Trotsky’s life and writings were congruent with the picture given of him in the trials. When confronted with the facts of the case, people’s minds sheered off from it like jelly from a spoon.
Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad. And from a social point of view, he is crazy, for he is trying to undo something that is finished, to unravel the social fabric. That is why my liberal friends looked so grave and solemn when I would press them to come along to a meeting and listen to a presentation of the facts— for them this was a Decision, too awful to be considered lightly. The Moscow trials were an historical fact and those of us who tried to undo them were uneasily felt to be crackpots, who were trying to turn the clock back. And of course the less we were listened to, the more insistent and earnest we became, even while we realized we were doing our cause harm. It is impossible to take a moderate tone under such conditions. If I admitted, though, to being a little bit hipped on the subject of Trotsky, I could sometimes gain an indulgent if flickering attention—the kind of attention that stipulates, “She’s a bit off but let’s hear her story.” And now and then, by sheer chance, one of my hearers would be arrested by some stray point in my narrative; the disparaging smile would slowly fade from his features, leaving a look of blank consternation. He would go off and investigate for himself, and in a few days, when we met again, he would be a crackpot too.
Most of us who became anti-Communists at the time of the trials were drawn in, like me, by accident and almost unwillingly. Looking back, as on a love-affair, a man could say that if he had not had lunch in a certain restaurant on a certain day, he might not have been led to ponder the facts of the Moscow trials. Or not then at any rate. And had he pondered them at a later date, other considerations would have entered and his conversations would have had a different style. On the whole, those of us who became anti-Communists during that year, 1936-7, have remained liberals — a thing that is less true of people of our generation who were converted earlier or later. A certain doubt of orthodoxy and independence of mass opinion was riveted into our anti-Communism by the heat of that period. As soon as I make this statement, exceptions leap into my mind, but I think as a generalization it will stand. Those who became anti-Communist earlier fell into two classes: the experts and those to whom any socialist ideal was repugnant. Those whose eyes were opened later, by the Nazi-Soviet pact, or still later, by God knows what, were left bruised and full of self-hatred or self-commiseration, because they had palliated so much and truckled to a power-centre; to them, Communism’s chief sin seems to be that it deceived them, and their public atonement takes on both a vindicating and a vindicative character.
We were luckier. Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and proximity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young men I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.
So, I did not try to be a Marxist or a Trotskyite, though for the first time I read a little in the Marxist canon. But I got the name of being a Trotskyite, which meant, in the end, that I saw less of the conventional Stalinists I had been mingling with and less of conventional people generally. (My definition of a conventional person was quite broad: it included anyone who could hear of the Moscow trials and maintain an unruffled serenity.) This, then, was a break or a rupture, not very noticeable at first, that gradually widened and widened, without any conscious effort on my part, sometimes to my regret. This estrangement was not marked by any definite stages; it was a matter of tiny choices. Shortly after the Moscow trials, for instance, I changed from the Herald-Tribune to the Times; soon I had stopped doing crossword puzzles, playing bridge, reading detective stories and popular novels. I did not “give up” these things, they departed from me, as it were, on tiptoe, seeing that my thoughts were elsewhere.
To change from the Herald-Tribune to the Times, is not, I am aware, as serious a step as breaking with international Communism when you have been its agent; and it occurs to me that Mr. Chambers and Miss Bentley might well protest the comparison, pointing out that they were profoundly dedicated people, while I was a mere trifler, that their decisions partook of the sublime, where mine descended to the ridiculous—Mr. Chambers says, he was ready to give his life for his beliefs. Fortunately (though I could argue the point, for we all give our lives for our beliefs, piecemeal or whole), I have a surprise witness to call for my side, who did literally die for his political views.
I am referring to Trotsky, the small, frail, pertinacious old man who wore whiskers, wrinkles, glasses, shock of grizzled hair, like a gleeful disguise for the erect young student, the dangerous revolutionary within him. Nothing could be more alien to the convulsed and tormented moonscapes of the true confessions of ex-Communists than Trotsky’s populous, matter-of-fact recollections set out in My Life. I have just been re-reading this volume, and though I no longer subscribe to its views, which have certainly an authoritarian and doctrinaire cast that troubles me today, nevertheless, I experience a sense of recognition here that I cannot find in the pages of our own repentant “revolutionaries.” The old man remained unregenerate; he never admitted that he had sinned. That is probably why nobody seems to care for, or feel apologetic too, his memory. It is an interesting point—and relevant, I think, to my story—that many people today actually have the impression that Trotsky died a natural death.
In a certain sense, this is perfectly true. I do not mean that he lived by violence and therefore might reasonably be expected to die by violence. He was a man of words primarily, a pamphleteer and orator. He was armed, as he said, with a pen and peppered his enemies with a fusillade of articles. Hear the concluding passages of his autobiography. “Since my exile, I have more than once read musings in the newspapers on the subject of the ‘tragedy’ that has befallen me. I know no personal tragedy. I know the change of two chapters of revolution. One American paper which published an article of mine accompanied it with a profound note to the effect that in spite of the blows the author had suffered, he had, as evidenced by his article, preserved his clarity of reason. I can only express my astonishment at the philistine attempt to establish a connection between the power of reasoning and a government post, between mental balance and the present situation. I do not know, and I never have known, of any such connection. In prison, with a book or pen in my hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at mass-meetings of the revolution. I felt the mechanics of power as an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction.”
This was not a man of violence. Nevertheless, one can say that he died a natural death—a death that was in keeping with the open manner of his life. There was nothing arcane in Trotsky; that was his charm. Like an ordinary person, he was hospitably open to hazard and accident. In his autobiography, he cannot date the moment when he became a socialist.
One factor in his losing out in the power-struggle at the time of Lenin’s death was his delay in getting the telegram that should have called him home from the Caucasus, where he was convalescing, to appear at Lenin’s funeral—had he got the telegram, perhaps the outcome would have been different. Or again, perhaps not. It may be that the whims of chance are really the importunities of design. But if there is a Design, it aims, in real lives, like the reader’s or mine or Trotsky’s, to look natural and fortuitous; that is how it gets us into its web.
Trotsky himself, looking at his life in retrospect, was struck, as most of us are on such occasions, by the role chance had played in it. He tells how one day, during Lenin’s last illness, he went duck-shooting with an old hunter in a canoe on the River Dubna, walked through a bog in felt boots—only a hundred steps—and contracted influenza. This was the reason he was ordered to Sukhu for the cure, missed Lenin’s funeral, and had to stay in bed during the struggle for primacy that raged that autumn and winter. “I cannot help noting,” he says, “how obligingly the accidental helps the historical law. Broadly speaking, the entire historical process is a refraction of historical law through the accidental. In the language of biology, one might say that the historical law is realized through the natural selection of accidents.” And with a faint touch of quizzical gaiety he sums up the problem as a Marxian: “One can foresee the consequences of a revolution or a war, but it is impossible to foresee the consequences of an autumn shooting-trip for wild ducks.” This shrug before the unforeseen implies an acceptance of consequences that is a far cry from penance and prophecy. Such, it concedes, is life. Bravo, old sport, I say, even though the hall is empty.
Thank you.
UNAMERICAN
The dialogue in the play is from the Congressional record of six meetings of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in Washington, D.C. and New York City: public and private hearings spanning a period of just over three weeks during August of 1948.
Each scene might begin with a Voice Over stating the specific date, city, venue and public or private character of the meeting. This might be followed by a gavel being struck before the first words of the scene are spoken.
The public meetings—the first, second, and final scenes—are well attended and this can be indicated with ambient noise, extras, digital imaging or combinations of the three in ways to be determined by the production principals. There is a stenographer present in each scene.
