Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  My sense of loneliness drove me to keep all the more to myself. My lethargy made any effort seem futile. The idea of making the long trip to New York City to reclaim some scraps of paper that I had left there ten years before, seemed an unendurable effort. I wanted only to be with my family and not to leave the sanctuary of the farm. And so Marbury had to ask me a second time.

  XVIII

  This time Cleveland warned me that if I did have anything of Hiss’s I had better get it. What I might have had seemed to me of so little importance that we had scarcely touched on it.

  I communicated with my wife’s nephew, Nathan Levine,69 merely telling him that I was going to New York and asking him if he would have “my things” ready for me. It took him some time to think back ten years and figure out what my things might be. He, of course, had never known what was in the envelope which I had asked him to hide in 1938.

  I left the farm with deep reluctance. It was a Sunday. In New York the streets were empty. I went by subway to Levine’s apartment in Brooklyn. It was crowded with relatives, none of whom I had seen for years. Though my relations with Levine were warm they were infrequent. “My things,” he told me, were at his mother’s house—my wife’s sister’s. She was coming to call upon him shortly and he wanted to wait until she and his father had arrived before he drove over to their house, where he had been living when I gave him the envelope to hide for me, and where he had hidden it. He did not want his mother to ask embarrassing questions when he took it out of hiding. She was suffering from a weak heart, of which, not long afterwards, she died. Almost as soon as she had arrived, Levine and I drove the short distance to her house on Rochester Avenue.

  Levine led me up to the second floor. By then he was laughing at what seemed to him a somewhat absurd business. He led me to a bathroom, where, over the tub, a small window opened into a dumbwaiter shaft that had long been out of use. Inside the shaft was some kind of small shelf or ledge. There Levine had laid “my things.”

  He climbed upon the tub, opened the little window and half disappeared into the shaft. When he reappeared, he handed me an envelope that was big, plump and densely covered with the clotted cobwebs and dust of a decade. As I took it from his hands, that accumulation slid to the floor.

  In surprise, for I had supposed that the envelope was a small one, I carried it to the kitchen, which was at the end of the hall, and laid it on a white enamel table top. Levine’s chief concern was for the mess that I had made on his mother’s floor, for she was a somewhat implacable housekeeper. He took a broom and dustpan and went back to tidy up.

  In his absence, I opened the envelope and drew part way out the thick batch of copied State Department documents. At a glance, I saw that, besides those documents, and Hiss’s handwritten memos, there were three cylinders of microfilm and a little spool of developed film (actually two strips). By a reflex of amazement, I pushed the papers back into the envelope. Then I held on to the edge of the table, for I had the feeling that the floor was swinging around me and that I was going to fall to it. That passed in an instant But I continued to grip the edge of the table in the kind of physical hush that a man feels to whom has liappened an act of God.

  I was still standing there—it had all taken only a few moments-when Levine came back with his broom and dustpan and asked me, as nearly as I remember, if I had found what I was looking for.

  My answer was more to myself than to him. “Good God,” I said, “I did not know that this still existed.”

  XIX

  I telephoned my wife from New York and asked her to drive to meet me at the station in Baltimore. I asked her to be sure to meet me on time. I did not want to wait in the station. She asked me if something was wrong. I said simply: “I have found something.”

  My wife was waiting for me in Baltimore. The children had been asleep on the back seat of the car, and woke to greet me. I got behind the wheel and laid the envelope on the seat between my wife and me. At home my wife went at once to put the children to bed.

  In our living room, I examined for the first time all the contents of the envelope. There were sixty-five typed pages, copies or summaries of confidential State Department documents. There were two strips of developed microfilm, one containing the first part of a long document from the Trade Agreements Division of the State Department. It ran over onto the second strip, which also included some short State Department cables. There were three cylinders of microfilm, undeveloped, as I knew, because, on two of the cylinders, the caps were taped with adhesive tape. The cap on the third cylinder had been jarred off or never properly fitted. There was also a long memo on yellow foolscap in the handwriting of Harry Dexter White.70 There were one or two smaller items of no particular importance.

  That stunned sense which had come over me when I first saw the contents of the envelope had never quite left me. I took the papers, the film and the envelope, which was covered on one side with a crust of grime that had cracked with age, and hid them upstairs in my bedroom.

  How could I help but feel stunned? For I knew that the documents and the film meant much more than any part they might play in the libel suit. They challenged my life itself. They meant that there had been given into my hands the power to prove the existence of the Communist conspiracy. They meant that I must decide once for all whether to destroy that documentary proof and continue to spare those whom I had so far shielded, or to destroy the conspiracy with the means which seemed to have been put into my hands for that reason by the action of a purpose that reached far back into the past to the moment and the impulse that had first led me to secrete the film and papers. There was this one chance, and only this one, which, if I destroyed the evidence, would never come again. I knew, too, that whatever else I destroyed, I could do what I had to do only if I was first of all willing to destroy myself.

