MR. NIXON : Can you tell us who that was?
MR. HISS: The friend who accompanied me?
MR. NIXON: Yes.
MR. HISS: He was Joseph Johnston, of Birmingham, Ala., who happened to be in Washington at that time. What press person spoke to him, I do not know. I have not asked him what press person it was. I think it was a member of the press who came up to him casually while he was sitting with me.
MR. NIXON : And, Mr. Johnston told you that a member of the press had told him—
MR. HISS: Just what I have told you.
MR. NIXON: What you have just told me?
MR. HISS: That is correct.
MR. NIXON: And on the basis of that statement, which is hearsay twice removed, you are leaving the implication that Mr. Crosley has been in a mental institution.
MR. HISS: Mr. Nixon, you say I am leaving an implication.
MR. NIXON: Well, I cannot gather anything else from your statement.
MR. HISS: There have been other reports made to me.
MR. NIXON: What other reports?
MR. HISS: That an individual who formerly worked on Time said that Chambers had been to a mental institution.
MR. NIXON: Who told you that?
MR. HISS: This also came to me from a second-hand source. The name of the individual who was supposed to have made the statement—I do not like to bring names in unnecessarily, however, if you insist—
MR. NIXON: I insist.
MR. HISS: The name is of a person named Walton, who, I understand, formerly worked on Time, and who, I do not know that Walton, he said definitely that Chambers had been to a mental institution in 1946. The statement was made that Walton understood that or thought that.
MR. NIXON : Now, who else?
MR. HISS: I do not recall any other specific information because I have not personally been attempting to go into it. I have asked counsel if they could check on it. It is not an easy thing to check. It is not easy to check on.
MR. NIXON: Well, the committee is interested in this information because we, too, have the obligation to check on it. As I understand, both of your statements are made on the basis of what other people told you—
MR. HISS: Entirely.
MR. NIXON: Concerning things which have been told them.
MR. HISS: Entirely, and I have not gone into it personally. I have asked counsel to see if there is any way they could find out about it.
MR. NIXON: That is all I have, Mr. Chairman.
THE CHAIRMAN: Mr. Counsel, you have something there that you wanted to bring up some time ago. What is that?
MR. DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Will you bear with me? It won’t take but just a minute. It seems as if it is ancient history now, but after Mr. Mundt made his statements, I felt I wanted to refer the committee to a statement made by Mr. Mundt during the hearing, the first public hearing, at which Mr. Hiss’ name came up, and I would like to just read the two paragraphs:
“Mr. Mundt:Mr. Chambers, I am very much interested in trying to check the career of Alger Hiss. I know nothing about Donald Hiss, but, as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the personnel committee, I have had some occasion to check the activities of Alger Hiss while he was in the State Department. There is reason to believe that he organized within the Department one of the Communist cells, which endeavored to influence our Chinese policy, and bring about the condemnation of Chiang Kai-shek, which put Marzani51 in an important position there and, I think, it is important to know what happened to these people after they leave the Government. Do you know where Alger Hiss is employed now?”
MR. MUNDT: I am glad you read that, Mr. Counsel, because I was just going to make that statement now, and I won’t have to do it, in connection with a statement in the letter of Mr. Hiss in which he implied or gave the impression that my disagreement with American foreign policy was because he had been connected with it, and I would not want it to go out that my only disagreement with some of these policies is because of your connection with them.
As far as I am concerned, Mr. Hiss, our policy toward China, the political agreement at Yalta, which you said you helped’ write, and the Morgenthau plan, you mentioned three of them, are hopelessly bad, and I shall continue to consider them hopelessly bad even though you prove yourself to be the president of the American Daughters of the Revolution. The fact that you were connected with them may or may not, when these hearings have terminated, increase my skepticism about their wisdom.
It is true, as I said in my summation, that as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee I have had brought to my attention several times the mention of the name Alger Hiss in connection with our Chinese policy. It is also true that after listening to him testify the following day I said publicly, and I said in the record, that he had been a very persuasive and convincing witness,and had very well convinced me of his reliability. In fact, I advised Mrs. Mundt at dinner that night, and she said I had been taken in by his suavity. Perhaps a woman’s intuition is better than a man’s, I do not know, but at all events, I am willing to again state that Mr. Hiss was a willing and persuasive witness as far as I am concerned.
I would like to say just one other thing with regard to that part of the letter, Mr. Chairman, which says it is inconceivable that he, Mr. Hiss, could have worked in the Government for these many years and still have been a member of the Communist Party or disloyal. That is not inconceivable to me without in any way attempting at this time to indict the credibility of Mr. Hiss. But I wish to point out that John Peurifoy, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security, has notified Congress that 134 members of the State Department52 had weasled their way into the State Department alone, and had been removed from the Department for disloyalty reasons.