THE CHARACTERS
Witnesses
Whittaker Chambers late forties
Alger Hiss middle forties
House UnAmerican Activities Committee Congressmen
Richard Nixon mid thirties
Karl E. Mundt late forties
John McDowell mid forties
Edward F. Hebert late forties
HUAC Committee Aides
Robert E. Stripling forties
(Committee investigator)
Benjamin Mandell fifties
(Committee researcher)
Extras
John Dollard forties
(Hiss’s Carnegie Foundation friend)
Stenographer
People at Public Hearings
WHITTAKER CHAMBERS & ALGER HISS
Whittaker Chambers once described himself as “a heavy man,” and beyond physical reference this might indicate a slow, deep-thinking man, ready at times to strike a note of high drama, but also capable of eloquence.
Alger Hiss is more immediately prepossessing, albeit over-selling himself here as the eminent figure of his public record, but from the beginning operating under a severe strain.Much of the sub-text of the play has to do with the way these two men, once perhaps close friends, now in great discomfort with themselves and one another, navigate a confrontation that would prove to be a benchmark in mid-20th Century American history.
Much of the sub-text of the play has to do with the way these two men, once perhaps close friends, now in great discomfort with themselves and one another, navigate a confrontation that would prove to be a benchmark in mid-20th Century American history.
ACT ONE
VOICE OVER: Tuesday, August 3, 1948, Washington, D.C. Public Hearing. House UnAmerican Activities Committee room. A gavel is struck.
Attended by reporters and observers. Whittaker Chambers has been summoned to testify after being identified as a former Communist in earlier testimony before the Committee. As the scene progresses there is a change in mood, flashbulbs go off and there are departures by reporters to phone their newspapers.
Investigator Robert Stripling: Will you state your full name?: Will you state your full name?
Whittaker Chambers: My name is David Whittaker Chambers.
Stripling: Mr. Chambers, will you raise your voice a little, please? Where and when were you born?
Chambers: I was born, April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.
Stripling: How long have you been associated with Time magazine?
Chambers: Nine years.
Stripling: Prior to that time, what was your occupation
Chambers: I was a member of the Communist Party and a paid functionary of the party.
Stripling: Who comprised the group to which you refer?
Chambers: The apparatus was organized with a leading group of seven men, each of whom was the leader of a cell.
Stripling: Could you name the seven individuals?Chambers: The head of the group was at first Nathan Witt. Other members of the group were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer…
Chambers: The head of the group was at first Nathan Witt. Other members of the group were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer…
Chambers: The head of the group was at first Nathan Witt. Other members of the group were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer…
Flashbulbs have begun.
I have a statement that I’d like to read, if I may.
Stripling: Yes, sir.
Chambers: May I go ahead?
Stripling: Yes, Mr. Chambers, go ahead.
Chambers (reading a prepared statement): Almost exactly nine years ago—that is, two days after Hitler and Stalin signed their pact—I went to Washington and reported to the authorities that I knew about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists. For years, international Communism, of which the United States Communist party is an integral part, had been in a state of undeclared war with this Republic. With the Hitler-Stalin pact that war reached a new stage. I regarded my action in going to the Government as a simple act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat.
At that moment in history, I was one of the few men on this side of the battle who could perform this service. I had joined the Communist Party in 1924. No one recruited me. I had become convinced that the society in which we live, Western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism. I did not understand the causes of the crisis or know what to do about it. But I felt that, as an intelligent man, I must do something. In the writings of Karl Marx, I thought that I had found the explanation of the historical and economic causes of the crisis. In the writings of Lenin, I thought I had found the answer to the question: what to do?
In 1937, I repudiated Marx’s doctrines and Lenin’s tactics. Experience and the record had convinced me that Communism is a form of totalitarianism, that its triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway and spiritual night to the human mind and soul. I resolved to break with the Communist Party at whatever risk to my life or other tragedy to myself or my family. Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that 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.”
It is ten years since I broke away from the Communist Party. During that decade, I have sought to live an industrious and God-fearing life. At the same time, I have fought Communism constantly by act and written word. I am proud to appear before this Committee.
At the same time, I should like to call upon all ex-Communists who have not yet disclosed themselves, and all men within the Communist Party whose better instincts have not yet been corrupted and crushed by it, to aid in the struggle while there is still time.
2
VOICE OVER: Thursday , August 5, 1948, Washington, D.C. Public Hearing, House UnAmerican Activities Committee Room. A gavel is struck.
More crowded attendance.
Congressman Karl Mundt: Mr. Hiss, what is your current employment?
Hiss: I am the President of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace.
Mundt: Did you draft, or participate in drafting, parts of the Yalta Agreement?
Hiss: I think it is accurate and not an immodest statement to say that I did to some extent, yes.
Mundt: Mr. Hiss, I want to say, as one member of the committee, that it is extremely puzzling that a man who is senior editor of Time magazine, by the name of Whittaker Chambers, whom I had never seen until a day or two ago, and whom you say you have never seen—
Hiss: As far as I know, I have never seen him.
Mundt: —should come before this committee and discuss the Communist apparatus working in Washington, which he says is transmitting secrets to the Russian Government, and he lists a group of seven people—Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer, John Abt, Harold Ware, Alger Hiss and Donald Hiss…
Hiss: That is eight.
Mundt: There seems to be no question about the subversive connections of the six others than the Hiss brothers, and I wonder what possible motive a man who edits Time magazine would have for mentioning Donald Hiss and Alger Hiss in connection with those other six.
Hiss: So do I, Mr. Chairman. I have no possible understanding of what could have motivated him. There are many possible motives I assume, but I am unable to understand it.
Stripling: You say you have never seen Mr. Chambers?
Hiss: The name means absolutely nothing to me, Mr. Stripling.
A photograph of Whittaker Chambers is presented to Hiss.
Mundt: This photograph was taken about a decade ago. Did you ever know an individual who resembles this picture?
Hiss: I would much rather see the individual. I have looked at all the pictures I was able to get hold of in, I think it was yesterday’s paper which had the pictures. If this is a picture of Mr. Chambers, he is not particularly unusual-looking. He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the chairman of this committee.
Laughter.
Mundt: I hope you are wrong in that.
Hiss: I didn’t mean to be facetious, but very seriously, I would not want to take oath that I had never seen that man. I would like to see him and then I think that I would be better able to tell whether I had ever seen him. Is he here today?
Mundt: Not to my knowledge.
Hiss: I hoped he would be.
Congressman Richard Nixon: You indicated that several government officials requested you to come here and you have issued a categorical denial to certain statements that were made by Mr. Chambers concerning people that you were associated with in government. I think it would make your case much stronger if you would indicate government officials.
Alger Hiss: Mr. Nixon, regardless of whether it strengthens my case or not, I would prefer, unless you insist, not to mention any names in my testimony that I don’t feel are absolutely necessary. If you insist on a direct answer to your question, I will comply.
Nixon: I would like to have a direct answer to the question.
Hiss: Another official of the government of the United States who strongly urged me to come to Washington after I had told Judge Frank I did not think I could financially afford to do so—and I am answering this only because you ask it—was Justice Felix Frankfurter
3
VOICE OVER: Saturday, August 7, 1948, New York City. Closed hearing in a meeting room at the Commodore Hotel in midtown Manhattan. A gavel is struck.
Congressman Nixon: Mr. Hiss in his testimony was asked on several occasions whether or not he had ever known, or knew, a man by the name of Whittaker Chamber. In each instance he categorically said “No.” At what point did you know Mr. Hiss? What time?
Whittaker Chambers: I knew Mr. Hiss, roughly, between the years 1935 to 1937.
Nixon: Do you know him as Mr. Alger Hiss.
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Did you happen to see Mr. Hiss’s pictures in the newspapers as a result of these recent hearings?
Chambers: Yes, I did.