  XX

  The next morning I told Richard Cleveland that I had found something. In his careful and deliberate way, Cleveland had kept a tight grip of his reaction. Presently, William Macmillan joined us. We sat discussing the decision I must make and what I must do in making it. Both men decided to drive me to Westminster to examine the papers.

  I write “papers” because it was the copied State Department, Hiss’s handwritten memos and Harry White’s long memo that I showed to Cleveland and Macmillan in our living room at the farm. They examined the documents slowly and thoroughly. I had the impression that, to their law-conscious minds, the grimed and crackled envelope was more telling at that moment than the documents. I knew what the documents were. I could not, like a lawyer, know that verification of type face, paper, etc., would have to be made before the authenticity of the documents could be certified. I was depressed by my friends’ deliberateness. I thought with a renewal of hopelessness: “Is it impossible to convince anyone of the plain fact, even with the evidence in front of us?” This feeling was, of course, quite mistaken. Both Cleveland and Macmillan grasped the enormity of the documents at once.

  Some of my feeling lifted when Cleveland said that, clearly, the documents must be put in a secure place and that he would take them into custody and put them at once in his safety-deposit box at the Semmes firm. Photostats would also have to be made. (They were made a day or so later, with Macmillan standing by to supervise every step of the operation.)

  I surrendered the documents into Cleveland’s keeping and drove back with Macmillan and him to Baltimore. There were some long silences on that drive. I had the impression that almost the same kind of hush had touched my friends that had touched me when I first found the documents.

  Cleveland had at once said emphatically that he hoped that it was my intention to introduce the documents into the pre-trial examination. I pointed out what such action on my part would inflict on all those involved in my disclosure. This had happened on a Monday. On Tuesday I still had not reached a decision and said that I must have a day in which to think things through. But the next day I was scheduled to testify at the pre-trial examination. The His
s lawyers had already given notice that they intended to examine my wife. Cleveland and Macmillan arranged to have my wife examined Wednesday in my stead. During the day while she was testifying, I would reach my decision about the documents.

  XXI

  It will be asked: Why did you not turn the microfilm, also, over to Richard Cleveland?

  At the level of conscious motive, I did not turn over the film because the contents of the three cylinders were not developed and I did not know whether or not they had any bearing on the Hiss libel suit. I planned to try to develop the film myself, to see what was on it before I surrendered all of the film to anyone. (There was also a possibility for the first day or so that I would destroy it and myself, but I will come to that in its place.) To understand the next developments in the Hiss Case, it is necessary to consider briefly how, in retrospect, the Case then seemed to me.

  For me the Hiss Case did not begin in 1948. It began in 1939 when I talked to Adolf Berle. As a result of that incident and later observations, I concluded that there were powerful forces within the Government to whom such information as I had given Berle was extremely unwelcome. I believed that they had no intention of acting on it, and that, if I made myself troublesome, any action taken would be taken against me. From time to time, rumors and reports had reached me of what I could only regard as a fitful struggle going on out of sight, among those who sought to bring the facts behind the Hiss Case to light and those who strove to keep them hidden. Sometimes, the struggle reached a peak, as when, shocked by what Isaac Don Levine had told him of my story, Walter Winchell again took it to President Roosevelt. Again nothing happened. It reached another peak when Ambassador William Bullitt took the same story to the President. It reached another peak when a newsman procured, from sources unknown to me, at least the substance of what was in the Berle notes, and tried to force action on them in other ways.

  This official apathy, it seemed to me, was the reason why, with allegations in the hands of the F.B.I. for years that Alger Hiss and the rest of the Ware Group were Communists, nothing had happened.

  In the end, this was why, I held, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and not some other agency of Government more directly concerned, had at last to force the indispensable disclosure. It was why, convinced that the Communist infiltration touched the heart of the nation’s safety, I had to respond to the Committee’s summons, and make the revelations where they could be heard.

  Once I had begun that testimony, only the existence of that higher apathy seemed adequate to explain why the full weight of official disapproval was directed at first against me, and not into following up my charges, and why the Hiss Case was “a red herring.” It explained why the violent resentment of public and official persons was concentrated on me, just as, later on, it explained how the spectacle of the first Hiss trial was possible, and the singular behavior of some of those engaged in it.

