82 All the press, it should be noted, handled this story with great restraint and propriety.
83 The other was my wife.
84 It is worth noting that the Hiss defense, which tried to work up a highly implausible and easily disprovable theory that Wadleigh, and not Hiss, was the source of the copied State Department documents and microfilm, never included David Carpenter in their effort to shift guilt. And that despite the fact that Carpenter had recruited Wadleigh into the Soviet apparatus and was much more constantly in contact with him than I was. But then, Wadleigh had broken with Communism, and was therefore its enemy, while Carpenter was still a Communist, employed at that time by the Daily Worker.
85 It was not to make its appearance until early in the first Hiss trial when the defense produced it with a flourish in court. The motives of the defense in producing the typewriter have seemed cryptic to many people. Actually, Prose-copied on a Woodstock. They had no evidence that the documents had been copied on Hiss’s Woodstock. cutor Thomas F. Murphy left them almost no alternative. For in his opening address he made it clear that he knew the defense had the machine and Lloyd Paul Stryker could scarcely keep silent about it without causing the jurors to feel that he was concealing something.
86 When we finished, Tom Spencer asked me if there was anything that I wanted to add. I took his pen, and, at the end of the report, wrote: E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (And so we emerged again to see the stars). This literary flourish may seem more understandable when the context of that experience is remembered, and when it is recalled that these words are the last line of Dante’s Inferno and the last line of Marx’s Capital.
87 My contact with the F.B.I. has always been at the agent level. The one administrator I know is the assistant chief of a field office.
88 Some of them had more personal ties to Hiss. “Imagine,” said a U.N. administrator to a friend of mine, “the embarrassment of all the people here whom Alger Hiss recommended for their jobs.”
89 For this term, which I cannot better, and for the next, I am indebted to an anonymous writer in the Freeman, who was discussing, not the Hiss Case, but more current manifestations.
90 That was not to be of much help to me. After half an hour on the stand I thought of Judge Samuel H. Kaufman: Of course, I know nothing about judges, but do they all act like this?
91 In the second Hiss trial Judge Henry W. Goddard presided over his orderly court with complete authority and dignity.
92 Murphy’s success in convicting Alger Hiss seemed for a time to have ended his career in Government. After the second Hiss trial, he was called to the White House and officially thanked. When the next appointment to a judgeship came up, Murphy was passed over. It was said that he did not have sufficient political backing. Murphy resigned from the Justice Department to become Police Commissioner of New York City. Then the appointment of Judge Medina to the Appellate bench left a vacancy in the United States District Court. Once more, it seemed as if Murphy would be passed over. The White House considered Lloyd Paul Stryker, Hiss’s trial lawyer, for the new judgeship. Only when powerful Democratic forces pointed out the unhappy impression that such an appointment might leave on the nation, and that the Senate might refuse to confirm, did the White House yield and appoint Murphy a judge.
93 Senator Nixon’s role did not end with his dash back to the United States to rally the House Committee when the microfilm was in its hands. His testimony before the Grand Jury that indicted Alger Hiss is a significant part of the Hiss Case. Throughout the most trying phases of the Case, Nixon and his family, and sometimes his parents, were at our farm, encouraging me and comforting my family. My children have caught him lovingly in a nickname. To them, he is always “Nixie,” the kind and the good, about whom they will tolerate no nonsense. His somewhat martial Quakerism sometimes amused and always heartened me. I have a vivid picture of him, in the blackest hour of the Hiss Case, standing by the barn and saying in his quietly savage way (he is the kindest of men): “If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil.”
94 Enormously helped by a book, Seeds of Treason, co-authored by Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, which first enabled the nation to see the Hiss Case as a connected whole.
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