Nixon: Was that the man you knew as Alger Hiss?
Chambers: Yes, that is the man.
Nixon: You are certain of that?
Chambers: I am
Nixon: During the time that you knew Mr. Hiss, did he know you as Whittaker Chambers?
Chambers: No, he did not.
Nixon: By what name did he know you?
Chambers: He knew me by the Party name of Carl.
Nixon: Did he ever question the fact that he did not know your last name?
Chambers: Not to me.
Nixon: Why not?
Chambers: Because in the underground Communist Party the principle of organization is that functionaries, heads of the group in other words, shall not be known by their right names but by pseudonyms or party names.
Nixon: Were you a party functionary?
Chambers: I was a functionary.
Nixon: This entire group with which you worked in Washington did not know you by your real name
Chambers: No member of that group knew me by my real name.
Nixon: All knew you as Carl.
Chambers: That is right.
Nixon: No member of that group ever inquired of you as to your real name?
Chambers: To have questioned me would have been a breach of party discipline, Communist Party discipline.
Nixon: I understood you to say that Mr. Hiss was a member of the party.
Chambers: Mr. Hiss was a member of the Communist Party.
Nixon: Is there any other circumstance which would substantiate your allegation that he was a member of the party…?
Chambers: I must interpolate there that all Communists in the group in which I originally knew him accepted him as a member of the Communist Party.
Nixon: Referred to him as a member of the party?
Chambers: That doesn’t come up in conversation, but this was a Communist group.
Nixon: Could this have possibly been an intellectual study group?
Chambers: It was in no wise an intellectual study group. Its primary function was not that of an intellectual study group…its primary function was to infiltrate the government in the interest of the Communist Party.
Nixon: At that time, incidentally, Mr. Hiss and the other members of this group who were Government employees did not have party cards?
Chambers: No members of that group to my knowledge ever had party cards, nor do I think members of any such group have party cards.
Nixon: The reason is—
Chambers: The reason is security, concealment.
Nixon: In other words, people who are in the Communist underground are in fact instructed to deny the fact that they are members of the Communist Party?Chambers: I was told that party registration was kept in Moscow and in some secret file in the United States.
Nixon: Did Mr. Hiss have any children?
Chambers: Mr. Hiss had no children of his own.
Nixon: Were there any children living in his home?
Chambers: Mrs. Hiss had a son.
Nixon: Do you know the son’s name?
Chambers: Timothy Hobson.
Nixon: Approximately how old was he at the time you knew him?
Chambers: It seems to me he was about 10 years old.
Nixon: What did you call him?
Chambers: Timmie.
Nixon: Did Mr. Hiss call him Timmie also?
Chambers: I think so.
Nixon: Did he have any other nickname?
Chambers: Not that I recall. He is the son, to the best of my knowledge, of Thayer Hobson, who I think is a member of the publishing house of William Morrow here in New York.
Nixon: What name did Mrs. Hiss use in addressing Mr. Hiss?
Chambers: Usually “Hilly.”
Nixon: “Hilly”?
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Quite often?
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: In your presence?
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Not “Alger”?
Chambers: Not “Alger.”
Nixon: What nickname, if any, did Mr. Hiss use in addressing his wife?
Chambers: More often “Dilly” and sometimes “Pross.” Her name was Priscilla. They were commonly referred to as “Hilly” and “Dilly.”
Nixon: They were commonly referred to as “Hilly” and “Dilly”?
Chambers: By other members of the group.
Nixon: Did you ever spend any time in the Hiss’s home?
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Did you ever stay overnight?
Chambers: Yes; I stayed overnight for a number of days.
Nixon: You mean from time to time?
Chambers: From time to time.
Nixon: Did you ever stay longer than a day?
Chambers: I have stayed there as long as a week.
Nixon: What arrangements were made for taking care of your lodging at that time? Were you there as a guest?
Chambers: I made that a kind of informal headquarters.
Nixon: I understand that, but what was the financial arrangement?
Chambers: There was no financial arrangement.
Nixon: You were a guest.
Chambers: Part of the Communist pattern.
Nixon: Did the Hisses have a cook? Do you recall a maid?
Chambers: As nearly as I can remember, they had a maid who came in to clean, and a cook who came in to cook. I can’t remember whether they had a maid there all the time or not. It seems to me in one or two of the houses they did. In one of the houses they had a rather elderly Negro maid whom Mr. Hiss used to drive home in the evening.
Nixon: You don’t recall the names of the maids?
Chambers: No; I don’t.
Nixon: Did the Hisses have any pets?
Chambers: They had, I believe, a cocker spaniel. I have a bad memory for dogs, but as nearly as I can remember it was a cocker spaniel.
Nixon: Do you remember the dog’s name?
Chambers: No. I remember they used to take it up to some kennel. I think out Wisconsin Avenue.
Nixon: They took it to board it there.
Chambers: Yes. They made one or two vacation trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Nixon: They made some vacation trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland?
Chambers: Yes, and at those times the dog was kept at the kennel.
Nixon: You state the Hisses had several different houses when you knew them? Could you describe any one of those houses to us?
Chambers: I think so. It seems to me when I first knew him he was living on 28th Street in an apartment house. There were two almost identical apartment houses. It seems to me that is a dead-end street and this was right at the dead end and certainly it is on the right-hand side as you go up.
It also seems to me that apartment was on the top floor. Now, what was it like inside, the furniture? I can’t remember.
Nixon: What was Mr. Hiss’s library devoted to?
Chambers: Very nondescript, as I recall.
Nixon: Do you recall what floor the apartment was on?
Chambers: I think it was on the top floor.
Nixon: The fourth?
Chambers: It was a walk-up. I think the fourth.
Nixon: It could have been the third, of course?
Chambers: It might have been.
Nixon: But you think it was the top, as well as you can recall?
Chambers: I think it was the top.
Nixon: Understand, I am not trying to hold you to absolute accuracy.
Chambers: I am trying to recall.
Nixon: Was there any special dish they served?
Chambers: No. 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 was kind of pulled together from here or there, maybe 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 care nothing about food. It was not a primary interest in their lives.
Committee Researcher Robert Mandel: Did Mr. Hiss have any hobbies?
Chambers: 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.
Congressman McDowell: A very rare specimen?
Chambers: I never saw one. I am also fond of birds.
Nixon: Did they have a car?
Chambers: Yes; they did. When I first knew them they had a car. Again I am reasonably sure—I am almost certain—it was a Ford and that it was a roadster. It was black and it was very dilapidated. There is no question about that.
I remember very clearly that it had hand windshield wipers. I remember that because I drove it one rainy day and had to work those windshield wipers by hand.
Nixon: Do you recall any other car?
Chambers: It seems to me in 1936, probably, he got a new Plymouth.
Nixon: Do you recall its type?
Chambers: It was a sedan, a two-seated car.
Congressman Mandel: What did he do with the old car?
Chambers: The Communist Party had in Washington a service station—that is, the man in charge or owner of this station was a Communist—or it may have been a car lot.
Nixon: But the owner was a Communist?
Chambers: The owner was a Communist. I never knew who this was or where it was. It was against all the rules of underground organization for Hiss to do anything with his old car but trade it in, and I think this investigation has proved how right the Communists are in such matters, but Hiss insisted that he wanted that car turned over to the open party so it could be of use to some poor organizer in the West or somewhere.
Much against my better judgment and much against J. Peters’ better judgment, he finally got us to permit him to do this thing. Peters knew where this lot was and he either took Hiss there, or he gave Hiss the address and Hiss went there, and to the best of my recollection of his description of that happening, he left the car there and simply went away and the man in charge of the station took care of the rest of it for him. I should think the records of that transfer would be traceable.
Nixon: Where was that?
Chambers: In Washington, D.C., I believe; certainly somewhere in the District.