  Now it is proper to point out the facts that we all know: once I had put documentary evidence in the Justice Department’s hands, Hiss was promptly indicted; Thomas F. Murphy was chosen by the Government to try the case; Hiss was convicted and his appeal opposed and denied. He was imprisoned. But in November, 1948, those developments lay ahead, and in the light of the past or the climate of the present and near future, they were not developments that the kind of mind that the world calls “realistic” would have cared to give odds on. Quite the reverse.

  The climate of 1948 was set by a report that forces within the Government were determined to stifle the Hiss Case by indicting me and thereby removing the one witness who could make the case possible. Congressman Nixon believed that the Government had already taken the preliminary steps necessary to indict me. A special night session of members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities was called to discuss ways to counteract the effort to indict me—not because the Committee felt any personal fondness for me or wished to save me from indictment as an individual man, but because my indictment must clearly smother the Hiss Case.

  Thus, beset by the conflict in my own witness, I was also beset by a political conflict outside me, and largely beyond my knowledge, with which I had little or nothing to do, but which steadily played on me.

  What powers within the Government wanted the Hiss Case stifled? I have never been in a position to map with authority the geography of power within the Government, or beyond it. But, like everybody else, I have witnessed certain public acts. There was the appearance of two Supreme Court Justices, Justice Felix Frankfurter and Justice Stanley Reed, as voluntary71 character witnesses for Alger Hiss at his first trial. A justice of the Supreme Court has no personal character. He is a living symbol. The intervention of two Supreme Court Justices in a trial in which the implied charge was espionage was an event in this nation’s history, and one whose implications are deep-going.

  Nor can Secretary of State Acheson’s remark after Hiss’s conviction be reviewed merely in those terms of personal feeling that I of all men must be the first to understand, for I shared that feeling. For a Secretary of State to say, after the conviction of a man on an implied charge of espionage: “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss,” cannot possibly be dismissed simply as an upwelling of personal feeling. This would be true even if the State Department aide, waiting in an anteroom with a Bible so that newsmen could check the Secretary’s scriptural reference, did not make it clear that this was no spontaneous outburst. You will look in vain in history for anything comparable to it.

  These are facts. We witnessed them. They are indisputable. They were evoked by a single focus of infection—the Hiss Case. They are sometimes explained, along with much else, as manifestations of partisan politics. I believe that those who suppose so are merely influenced by the traditional pattern of American politics at a time when that traditional pattern no longer holds good. The factor of partisan politics may have been in play, but I do not believe that, in the sense of two-party politics, it was decisive. The explanation lies deeper.

  The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades. This is not a charge. My opinion of that revolution is not at issue. It is a statement of fact that need startle no one who has voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power. And with that we come to the heart of the Hiss Case and all its strange manifestations. No one could have been more dismayed than I at what I had hit, for though I knew it existed, I still had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power.

  It was the forces of this revolution that had smothered the Hiss Case (and much else) for a decade, and fought to smother it in 1948. These were the forces that made the phenomenon of Alger Hiss possible; had made it possible for him to rise steadily in Government and to reach the highest post after he was already under suspicion as a Communist in many quarters, including Congress, and under the scrutiny of the F.B.I. Alger Hiss is only one name that stands for the whole Communist penetration of Government. He could not be exposed without raising the question of the real political temper and purposes of those who had protected and advanced him, and with whom he was so closely identified that they could not tell his breed from their own.72

  No act of mine was more effective in forcing into the open the long-smothered Hiss Case than my act in dividing the documentary evidence against Hiss, introducing the copied State Department documents into the pre-trial examination (which, in effect, meant turning them over to the Justice Department), and placing the microfilm, separately, in the pumpkin. 73 It was my d
ecisive act in the Case. For when the second part of the divided evidence, the microfilm, fell into the hands of the Committee, it became impossible ever again to suppress the Hiss Case.

  That is the meaning of the pumpkin-a meaning that has been widely missed, I feel, in laughter at the pumpkin itself. Yet without an understanding of that meaning, the heart meaning of the Case is blurred, the logic of the ferocious animus against me is lost, and the acts which preceded and followed my division of the evidence seem merely like the goings on in a thriller. That, I am convinced, is how many people still view them. They never were that. They are the sign that great conflicting forces were at grips. And the special necessities of that struggle impressed upon the acts, in which it was fought out, their special forms.

  It is certainly true that, on the level of consciousness, I divided the evidence in order to try to find out what was on the undeveloped film. Yet I like to wonder sometimes if the subconscious, which so constantly occupies the minds of our intellectuals, could conceivably have been at work here. To put it in my own way, I like to trust that the God of Battles has this Republic in His care. I like to trust that I was moved by an intuition, if only from my reading of military history, that, in general, battles are won by the reserves. The microfilm stands for the reserves.