XXII
I drove my wife to Baltimore for the pre-trial examination with a feeling that I was throwing her to the wild beasts in my stead. I had driven her there a few weeks earlier to talk with Richard Cleveland and William Macmillan. On that earlier drive to Baltimore, we discussed for the first time our memories of the Hisses. Until then, I had never asked my wife what she remembered. I had cut short all attempts on her part to tell me. I did not want her to be involved in any way in the Case, which was a man’s fight, and one in which she had no real part. I could not bear to admit, even to the extent of conversation with her about it, that in reality she was involved.
The Hiss lawyers had made that clear by summoning her to testify. Now we had no choice but to discuss the past. To my surprise, I found that my wife’s recollection of many things was clearer than my own. This was especially true of personal and physical details—the interiors, drapes, furniture, wallpaper of the Hiss houses, occasions when the Hisses had been at our house, occasions when we had been at theirs. Moreover, my wife had a simple way of determining relative dates and events. She related them to the birth of her children and their various stages of development. Furthermore, she was extremely emphatic, not to say stubborn, about what she remembered. But in almost every case, she proved to be right.
On the morning of the pre-trial examination, I parked near the station in Baltimore and guided my wife to a taxicab. She suddenly realized that I was going to leave her.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” she asked, in a voice all the more terrible because, as always, she sought to subdue her real horror of facing alone what lay ahead, so that her voice was without reproach, like that of an abandoned but brave child.
“No,” I said, “they will not let me be there. But Dick Cleveland and Bill Macmillan will take care of you.” She did not cry. We took each other’s hands because we do not like to embrace before strange people. I watched the cab pull away from the curb and stood watching it as it disappeared. I did not know whether I would see my wife again.
XXIII
I drove back to the farm. I drove by the longest route because I wanted time to think out what I would do that day. But I cannot say that I really thought while I was driving. I can only say that there was in my mind a motion which seethed and broke, like waves, against two alternatives. Either was a reef, and I cannot call thinking what was, in fact, the agony of indecision.
The agony resulted from the conflict between two forms of witness that I had to bear—the witness against Communism and the human witness. It was precipitated by my act in turning over to Cleveland the copied State Department documents. That act meant, in effect, that I had already turned over the documents to the Government—for it was a matter of indifference whether I myself formally introduced them into evidence, or whether, if I were no longer alive to do so, they passed into the Government’s hands in other ways. When I placed them in Richard Cleveland’s hands, I had completed that part of my witness. Men might add sequels to that fact after whatever flourishes they pleased. They could not change the fact. They might choose to understand the evidence. They might reject the evidence. The hard fact was that the evidence was in. What they did with it would be a shrewd measure, in the crisis of the time, of men’s ability or inability to save themselves. If it is remembered what a drowning sea of hostility, public and secret opposition, skepticism, hatred and simple lack of understanding of my purpose then washed around me, it may not seem strange that I should feel, with a strong taint of bitterness in my despair, that I could do little more, one way or another, to help men to make up their minds. There are limits to strength, and in that direction I had then reached one of the limits.
The decision concerned my other witness. It was what I was going to do about those whom I had implicated by turning over the documents and those whom I must next implicate by turning over the microfilm. It took this form: Should I destroy the microfilm and destroy myself? I had less than a day in which to make up my mind, and to act.
By turning over the documents to Cleveland, I had implicated only Alger Hiss and Harry White, who was already dead. By turning over the film, which must be my next step, I would implicate others. Of these I was sure that Abel Gross must be one, and I supposed, too, then, that Reno and Wadleigh might be implicated. I had forgotten that Wadleigh was in Turkey on a diplomatic mission during the forepart of 1938 and could not have been back long when the films were made.
By destroying the film, I could spare these people completely. What was of immediate urgency, by destroying myself, I could remove the only living witness against Alger Hiss (for at that time no other witnesses had appeared). Yet my witness against the Communist conspiracy would not be changed by my act. The documents, what Thomas F. Murphy was later to call “the immutable evidence,” were the immutable witness. They spoke in silence for me.
Whether I lived and bore a witness of justice, or killed myself and bore a witness of mercy, I would in either case destroy myself. That was the point at which the alternatives arose. Which form of destruction should I choose? They arose, too, at the point at which I raised the question of my own suffering. Was it God’s purpose that I should live and by consciously inviting a suffering such as I could scarcely conceive, bear a witness to the end that those infidels might be crushed completely? Did not everything tend to that conclusion? Had not everything that had happened in this respect in the Case since my first testimony been forced upon me, grudgingly, reluctantly, step by step, against my will, by the action of the others, and not my own?
Or was it God’s purpose that, having borne my witness against the conspiracy, I should bear a higher witness, by sparing all whom I had implicated or might implicate, in the only way left to me—by destroying myself? If so, I would suffer damnation, which was perhaps the meaning of it all. For then the question became simply this: Should a man accept damnation in the full consciousness that he was destroying himself eternally as the ransom of those with whom he had shared a common evil, and whom nothing less than such an act could reclaim? Was that the penalty exacted by the past at that point where justice and mercy are one?