Nixon: You don’t know where?
Chambers: No; never asked.
Nixon: Do you recall any other cars besides those two?
Chambers: No, I think he had the Plymouth when I broke with the whole business.
Nixon: You don’t recall any other hobbies he had?
Chambers: I don’t think he had any other hobbies.
Nixon: Did they have a piano?
Chambers: I don’t believe so. I am reasonably sure they did not.
Nixon: Do you recall any particular pieces of furniture that they had?
Chambers: The only thing I recall was a small leather cigarette box, leather-covered cigarette box, with gold tooling on it. It seems to me that box was red leather.
Nixon: Red leather cigarette box with gold tooling?
Chambers: That is right.
Nixon: Do you recall possibly what the silver pattern was, if any? Was it sterling?
Chambers: I don’t recall.
Nixon: Do you recall what kind of chinaware they used.
Chambers: No. I have been thinking over these things and none of that stands out.
Nixon: What kind of cocktail glasses did they have?
Chambers: We never drank cocktails.
Nixon: Did they drink?
Chambers: They did not drink. They didn’t drink with me. For one thing, I was strictly forbidden by the Communist Party to taste liquor at any time.
Nixon: And you didn’t drink?
Chambers: I never drank.
Nixon: As far as you know, they never drank, at least with you?
Chambers: He gave cocktail parties in Government service.
Nixon: Could you describe Mr. Hiss’s physical appearance for us?
Chambers: Mr. Hiss, I should think, is about 5 feet 8 or 9, slender. His eyes are wide apart and blue or gray.
Nixon: Blue or gray?
Chambers: I think they change.
Nixon: Sort of blue-gray?
Chambers: Blueish-gray, you could say. In his walk, if you watch him from behind, there is a slight mince sometimes.
Nixon: A slight mince?
Chambers: Mince. Anybody could observe.
Nixon: Does Mrs. Hiss have any physical characteristics?
Chambers: Mrs. Hiss is a short, highly nervous, little woman. I don’t, as a matter of fact, recall the color of her eyes, but she has a habit of blushing red when she is excited or angry, fiery red.
Researcher Mandel: A picture of Hiss shows his hand cupped to his ear.
Chambers: He is deaf in one ear.
Nixon: Mr. Hiss is deaf in one ear?
Congressman Hebert: Which ear?
Chambers: I don’t know. My voice is pitched very low and it is difficult for me to talk and make myself understood.
Nixon: Did he wear glasses at the time?
Chambers: I think he wore glasses only for reading.
Nixon: Did he tell you how he became deaf in one ear?
Chambers: I don’t recall that he did. The only thing I remember he told me was as a small boy he used to take a little wagon—he was a Baltimore boy—and walk up to Druid Hill Park, which was up that time way beyond the civilized center of the city, and fill up bottles with spring water and bring them back and sell it.
Nixon: Do you remember any physical characteristics of the boy?
Chambers: Timmie?
Nixon: Yes.
Chambers: Timmie was a puny little boy, also rather nervous.
Nixon: This is Mrs. Hiss’s son?
Chambers: Mrs. Hiss’s son by Thayer Hobson, who I think is one of the Hobson cousins, a cousin of Thornton Wilder. It is possible I could be mistaken about that.
Nixon: Do you recall anything else about the boy? Do you recall where he went to school?
Chambers: Yes; I do. I don’t know the name of the school he was attending then, but they told me that Thayer Hobson was paying for his son’s education, but they were diverting a large part of that money to the Communist Party.
Nixon: Hiss told you that?
Chambers: Yes, sir.
Nixon: Did he say how much he was paying?
Chambers: No; I don’t know how much he was paying.
Nixon: Did he name the Communist Party as the recipient?
Chambers: Certainly.
Nixon: He might not have said simply “the party”? Could it have been the Democratic Party or Socialist Party?
Chambers: No.
Congressman Hebert: Hobson was paying for the boy’s education?
Chambers: Yes; and they took him out of a more expensive school and put him in a less expensive school expressly for that purpose. That is my recollection.
Nixon: When would that have occurred?
Chambers: Probably about 1936.
Nixon: Did they change in the middle of the year?
Chambers: I don’t recall…
Investigator Stripling: Do you remember anything about his hands?
Chambers: Whose?
Stripling: Alger Hiss’s.
Chambers: He had rather long delicate fingers. I don’t remember anything special.
Researcher Mandel: How is it he never wrote anything publicly?
Chambers: Well, he came into the underground like so many Communists did—this was a new stage in the history of American Communists.
Mandel: He was never in the open Communist Party?
Chambers: He was never in the open Communist Party, came in as an underground Communist.
Congressman Hebert: Did he have any other brothers or sisters besides Donald?
Chambers: He had one sister, I believe, living with her mother in Baltimore.
Hebert: Did he ever talk about her?
Chambers: Yes; once or twice, and mentioned his mother. He once drove me past their house, which as I recall, was on or near Linden Street.
Hebert: What did the sister do?
Chambers: I don’t think she did anything besides live with her mother. Whether he had any more than that I don’t know.
Congressman Nixon: You never met the sister?
Chambers: No; nor ever met the mother. My impression was his relations with his mother were affectionate but not too happy. She was, perhaps, domineering. I simply pulled this out of the air in the conversation.
Investigator Stripling: Did he go to church?
Chambers: He was forbidden to go to church.
Stripling: Do you know whether he was a member of a church?
Chambers: I don’t know.
Stripling: Do you know if his wife was a member of a church?
Chambers: She came from a Quaker family. Her maiden name was Priscilla Fansler before she was married. She came from the Great Valley near Paoli, Pennsylvania.
Congressman Nixon: Did she tell you anything about her family?
Chambers: No; but she once showed me while we were driving beyond Paoli the road down which their farm lay.
Nixon: You drove with them.
Chambers: Yes.Nixon: Did you ever go on a trip with them other than by automobile?
Chambers: No.
Nixon: Did you ever stay overnight on any of these trips?
Chambers: No.
Nixon: When did you meet Donald Hiss.
Chambers: Probably within the same week in which I met Alger Hiss.
Nixon: Did you ever stay in Donald Hiss’s home?
Chambers: No, my relation with Donald Hiss was much less close. I can make that point now, if you will permit. My relationship with Alger Hiss quickly transcended our formal relationship. We became close friends.
Nixon: Donald Hiss—what relation did you have with him?
Chambers: A purely formal one.
Nixon: He knew you as Carl.
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Did you collect dues from him?
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Did you meet his wife?
Chambers: I think I met her once, not very often.
Nixon: Where did you collect the dues from him, at his home?
Chambers: Probably in Alger’s house. He frequently came there.
Nixon: He came there to see you?
Chambers: Yes.
Nixon: Do you recall anything significant about Donald Hiss, as to personal characteristics, hobbies?
Chambers: No. Something else is involved there, too. Donald Hiss was married, I think, to a daughter of Mr. Cotton, who is in the State Department. She was not a Communist, and everybody was worried about her.
Nixon: Getting back to Alger Hiss for the moment, do you recall any pictures on the wall that they might have owned at the time?
Chambers: No; I am afraid I don’t.
Nixon: Donald Hiss—do you know any other characteristics about him, can you recall any?
Chambers: Except I can give you the general impression. He was much less intelligent than Alger. Much less sensitive than his brother. I had the impression he was interested in the social climb and the Communist Party was interested in having him climb. At one point I believe he was fairly friendly with James Roosevelt.
Nixon: Did you have any conversations with him you can recall that were out of the ordinary?
Chambers: Yes; one I think I can recall. He was working in the Labor Department, I believe in the Immigration Section, and it was the plan of the Communist Party to have him go to California, get himself sent by the government to California, to work in the Bridges case.