So it is not at all inconceivable that the number could just as well have been 135 as 134.
That was the end of Alger Hiss’s testimony on August 25th. There had been little gasps of astonishment and outrage in the hearing room when he made his unsupported charge that I had been in a mental institution.53 But, as he well knew, Hiss had only to utter the charge to have the press publish it in millionfold repetition. That was all that he needed, for who was there to deny it authoritatively for me? There was no one. Henceforth, the charge of insanity, and the whispering campaign that was linked to it, was the heart of the Hiss defense.
XXXIV
It was early evening, and the lights had already been switched on, or soon would be, when I took the stand and was sworn in. This time a microphone had been placed in front of me—the first I had ever talked into. I was puzzled by a sound like muffled thunder that seemed to come from behind me in the hearing room. Stripling nodded toward my hands. It was my thumbs drumming nervously against the sides of the microphone.
In the official transcript, my testimony that day fills some thirty-two pages. I had the impression at the time, borne out by rereading the record, that my testimony was the firmest and clearest I had yet given, in part because the Committee had a better grip of its questions, in part because I had become a little more used to the routine of questioning and to speaking before a crowd. Nevertheless, my voice at times was still sufficiently blurred or hurried so that, despite the microphone, there are a number of grammatical scrambles and other errors in the official record, when the reporter could not catch clearly what I was saying.
Once more I was led, chiefly by Nixon and Stripling, over most of my former testimony about Hiss and the Ware Group. My answers were unqualified and terse and hence in marked contrast to Hiss’s elaborate weaving and bobbing. Congressman Nixon and (later on) Hébert also put to me the questions with which Alger Hiss had challenged my past and my sanity. I responded simply and factually. I have been married for some seventeen years and was living happily with my wife; we had two children. I had never been charged with, or convicted of, a crime. I promised to furnish the Committee with a list of my pseudonyms and past employment. I was unable to furnish a bibliography of my writings. I had never, I confess
ed, written a book.54
MR. NIXON: Now, Mr. Chambers, you heard the charge made here that you have been treated for mental illness. Do you have any comment on that?
MB. CHAMBERS: Yes; I have never been treated for a mental illness—period.
MR. NIXON: You have never been treated in a mental institution?
MR. CHAMBERS: Never.
MR. NIXON: Never. Have you been treated for a mental illness or been in a [mental] institution during the past four years, which was the charge made?
MR. CHAMBERS: Of course, not; and anyone at Time Magazine can tell you that.
And yet, I knew as I answered the questions, that the effect of my answers was little or nothing. It was the questions themselves that had force and would henceforth hang like a poisonous fog over the Case, distorting all motives, issues and relationships seen through their murk.
How effective the insanity charge was can be glimpsed from the immediate reaction of the Committee’s Chairman. I had testified that my wife and I had at one time lived on a farm near Glen Gardner, N.J.—our converted barn near the valley of the robins. The Chairman pressed me to locate the farm exactly. If I had ever known the name of the little dirt road we lived on, I had forgotten it. The Chairman insisted. His insistence puzzled me since the point seemed of no particular relevance and could, in any case, easily be established from a map. It was not the exact location that was troubling him. “You know,” he was quoted to me by a Committee staff member as saying to his colleagues after the hearing, “you know, there are a lot of booby-hatches around Glen Gardner.” (J. Parnell Thomas was a member from the Garden State.)
Yet it was Chairman Thomas who asked me one of the more important questions of the hearing.
THE CHAIRMAN: What influenced you to join the Communist Party originally?
MR. 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.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, I can understand how a young man might join the Communist Party, but will you explain to us how a person who has 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?
MR. 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 there 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 weights (weighs) on them. What shall I do? At that crossroads the evil thing, communism, lies in wait for (them with) a simple answer.
But nothing in my testimony that day approached in feeling or meaning a dozen lines elicited by a more or less casual question from Richard Nixon. It must be remembered that I was speaking after seven or eight hours of public hearing. All day long, the special pressures of such an ordeal had beat upon me. Most of the time Alger Hiss had been on the stand, and the spectacle of that man, hopelessly baited by questions, although in a trap of his own contriving, had tormented me as much, or more, than anything I felt about myself.