XXIV
I was alone on the farm. The children were at school. Mr. Penning. ton was probably in one of the farther fields. During my drive I had reached no conclusion as to what I should do. I sat down at the kitchen table. With the evidences of my family around me, I tried to sum up the practical considerations. They were not many. Time had insured my life for $20,000. There was the farm and the producing herd. Mr. Pennington would help my family to work the farm until my son was big enough to take over.
My family would be better off without me, not simply because my act would liberate them from their only connection with the Case, which would, in fact, cease to exist. Living, I could be nothing to them but a dishonored man. Dead, I knew that I would be the binding point of a memory of mutual love that could have few equals.
My gun was upstairs. It had the merciful merit of being instantaneous. But I shrank from the physical aspects of using it, especially the horror that it must leave for my wife. There is a gas-producing substance of which a cyanide compound is one component. It is in common use on farms. We had a can of it which my wife had bought and which I had never looked at. I decided that, if I chose death, I would use that gas whose action I then supposed to be much quicker than is the case.
I got up and began walking across the farm, for the relief of doing something, and to try to reach a decision.
XXV
At the middle of our farm, there is a little woods of white pine and oak. It is along its edge that the arbutus grows. I had sometimes sat in it in the past to think and to observe. I found myself walking toward it.
If an intense seeking for guidance is prayer, then my experience in the woods was prayer. But it was prayer much of which must be called a stupor of distress. I sought to lay myself open to God, not to demand anything of Him, in a silence of the self that amounted to inertness. I do not know how long I
was in the woods. Nor have I any clear recollection of my earlier thoughts, which had reached the point of turmoil. What I am aware of is the moment at which a clarification set in. There came to me at last, by what processes of association, from what depths of memory I cannot trace, an image. It was the image of that Russian revolutionist who, as the only protest he was able to make against the flogging of his fellow prisoners, drenched himself in kerosene, ignited himself and burned himself to death.
The witness.
That was the precipitating image. It linked the purposes of my past and present and made one the meaning of my life. I do not mean that I thought that. The image rose in my mind. I am not conscious of a reasoning or an ordering of my thoughts, but of a kind of gradual separation like that by which, in clouded water, we see the sediment settle of its own weight at last, and leave the liquid clear and free. More and more, there settled upon me like a burden for which I slowly stooped, a sense that the weight of God’s purpose laid upon me was that I must not destroy myself. Therefore, I must not destroy the film. I must continue to bear a living witness, which would only mean my destruction by slower means. That was my penalty, but what happened to me was not the point at all.
And though I cannot retrace the stages by which I reached that certainty, 1 do know the thought which closed my experience in the woods, and which took form in words close to these: “If I, who am the least man in this nation, which is dying of self-satisfaction and indifference—if I do not find within myself the strength to do this, then, in the war between this world and Communism which is inevitably coming, any man will have the moral right to ask: ‘Why should I give my life?’ But if I do find this strength, nothing, ultimately, can destroy this nation, for it is the power of souls to move other souls.”
XXVI
I drove back to Richard Cleveland’s office to get my wife. The Hiss lawyers had given her a bad time. No doubt, pre-trial examinations must often be rough. But there is little doubt, either, that that one went far beyond any routine. roughness. For there is no doubt that the Hiss lawyers recognized instantly that Esther Chambers was a most dangerous witness to them, not only because her memory for concrete detail was vivid, but because her sincerity is transparent and infectious. “You reek of sincerity,” said Thomas F. Murphy, concluding his first interview with her.
Therefore, the Hiss lawyers had harried her to tears. The tone of their treatment of her is fixed, I think, in the one question of Marbury’s that has stayed in my mind. My wife had testified, in response to a question, that when we were living on St. Paul Street after my break with Communism, we had owned only a few plates that we had bought at a dime store. “Well, you didn’t eat off the floor, did you, Mrs. Chambers?” asked William Marbury.
There is a natural gentleness that even the basest men accord to a woman, not by reason of courtesy alone, but by an instinct rooted in all that makes them men. The instinct played no part in the pre-trial examination of my wife by Alger Hiss’s lawyers. “And then that —took it away from her,” Tom Murphy exploded, referring to a point in William Marbury’s interrogation of my wife. Let that epithet stand to Murphy’s honor as long as memories last.
Before I left Richard Cleveland, I told him that I had decided to introduce the copied State Department documents into the pre-trial examination the next day.
XXVII
At one or two o’clock on November 17, 1948, Cleveland, Macmillan and I filed into the Marbury law library for my resumed hearing. Under my arm I carried an envelope, containing the sixty-five pages of copied State Department documents, the four memos in Alger Hiss’s handwriting and the envelope in which they had lain hidden for a decade. Edward McLean was absent.