At that moment he had an opportunity to go into the State Department as, I think, legal adviser to the Philippine Section, which had just been set up.
It was the opinion of the party that he should do that and not the Bridges matter. It was his opinion that he should continue in the Bridges matter and there was a fairly sharp exchange, but he submitted to discipline and went to the State Department.
Nixon: Did you make an affidavit concerning Mr. Alger Hiss?
Chambers: I made a signed statement. I should think it was about 1945. Before that I had reported these facts at least 2 years before to the FBI and 9 years ago to Assistant Secretary of State Berle and mentioned Hiss’s name.
Nixon: Nine years ago, are you certain that you did mention Hiss’s name to Berle?
Chambers: I certainly mentioned Hiss’s name to Berle.
Congressman Nixon: Is there anything further? If not thank you very much, Mr. Chambers.
4
VOICE OVER: Monday, August 16, 1948. New York City. Closed hearing in the meeting room at the Commodore Hotel. A gavel is struck.
Hiss: I have been angered and hurt by one thing in the course of this committee testimony, and that was by the attitude which I think Mr. Mundt took when I was testifying publicly and which, it seems to me, you have been taking today, that you have a conflict of testimony between two witnesses—I restrained myself with some difficulty from commenting on this at the public hearing, and I would like to say it on this occasion, which isn’t a public hearing.
Nixon: Say anything you like.
Hiss: It seems there is no impropriety in saying it. You today and the acting chairman publicly have taken the attitude when you have two witnesses, one of whom is a confessed former Communist, the other is me, that you simply have two witnesses saying contradictory things as between whom you find it most difficult to decide on credibility.
Mr. Nixon, I do not know what Mr. Whittaker Chambers testified to your committee last Saturday. It is necessarily my opinion of him from what he has already said that I do know that he is not capable of telling the truth or does not desire to, and I honestly have the feeling that details of my personal life which I give honestly can be used to my disadvantage by Chambers then ex post facto knowing those facts.
I would request that I hear Mr. Chambers’ story of his alleged knowledge of me. I have seen newspaper accounts, Mr. Nixon, that you spent the weekend—whether correct or no, I do not know—at Mr. Chambers’s farm in New Jersey.
Nixon: That is quite incorrect.
Hiss: It is incorrect.
Nixon: Yes, sir. I can say, as you did a moment ago, that I have never spent the night with Mr. Chambers.
Congressman Mundt: The chairman wants to say this: Questions will be asked and the committee will expect to get very detailed answers to the questions. Let’s not ramble all around the lot here. You go ahead and ask questions and I want the witness to answer.
Nixon: Your testimony is that a man you knew in 1933 and 1934 was in one of the houses you lived in?
Hiss: I sublet my apartment to the man and I have written down his name.
Nixon: But you were not there at the same time?
Hiss: I didn’t spend a week in the same apartment with him. He did spend a day or two in my house when he moved in.
Nixon: This was the apartment you lived in between 1933 and 1934.
Hiss: It is exactly that apartment—1934 and 1935.
Nixon: Between 1934 and 1935.
Hiss: That is right.
Nixon: When you sublet your apartment? There was no other apartment and you can’t testify as to what apartment that was?
Hiss: I can testify to the best of my recollection. If this committee feels, in spite of what I have said—
Mundt: Never mind feelings. You let Mr. Nixon ask the questions and you go ahead and answer it.
Hiss: I want to be sure Mr. Nixon definitely wants me to answer responsively in spite of my plea that I don’t think he should ask me. But if he does—Mr. Nixon also asked me some questions in the public hearing that I didn’t want to answer, and I took the same position that if Mr. Nixon insisted on an answer after he knew my position, I will answer. I will give every fact of where I lived.
Investigator Stripling: Let the record show, Mr. Hiss, you brought up this ex post facto business. Your testimony comes as ex post facto testimony to the testimony of Mr. Chambers. He is already on record, and I am not inferring that you might know what he testified to, but certainly the United States attorney’s office has several copies.
Nixon: Now, quite obviously, I think that you can see that we are not attempting at this time to have you testify to facts with which we are going to brief Mr. Chambers. What we are trying to do is test the credibility of Mr. Chambers, and you are the man who can do it, and you can help us out by answering these questions and, frankly, I must insist.
Hiss: If you insist, I will, of course, answer…
Congressman Hebert: (standing up in exasperation) Mr. Hiss, let me say this to you now—and this is removed of all technicalities, it is just a man-to-man impression of the whole situation. I think it is pertinent. I don’t surrender my place on this committee to any individual who has an open mind, particularly regarding you and Mr. Chambers. I am not interested in who is lying except to the extent that it will only give us insight to further the case and that we are about to find out whether espionage was in effect in this country to the detriment of the security of this country.
I do not take the stand and never have taken the stand in this committee that anything is involved other than to get to the facts. I have tried just as hard in the public hearings to impeach those witnesses who are assumed to be so-called committee witnesses as I have tried to impeach the other witnesses. I think the record will speak for that.
We did not know anything Mr. Chambers was going to say. I did not hear your name mentioned until it was mentioned in open hearing.
Hiss: I didn’t know that.
Hebert: As I say, I am not trying to be cagey or anything, but trying to put it on the line as certainly one member of this committee who has an open mind and up to this point don’t know which one of the two is lying, but will tell you right now and I will tell you exactly what I told Mr. Chambers so that will be a matter of record, too: Either you or Mr. Chambers is lying.
Hiss: That is certainly true.
Hebert: And whichever one of you is lying is the greatest actor that American has ever produced.
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 the most fantastic story of unfounded—what motive would Chambers have or what motive—one of you has to have a motive. You say you are in a bad position, but don’t you think that Chambers himself destroys himself if he is proven a liar? What motive would he have to pitch a $25,000 position as the respected senior editor of Time magazine out the window?
Hiss: Apparently for Chambers to be a confessed former Communist and traitor to his country did not seem to him to be a blot on his record. He got his present job after he had told various agencies exactly that. I am sorry but I cannot but feel to such an extent that it is difficult for me to control myself that you can sit there, Mr. Hebert, 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.
Hebert: I am trying to tell you that I absolutely have an open mind and am trying to give you as fair a hearing as I could possibly give Mr. Chambers or yourself. The fact that Mr. Chambers is a self-confessed traitor—and I admit he is—the fact that he is a self-confessed former member of the Communist Party—which I admit he is—has no bearing at all on whether the facts that he told—or, rather, the alleged facts that he told—
Hiss: Has no bearing on this credibility?
Hebert: No; because, Mr. Hiss, I recognize the fact that maybe my background is a little different from yours, but I do know police methods and I know crime a great deal, and you show me a good police force and I will show you the stool pigeon who turned them in. Show me a police force with a poor record, and I will show you a police force without a stool pigeon. We have to have people like Chambers or Miss Bentley 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 has 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 am interested in.
Nixon: Do you have any children, Mr. Hiss?
Hiss: I have two children.
Nixon: You have two children. Could you give us their ages?
Hiss: One will be 22—he is my stepson—will be 22 September 19 next. His name is Timothy Hobson…
Nixon: Did you testify before what your wife’s name was?
Hiss: Her name was Priscilla Fansler, her maiden name. Her first marriage was to a Mr. Hobson, H-o-b-s-o-n.
Nixon: Where did she come from? What town?
Hiss: She was born in Evanston, Ill., but spent most of her early life outside of Philadelphia.
Nixon: In Paoli?
Hiss: Frazer.
Nixon: Is that near Paoli?
Hiss: It is on the main line not far from there…
Nixon: Frazer and Paoli are a few miles apart?
Hiss: Yes.
Nixon: Did she live there on a farm?
Hiss: Her father was in the insurance business, and he acquired a small place—I suppose it could be called a farm…
Nixon: What were the nicknames you and your wife had?