Even if Hiss had never been my friend, my reaction would have been merely less personal, scarcely less acute. Had I witnessed in a moving picture or a play such a spectacle as I was called upon to participate in, I would have walked out of the theater, for the same reason that the Greeks made it a law of their drama that acts of violence, suffering and death must take place off-stage. For they aroused in those who watched them emotions that were merely horrifying and ugly without being tragic, since tragedy lies not in the horror, but in the surmounting of horror. But I was an enforced spectator, held in that room under the same invisible compulsions as Hiss. And, as hour by hour, the agony mounted, died away and mounted again, point by damning point, I was more and more bowed under the sense of how much each of us was the prey, rather than an actor, in this historic experience to which what had been best in us had led us, from motives incomprehensible to most of those who watched or heard us, to this end.
The exchange with Nixon began almost off-handedly.
MR. NIXON: Mr. Hiss was your closest friend?
MR. CHAMBERS: Mr. Hiss was certainly the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party.
Alger Hiss was now sitting behind me among the spectators, surrounded by a little group of friends. As I testified, I could hear Hiss making sotto-voce sallies, and the titters of the others.
MR. 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?
MR. CHAMBERS: What motive I can have?
MR. NIXON: Yes. I mean, do you—is there any grudge that you have against Mr. Hiss over anything that he has done to you?
That single question slipped the cord on all the pent emotion that had been built up through the day. Until that moment, I had been testifying as a public witness, trying to answer questions carefully and briefly. Now I ceased to answer in that way. As I struggled to control my feeling, slowly and deliberately, I heard myself saying, rather than said: “The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives 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.”
In the completely silent room, I fought to control my voice.
XXXV
At eight o’clock at night, the long hearing ended. The men and women who had watched and listened to it surged out of the room in intently buzzing groups and on the dark street were soon engaged in a brisk competition for taxicabs.
When Alger Hiss left his first public hearing, people crowded around him. When he left the hearing room on August 25th, no one crowded around him. In the nine hours of the hearing, the tide of sentiment in the room, which had run deeply for him, had turned against him.
I left the room with the head of Time’s Washington bureau. As we walked in silence together down the curved hall of the House Office Building, I heard footsteps pounding after us on the marble floor. A young man caught up with us. He was apparently Jewish and could not have been more than seventeen. He was embarrassed at his rashness, but determined. “Mr. Chambers, Mr. Chambers,” he fumbled, “I want to thank you. That part about the tragedy of history—you don’t know what it means to young people like me.”
I did not know, in fact, that there were young people like him, or that the tragedy of history could possibly mean anything to them. But he suddenly rekindled in me a flash of what I had felt at the beginning, and then lost, in the long grind of the hearing—that I sp
oke, not for myself, but for others; others whom I did not know and could not imagine. I was too tired and too surprised to do more than thank him lamely and walk on.
12
THE BRIDGE
I
In the forty-eight hours after the August 25th hearing, the whole character of the Hiss Case changed for me. In those forty-eight hours I became a witness in a deeper sense. Until then, in the three weeks of congressional hearings, I had been a witness only in the sense that, given the opportunity, I had decided that a man should testify against the Communist conspiracy in the Government; and since I could, I must. I was most truly a witness to the degree in which I was reluctant. For a witness, if he is sincere, senses, though he cannot spell out even to himself, or does not wish to, what that commitment means. “It is a bridge I had hoped that I would never have to cross,” I said to my friend, John Chamberlain,55 as I prepared to go to Washington to testify, “but now I have to cross it.”
Even then, I did not know just what that bridge was, where it led or what it spanned. I did not even know whether I should have to cross it all the way.
By August 25th, I knew where the bridge led. By then, I began to grasp the degree to which I was not merely a man testifying against something. I was first of all a witness for something. The turn the struggle had taken made it clear that what most of the world supposed it to be—a struggle between two men—was precisely what it was not. It was a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths—Communism and Christianity—embodied in two men, who by a common experience in the past, knew as few others could know what the struggle was about, and who shared a common force of character, the force which had made each of them a Communist in the first place, and which I had not changed when I changed my faith. It was the power to hold convictions and to act upon them to the limit of life itself. The whole law of motion of the Case, and the ultimate fierceness of purpose of its principals, lies at that point where the struggle was a conflict of faiths, and the witness that each man must make step by step drove the ether to exertions, such as men in a mere clash of interests and personalities could neither have conceived nor sustained. Yet it is precisely at that point where we were most fiercely engaged that I found it least possible to feel hatred for Alger Hiss, although it was precisely the tactics whereby Hiss sought to conceal his guilt which constitutes, as Ralph de Toledano has pointed out, his real “crime against the human spirit.” That attitude of mine toward Hiss, which to many seemed incredible or baffling, had less and less to do with my former friendship for him. It had more and more to do with my deepening understanding of the witness that he, too, was making, and what it cost him to make it. For I cannot hate even an enemy, as I said in a broadcast immediately after Hiss’s second trial, who shares with me the conviction that that life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.
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