When the examination opened, I said that I should like to make a statement. I said, in substance, that until that time I had testified only to Alger Hiss’s Communism. I had done so because I wished to shield him. I could not shield him completely, but I had hoped to shield him from the most shattering consequences of his acts as a Communist. I had tried to shield him because, in my own break with Communism, I had been given strength and a time in which to reshape my life. I did not wish to deprive Hiss and others of the same possibility that had been granted me. But now I must testify that Alger Hiss had also committed espionage. In response to William Marbury’s request, I had brought evidence of that. Then I exposed the documents and the memos on the table in front of me.
William Macmillan moved in at once. “I think,” he said, “that in the interest of order, the recorder should number and list each document. If there is no objection, I will just read off the first and last words of each in sequence.” There began half an hour of stunning itemization. Macmillan read: “Paris: To the Secretary of State, Strictly Confidential, Signed Bullitt; Rome: To the Secretary of State, I learn in strictest confidence, Signed Phillips; Vienna: To the Secretary of State, Signed Messersmith....” On and on it went.
At the far end of the room, Marbury sat, staring fixedly at the table. At his right, another member of the Marbury firm watched the listing and listened to the reading with an expression of bewildered anxiety. Harold Rosenwald had got up from his place almost at once and stood staring gloomily out of the window with his hands clasped behind him.
When Hiss’s handwritten memos were introduced, Marbury asked to see one. At the same moment he was called to the telephone. Taking the memo with him, he went into his own office. If there had been a doubt in anybody’s mind that Marbury had compared the handwriting in the memo with some specimen of Hiss’s handwriting on his desk, Marbury’s face left little doubt when he returned. It was, of course, the same handwriting.
After the introduction of the documents, my examination was resumed. But the old spirit had gone out of it. That afternoon concluded my pre-trial examination until after Hiss’s indictment. Then, the alert Hiss defense, by an action entirely permissible in law, however it may seem in justice, reopened my examination in the libel suit. The chief purpose of this tactic was to elicit from me under oath, when I could not refuse to answer anything, any developments in the Government’s case against Hiss, up to that time, which might be of use to them. “There is nothing,” Thomas F. Murphy told the first Hiss jury, “that the Hiss lawyers did not know in advance about the Government’s case.” Now McLean conducted the examination. Marbury put in merely perfunctory appearances. A representative of the Department of Justice sat in, as an observer, not as a participant.
When I left the pre-trial examination on November 17th, I did not know just what would happen next.
XXVIII
I went back to the farm to wait. Marbury, after a flying trip to New York to show Hiss photostats of his handwritten memos, telephoned Richard Cleveland. Marbury proposed that the documents be turned over to the Government at once. Together the two lawyers went to Judge W. Calvin Chestnut who saw no necessity for turning over the papers to the Government but said that he would not object if counsel felt it to be necessary. Marbury at once telephoned the Justice Department. Up from Washington rushed Alex Campbell, the head of the Department’s Criminal Division, and two assistants. Thus the documents passed into the hands of the Department of Justice.
Marbury had seized the initiative. This was the period when, with Alger Hiss, he was doing everything possible to aid the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.74
I did not learn immediately of these developments. For a time, I lived in almost complete isolation at the center of the storm.
An event had already shaped my view of what to expect. On Election Day, I had listened to the first returns come over the radio. They were small tallies from widely scattered sections of the country. They showed the President leading almost everywhere. Until then it had been widely assumed that Governor Dewey would win. I reasoned that, if Truman was leading in the rural districts, he was certain of election when the city vote came in. “I think President Truman has won,” I told my wife. I went to bed and slept soundly.
But with the
red herring in mind, I took it for granted that the election results automatically meant that some way would be found to punish me for having tried to expose Alger Hiss. Scarcely anybody I knew supposed anything else. A few days after the election, one of the officials of our bank drew my wife aside. “It looks black for the Chamberses,” he said.
XXIX
About a fortnight passed. During that time I had no communication whatever with the Justice Department or the F.B.I. On the surface all was calm. The nation was getting ready for Christmas. On December ist, a spokesman for the Justice Department made his well-known comment: “Unless further evidence is forthcoming,” the Justice Department was not planning to take any action in the Hiss-Chambers Case.
On the same day, something else happened of which I did not know. In a column in the Washington Post, a pro-Hiss organ, had appeared a few lines of gossip. They said: there has been a startling development in the Hiss libel suit in Baltimore.
I first became aware of an electric disturbance when Bert Andrews of the Herald Tribune telephoned me. He had read the column in the Washington Post. He simply asked me if anything had happened in the libel suit. I answered that I could not discuss the libel suit. Judge Chestnut, Richard Cleveland and William Marbury had given Andrews similar answers. Andrews at once drew the proper journalistic inference that if nobody would talk about what had happened in the libel suit, something had happened. He got in touch with Robert Stripling.
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