Hiss: My wife, I have always called her “Prossy.”
Nixon: What does she call you?
Hiss: Well, at one time, she called me quite frequently “Hill,” H-i-l-l.
Nixon: What other name?
Hiss: “Hilly,” with a “y.”
Nixon: What other name did you call her?
Hiss: She called me “Hill” or “Hilly.” I called her “Pross” or “Prossy” almost exclusively.
Nixon: Did you ever call her “Dilly.”
Hiss: No, never.
Nixon: What did you call your son?
Hiss: Timmy.
Nixon: Where did you spend your vacations during that period?
Hiss: My son went to a camp over on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When he was at camp, we spent two summers, I think, during this period in Chestertown, Maryland.
Nixon: On the Eastern Shore?
Hiss: On the Eastern Shore of Maryland…
Nixon: Did you have pets?
Hiss: We had a brown cocker spaniel…
Nixon: What did you do with the dog when you went on your vacations, do you recall?
Hiss: I think we took Jenny over on the Eastern Shore. She did spend some time in the kennels when we were away…
Nixon: That is where you would have left the dog, boarded the dog?
Hiss: Yes; at that time I think we left her there.
Nixon: What hobby, if any, do you have, Mr. Hiss?
Hiss: Tennis and amateur ornithology.
Nixon: Is you wife interested in ornithology?
Hiss: …My wife is interested in ornithology, as I am.
Nixon: As a boy, Mr. Hiss, did you have any particular business that you engaged in?
Hiss: Yes.
Nixon: What was your business?
Hiss: I had two businesses. One of which I was most proud was the delivery of spring water in Baltimore…
Nixon: You had the spring water on your own place?
Hiss: We used to go out to the park.
Nixon: The park?
Hiss: Druid Hill Park is a park in Baltimore where there were good springs, and some of us had water routes and we carried water and delivered it to customers.
Congressman Hebert: As a child?
Hiss: Twelve or so.
Investigator Stripling: Is Druid Hill right in the middle of Baltimore?
Hiss: It was at the edge of town then and from our house it was 10 or 15 blocks. I have always been very proud of that.
Congressman McDowell: Did you ever see a prothonotary warbler?
Hiss (engaged): I have right here on the Potomac. Do you know that place?
Nixon: Have you ever seen one?
Hiss: Did you see it in the same place?
McDowell: I saw one in Arlington.
Hiss: They come back and nest in those swamps. Beautiful yellow head, a gorgeous bird…
Silence comes over the room, the congressmen regard each other circumspectly.
Nixon: (to mask the change in the room): I’d like to get back to…Do we need a short break?
All but Hiss immediately get up and variously leave the room. Hiss remains seated in the all but empty room.
Lights go down. End of Act
ACT TWO
VOICE OVER: Monday, August 16, 1948. New York City. The closed hearing in the meeting room at the Commodore Hotel continues. A gavel is struck.
Congressmen have returned to the room, the hearing having resumed.
Hiss: (as if with new resolve) I would like to raise a separate point, Mr. Mundt…if I may.
Chairman Mundt: Go ahead, yes, Mr. Hiss.
Hiss: As I said I have written down the name on a pad I have with me of the person whom I knew in 1933 and 1934 who not only spent some time in my house but sublet my apartment. That man certainly spent more than a week, not while I was in the same apartment. I do not recognize the photographs as possibly being this man. I want to see Chambers face to face and see if he can be this individual. I do not want and I don’t think I ought to be asked to testify now that man’s name and everything I can remember about him. I have written the name on this piece of paper. I have given the name to two friends of mine before I came to this hearing.
Nixon: This man who spent the time in 1933 and 1934 is still a man with whom you are acquainted?
Hiss: He is not. The name of the man I brought in—and he may have no relation to this whole nightmare—is a man named George Crosley, a free-lance journalist I met when I was working for the Nye committee. He was a writer. He hoped to sell articles to magazines about the munitions industry.
Nixon: And where were you living at that time?
Hiss: He was not named Carl and not Whittaker Chambers.
Nixon: Where were you living at that time?
Hiss: I would have to check the leases in my records at home. I saw him in my office over in the Senate Office Building. It was our job to give representatives of the press, students, people writing books, research people—to give them appropriate information out of the record, show them what had been put in the record. This fellow was writing a series of articles, according to my best recollection, free lancing, which he hoped to sell to one of the magazines.
He was pretty obviously not successful in financial terms, but as far as I know, wasn’t actually hard up.
Stripling: What color was his hair?
Hiss: Rather blondish, blonder than any of us here.
Stripling: Was he married?
Hiss: Yes, sir.
Stripling: Any children?
Hiss: One little baby, as I remember it, and the way I know that was the subleasing point.
Nixon: His wife and he and little baby did spend several nights in the house with you?
Hiss: This man Crosley, yes.
Nixon: Can you describe his wife?
Hiss: Yes, she was a rather strikingly dark person, very strikingly dark. I don’t know whether I would recognize her again because I didn’t see very much of her.
Nixon: How tall was this man, approximately?
Hiss: Shortish.
Nixon: Heavy?
Hiss: Not noticeably. That is why I don’t believe it has any direct, but it could have an indirect, bearing.
Nixon: How about his teeth?
Hiss: Very bad teeth. That is one of the things I particularly want to see Chambers about. This man had very bad teeth, did not take care of his teeth.
Investigator Stripling: Did he have most of his teeth or just weren’t well cared for?
Hiss: I don’t think he had gapped teeth, but they were badly taken care of. They were stained and I would say obviously not attended to.
Nixon: Can you state again just when he first rented the apartment?
Hiss: I was living on Twenty-ninth Street from December 1934 to June 1935 and that coincided with my service with the Nye committee.
Stripling: What kind of automobile did that fellow have?
Hiss: No kind of automobile. I sold him an automobile. I had an old Ford that I threw in with the apartment and had been trying to trade it in and get rid of it—an old, old Ford we had kept for sentimental reasons. We got it just before we were married in 1929.
Stripling: Was it a model A or model T?
Hiss: Early A model with a trunk on the back, a slightly collegiate model.
Stripling: What color?
Hiss: Dark blue. It wasn’t very fancy but it had a sassy little trunk on the back.
Nixon: You sold that car?
Hiss: I threw it in. He wanted a way to get around, and I said, “Fine, I want to get rid of it. I have another car, and we kept it for sentimental reasons, not worth a damn.” I let him have it along with the rent.
Nixon: Do you know how many days approximately he stayed with you? You said before he moved into your apartment he stayed in your house with you and your wife? About how many days?
Hiss: I would say a couple of nights. I don’t think it was longer than that. We left several pieces of furniture behind because the P Street house was partly furnished, so we didn’t need all of our furniture. As one does with a tenant trying to make him agreeable and comfortable, we left several pieces of furniture behind until the fall, his van was delayed, wasn’t going to bring all the furniture because he was going to be there just during the summer, and we put them up 2 or 3 nights in a row, his wife and little baby. I don’t think it was longer than that.
Nixon: A couple of nights?
Hiss: During the delay of the van arriving.
Nixon: Wouldn’t that be longer than 2 nights?
Hiss: I can’t remember when it was I finally decided it wasn’t any use expecting to collect from him, that I had been a sucker and he was a sort of deadbeat; not a bad character, but I think he just was using me for a soft touch.
Nixon: Do you recall any subjects of conversation during that period?
Hiss: We talked backwards and forwards about the Munitions Committee work. He told various stories that I recall of his escapades. He had been everywhere, like a cross between Jim Tully, the hobo author, and Jack London. I remember he told me he had personally participated in laying down the tracks of the streetcars in Washington, D.C. He had done that for local color, or something.
Nixon: You gave this Ford car to Crosley?
Hiss: Threw it in along with the apartment and charged the rent and threw the car in in addition. I don’t think I got any compensation.
Stripling: You wouldn’t say positively George Crosley and this person in the newspaper photographs are the same?
Hiss: Not positively.
Stripling: You would not say positively?
Hiss: I think they are not. That would be my best impression from the photographs.
2
VOICE OVER: Closed hearing, August 17, Commodore Hotel meeting room. A gavel is struck.
Nixon and other members of the committee seated variously in the room, Hiss and an associate from the Carnegie Foundation, Charles Dollard, seated together.
Nixon: [directed to Hiss] It is quite apparent at this stage in the testimony, as you indicated yesterday, that the case is dependent upon the question of identity. We have attempted to establish the identity through photographs of Mr. Chambers and that has been inadequate for the purpose. Today, we thought that since you had in your testimony raised the possibility of a third party who might be involved in this case in some way, and had described him at some length to the committee, that it would be well to, at the earliest possible time, determine whether the third party is different or the same one, and so consequently we have asked Mr. Chambers to be in New York at the same time so that you can have the opportunity to see him and make up your mind on that point.
Hiss: May I interrupt at this point, because I take it this will take more than 10 or 15 minutes. Would it be possible for one of the members of the committee to call the Harvard Club and leave word that I won’t be there for a 6 o’clock appointment?
Congressman McDowell: I would suggest it won’t take much more time than that, but you certainly may…There is a telephone, I believe, in the room here. Any time you want to call, you may.
Whittaker Chambers is escorted into the room and seated in a chair.
Nixon: Mr. Chambers, will you please stand. And will you please stand, Mr. Hiss? Mr. Hiss, the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before.
Hiss: May I ask him to speak? Will you ask him to say something?
Nixon: Yes. Mr. Chambers, will you tell us your name and your business?
Chambers: My name is Whittaker Chambers.
Hiss walks across the room to Chambers, and listens intently.
I am a senior editor of Time magazine.
Hiss: Would you mind opening your mouth wider?
Chambers: [nonplussed but then carrying through] My name is Whittaker Chambers.
Hiss: I said, would you open your mouth? [to Nixon] You know what I am referring to, Mr. Nixon. [to Chambers] Will you go on talking?
Chambers: I am a senior editor of Time magazine.
Hiss: May I ask whether his voice, when he testified before, was comparable to this?
Nixon [expecting something about his teeth]: His voice?
Hiss: Or did he talk a little more in a lower key?
McDowell [a whisper of irony]: I would say it is about the same now as we have heard.
Hiss: Would you ask him to talk a little more?
Nixon: Read something, Mr. Chambers. I will let you read from—
Hiss: I think he is George Crosley, but I would like to hear him talk a little longer.
McDowell: Mr. Chambers, if you would be more comfortable, you may sit down.
Hiss: Are you George Crosley?
Chambers: Not to my knowledge. You are Alger Hiss, I believe?
Hiss: I certainly am.
Chambers: That was my recollection.
Nixon passes a copy of the current issue of Newsweek to Chambers.
Chambers: [reading] Since June—
Nixon: Just one moment. Since some repartee goes on between these two people, I think Mr. Chambers should be sworn.
Hiss: That is a good idea.
Chambers is sworn in by a Congressional aide, holding a Bible, on which Chambers puts his right hand:
Congressional Aide: Do you swear to tell the whole truth, the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God.
Chambers: I do.
Overlapping:
Nixon: Mr. Hiss, may I say something? I suggested that he be sworn, and when I say something like that, I want no interruptions from you.
Hiss: Mr. Nixon, in view of what happened yesterday, I think there is no occasion for you to use that tone of voice in speaking to me, and I hope the record will show what I have just said.
Nixon: The record shows everything being said here today. Go ahead now, Mr. Chambers.
Chambers: (reading from Newsweek magazine): Tobin for Labor. Since June, Harry S. Truman has been peddling the labor secretaryship left vacant by Lewis B. Schwellenbach’s death in hope of gaining the maximum political advantage from the appointment—
Hiss: May I interrupt?
McDowell: Yes.
Hiss: The voice sounds a little less resonant than the voice that I recall of the man I knew as George Crosley. The teeth look to me as though either they had been improved upon or that there has been considerable dental work done since I knew George Crosley, which was some years ago. I believe I am not prepared without further checking to take an absolute oath that he must be George Crosley.
Silence for a beat.
Nixon: May I ask Mr. Chambers a question?
Hiss: I would like to ask Mr. Chambers, if I may.
Nixon: I will ask the questions at this time. Mr. Chambers, have you had any dental work since 1934 of a substantial nature?
Chambers: Yes, I have.
Nixon: What type of dental work?
Chambers: I have had some extractions and a plate…
Hiss: Could you ask him the name of the dentist that performed these things? Is that appropriate?
Nixon: Yes. What is the name?
Chambers: Dr. Hitchcock, Westminster, Maryland.
Hiss: That testimony of Mr. Chambers, if it can be believed, would tend to substantiate my feeling that he represented himself to me in 1934 or 1935 or thereabout as George Crosley, a free-lance writer of articles for magazines. I would like to find out from Dr. Hitchcock if what he has just said is true because I am relying partly, one of my main recollections of Crosley was the poor condition of his teeth.
Nixon: Can you describe the condition of your teeth in 1934?
Chambers: Yes. They were in very bad shape.
Nixon: The front teeth were?
Chambers: Yes. I think so.
Hiss: Mr. Chairman.
Nixon: Excuse me. Before we leave the teeth, Mr. Hiss, do you feel that you would have to have the dentist tell you just what he did to the teeth before you could tell anything about this man?
Hiss: I would like a few more questions asked. I didn’t intend to say anything about this, because I feel very strongly that he is Crosley, but he looks very different in girth and in other appearances—hair, forehead, and so on, particularly the jowls.
Investigator Stripling: I certainly gathered the impression when Mr. Chambers walked in this room and you walked over and examined him and asked him to open his mouth, that you were basing your identification purely on what his upper teeth might have looked like. Now, here is a person that you knew for several months at least. You knew him so well that he was a guest in your home.
Hiss: Would you—
Stripling: I would like to complete my statement—that he was a guest in your home, that you gave him an old Ford automobile, and permitted him to use or you leased him your apartment and in this, a very important confrontation, the only thing that you have to check on is this denture; is that correct? There is nothing else about this man’s features which you could definitely say, “This is the man I knew as George Crosley,” that you have to rely entirely on this denture; is that your position?
Hiss: Is your preface through? My answer to the question you have asked is this:
From the time on Wednesday, August 4, 1948, when I was able to get hold of newspapers containing photographs of one Whittaker Chambers, I was struck by a certain familiarity in features. When I testified on August 5th and was shown a photograph by you, Mr. Stripling, there was again some familiarity in features. I could not be sure that I had never seen the person whose photograph you showed me. I said I would want to see the person.
The photographs are rather good photographs of Whittaker Chambers as I see Whittaker Chambers today. I am not given on important occasions to snap judgments or simple, easy statements. I am confident that George Crosley had notably bad teeth. I would not call George Crosley a guest in my house. I have explained the circumstances. If you choose to call him a guest that is your affair.
Stripling: I am willing to strike the word “guest.” He was in your house.
Hiss: I saw him at the time I was seeing hundreds of people. Since then I have seen thousands of people. He meant nothing to me except as one I saw under the circumstances I have described.
My recollection is of George Crosley; if this man had said he was George Crosley, I would have no difficulty in identification. He denied it right here. I would like and asked earlier in this hearing if I could ask some further questions to help in identification. I was denied that.
Stripling: I think you should be permitted—
Hiss: I was denied that right. I am not, therefore, able to take an oath that this man is George Crosley. I have been testifying about George Crosley. Whether he and this man are the same or whether he has means of getting information from George Crosley about my house, I do not know. He may have had his face lifted.
Stripling: Mr. Chambers, do you have any objection to being cross-examined by Mr. Hiss.
Chambers: No.
Hiss: [addressing Chambers] Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley?
Chambers: Not to my knowledge.
Hiss: Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street?
Chambers: I most certainly did.
Hiss: You did or did not?
Chambers: I did.
Hiss: Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?
Chambers: (quietly) Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.
Hiss: Would you be responsive and continue with your answer?
Chambers: I do not think it is needed.
Nixon: I will help you with the answer, Mr. Hiss. The question, Mr. Chambers, is, as I understand it, that Mr. Hiss cannot understand how you could deny that you were George Crosley and yet admit that you spent time in his apartment. Now would you explain the circumstances…?
Chambers: As I have testified before, I came to Washington as a Communist functionary, a functionary of the American Communist Party. I was connected with the underground group of which Mr. Hiss was a member. Mr. Hiss and I became friends to the best of my knowledge. Mr. Hiss himself suggested that I go there, to the apartment, and I gratefully accepted.
Hiss [in a spasm of anger]: Mr. Chairman, I don’t need to ask Mr. Whittaker Chambers any more questions. I am now perfectly prepared to identify this man as George Crosley.
Nixon: Would you spell that name?
Hiss: C-r-o-s-l-e-y.
Nixon: You are sure of one “s”?
Hiss: That is my recollection. I have a rather good visual memory, and my recollection of his spelling of his name is C-r-o-s-l-e-y. I don’t think that would change as much as his appearance.
Stripling: You will identify him positively now?
Hiss: I will on the basis of what he has just said positively identify him without further questioning as George Crosley.
Stripling: Will you produce for the committee three people who will testify that they knew him as George Crosley?
Hiss (nonplussed): I will if it is possible. Why is that a question to ask me? I will see what is possible. This occurred in 1935. The only people that I can think of who would have known him as George Crosley with certainty would have been the people who were associated with me in the Nye Committee.
Stripling: Can you name three people whom we can subpoena who can identify him as George Crosley?
Hiss: I am afraid I will have to confer with the individual members. The people, as I recall them, who were on the staff and they were in and out of Washington constantly—were Mr. Raushenbush. I would like to consult Steve Raushenbush. I don’t know whether Crosley ever called on him.
Nixon: Where is he now, Mr. Hiss?
Hiss: I don’t know.
Stripling: He is in Washington.
Hiss: Robert Wohlford was one of the investigators.
Nixon: Do you know where he is?
Stripling: Department of Justice.
Hiss: I don’t remember the name of the very efficient secretary to Mr. Rauschenbush. Miss Elsie Gullender, I think her name was. Do you know the whereabouts of Miss Elsie Gullender?
No immediate response.
McDowell: Mr. Hiss, were you aware that George Crosley was a Communist? Did you ever discuss politics?
Hiss: May I just state for the record that it was not the habit in Washington in those days, when particularly if a member of the press called on you, to ask him before you had further conversation whether or not he was a Communist. It was a quite different atmosphere in Washington then than today. I had no reason to suspect George Crosley of being a Communist. It never occurred to me that he might be or whether that was of any significance to me if he was…I would like to say that to come here and discover that the ass under the lion’s skin is Crosley—I don’t know why your committee didn’t pursue this careful method of interrogation at an earlier date before all the publicity…
McDowell: Well, now, Mr. Hiss, you positively identify—
Hiss: Positively on the basis of his own statement that he was in my apartment at the time when I say he was there. I have no further question at all. If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off, I would be sure.
McDowell: Mr. Chambers, will you identify this man as Alger Hiss.
Chambers: Positive identification.
Hiss rises with clenched fists and walks in the direction of Chambers, who remains calmly seated on the couch.
Hiss: May I say for the record at this point, that I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee without their being privileged for suit for libel. I challenge you to do it, and I hope you will do it damned quickly.
Chairman Mundt rises and lays a restraining hand on Hiss’s arm.
Hiss: I am not going to touch him. You are touching me.
Mundt: Please sit down, Mr. Hiss.
Hiss: I will sit down when the chairman asks me. Mr. Russell, when the chairman asks me to sit down—
Mundt: I want no disturbance.
Hiss: I don’t—
McDowell: Sit down, please.
Hiss: You know who started this.
Hiss resumes his seat.
Stripling (to Hiss): I am concerned with the statement you made before the Committee of Congress in the presence of quite a few hundred people that you didn’t even know this person. You led the public and the press to believe that you didn’t know such a person.
A beat.
You are fully aware that the public was led to believe that you had never seen, heard, or laid eyes upon an individual who is this individual, and now you do know him.
Hiss: I did not say that I have never seen this man. I said, so far as I know I have never seen Whittaker Chambers.
Stripling: Never laid eyes on him.
Hiss: I wouldn’t have been able to identify him for certain today without his own assistance.
Stripling: You are willing to waive the dentures?
A beat.
McDowell: [to Hiss, preparing to leave] Thank you.
Hiss: I don’t reciprocate.
McDowell: Italicize that for the record.
Hiss and his associate from the Carnegie Foundation Dollard leave.
After a beat.
Stripling (to Chambers, in a broad Texas accent): Ha-ya, Mistah Crawz-li?
3
VOICE OVER: Wednesday, August 25, 1948. Public Hearing, Washington, D.C. A gavel is struck.
Hiss is seated in back of Chambers as he testifies.
Chairman: What influenced you to join the Communist Party originally?
Whittaker Chambers: It is a very difficult question. As a student, I went to Europe. It was then shortly after the First World War. I found Germany in chaos, and partly occupied; northern France, and parts of Belgium were smashed to pieces. It seemed to me that a crisis had been reached in Western civilization which society was not able to solve by the usual means. I then began to look around for the unusual means. I first studied for a considerable time British Fabian socialism, and rejected it as unworkable in practice. I was then very much influenced by a book called Reflections on Violence, by Georges Sorel, a syndicalist, and shortly thereafter I came to the writings of Marx and Lenin. They seemed to me to explain the nature of the crisis, and what to do about it.
Chairman: Well, I can understand how a young man might join the Communist Party, but will you explain to us how a person who had made a real living in this country, a person with a large income, some of the witnesses we have had before this committee, over a period of time, what, in your mind, would influence them to join the party here in this country?
Chambers: The making of a good living does not necessarily blind a man to a critical period which he is passing through. Such people, in fact, may feel a special insecurity and anxiety. They seek a moral solution in a world of moral confusion. Marxism, Leninism offers an oversimplified explanation of the causes and a program for action. The very vigor of the project particularly appeals to the more or less sheltered middle-class intellectuals, who feel that the whole context of their lives has kept them away from the world of reality. I do not know whether I make this very clear, but I am trying to get at it. They feel a very natural concern, one might almost say a Christian concern, for underprivileged people. They feel a great intellectual concern at least, for recurring economic crises, the problem of war, which in our lifetime has assumed an atrocious proportion, and which always weighs on them. What shall I do? At that crossroads the evil thing, communism, lies in wait for them with a simple answer.
Nixon: Mr. Hiss was your closest friend?
Chambers: Mr. Hiss was certainly the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party.
Nixon: Mr. Chambers, can you search your memory now to see what motive you can have for accusing Mr. Hiss of being a Communist at the present time?
Chambers: What motive I can have?
Nixon: Yes, I mean, do you—is there any grudge that you have against Mr. Hiss over anything that he has done to you?
The room grows dead silent over the course of Chambers’ reply as he struggles to control his voice.
Chambers (slowly and deliberately, trying to contain sudden backed-up emotion): The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motive or revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.
Lights dim.
Curtain.