Democrats howled. The “pumpkin papers” seemed to be the last absurd act in the Chambers melodrama. The nature of the papers which had been released to the press made the twenty-four-hour watch seem ridiculous. As A. J. Liebling wrote in the New Yorker, they constituted “a mixed bag of trivia.” None of it had been of much significance in 1938, let alone 1948. One paper had reported that the Japanese were trying to buy manganese from a Costa Rican island which had no manganese. Another solemnly noted that Hitler and Mussolini were exchanging staff officers. A third had been written at a time when the whole world knew the Nazi seizure of Austria was imminent. It recorded an opinion of the American consul general in Vienna: “it seems possible Hitler is seeking a foreign political triumph at the expense of Austria.”
That was good for a chuckle, but it was the last laugh liberal Democrats were going to have from this business. As other papers were declassified it became evident that some of them had been enormously helpful in Moscow, and others were being withheld from newspapermen because the State Department had ruled that they were too secret, even in 1948, to be published without risking the national security. Moreover, the content of the documents was really beside the point. Had they been confined to weather reports or traffic accidents, their appearance in the hands of a former Communist courier would still have been shocking, and an occasion for a broad federal inquiry, because all of them had been transmitted in Code D, the department’s most secret cipher. That meant the code had been broken and American diplomacy compromised on a very high level; agents of another government had been able to eavesdrop at will, picking up information on exchanges with foreign secretaries of friendly powers, names of confidential informers, troop transfers, presidential directives—the lot. And indeed, when former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles examined enlargements of the pumpkin papers he declared that their acquisition by another government in 1938, and especially the loss of Code D, had been “most perilous to the interests of the United States.”
Now the administration had no choice. In his press conferences President Truman continued to maintain that talk of spies had been nothing more than a campaign red herring, but already his Justice Department was moving to preempt ground hitherto held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In New York the government recalled a grand jury and showed it some of the enlargements. Subpoenas were issued for Hiss, Chambers, and Mrs. Hiss. On December 15 Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury. His first trial began on May 31, 1949, and ended on July 8 with the jury hung, eight for conviction and four not. There was a great deal of unpleasantness about the judge. He had been solicitous of the Hiss cause throughout, overruling the prosecution, sustaining the defense, and excluding witnesses who, had they been permitted to testify, would have clarified several points that baffled the jury. Those who had expected a guilty verdict were chagrined.
It was at this point that Richard Nixon first came to the attention of the country’s liberal constituency and offended it deeply. Democrats had followed the trial numbly, hoping that the mountain of circumstantial evidence would somehow be explained away. The deadlock disappointed them, too. It was a blow to learn that eight jurors had believed Chambers, and they were in no mood to be jarred by a contentious young Republican congressman. He did go far. It was doubtless true that “the Truman administration,” as he charged, was “extremely anxious that nothing bad happen to Mr. Hiss,” and even fair to add that the court’s “prejudice against the prosecution” had been “obvious and apparent.” But it was unwise to demand an investigation of the judge, and unwiser still to raise the hackles of those who believed in simple justice by saying that “the average American wants all technicalities waived in this case.” A trial without technicalities is a lynching bee. A. J. Liebling, stuck with Hiss and not much liking it, observed that apparently “it is un-American not to convict anybody Congressman Nixon doesn’t like,” and, in another thrust, that Nixon was “in the plight of a young bank teller who has bet his life savings on a horse that looks like faltering.”
Chambers wasn’t faltering. He was surer of himself when the second trial opened November 17 under an impartial judge and with a new attorney, less histrionic than the first, representing Hiss. Another consideration was working against the defense. Great political trials must be seen in the context of their times, and throughout 1949 and January 1950, when the second trial ended, the temperature of the cold war was dropping steadily. During every day of both trials Chiang Kai-shek was giving ground to the Chinese Communists until, on the day the second verdict came in, he had lost all of it. In eastern Europe the Red Army was suppressing one democratic government after another. NATO was coalescing to protect western Europe from it. Between the two trials Russia exploded its first atomic bomb. At home the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations grew by the month. Accusations of spying were losing their novelty, and with it their incredibility. The FBI had arrested Judith Coplon on charges of espionage. The Smith Act defendants were being tried in the same building as Hiss; during quiet moments in his trial you could hear Communists demonstrating outside in Foley Square. In August 1948, when Chambers and Hiss had faced one another for the first time in a decade in that Commodore Hotel room, it had been possible to argue that Henry Wallace might be right. Seventeen months later, when Hiss’s second jury retired to deliberate, opinion against Russia and its American admirers had hardened. The jurors found Hiss guilty on both counts.
That does not mean that Alger Hiss was a victim of world politics, except in the sense that it was world politics which had got him in trouble in the first place. Reading through transcripts of the two trials, one can only wonder that four people had voted to acquit him at the end of the first one, despite the biased judge. The documents alone should have been enough to condemn him. He admitted that the handwriting in the memoranda was his. He said that it had been his practice to summarize long documents for his chief, Francis B. Sayre. Sayre denied it, his secretary denied it; nobody in the State Department had heard of such a custom. In the trials Hiss was asked how Chambers had acquired these digests. He didn’t know; he supposed someone had gone through his wastebaskets in the 1930s and saved them. Then, the relentless prosecutor asked, why had they been folded and not crumpled? Hiss agreed that it was a mystery.
U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss was a puzzle fashioned with such pieces: the Woodstock typewriter, the prothonotary warbler, the Hitchcock chairs stenciled in gilt, the Volta Place walls papered with a mulberry pattern, “Hilly” and “Pross,” the handwritten notes—and the $400 “loan.” The loan was in some ways the most convincing fragment of all. In the autumn of 1937 Chambers had needed a new automobile. After his trade-in he was short $400. He went to the Hisses and they gave it to him.
Here the records were very precise. On November 17, 1937, Mrs. Hiss had withdrawn $400 from their savings account. Four days later Chambers bought his auto. The bankbook and the car dealer’s bill of sale were submitted as evidence. Mrs. Hiss testified that she had taken the money out to furnish their new home. She had no receipts, and the withdrawal had just about wiped out their savings. It left them a balance of $14.69—so little that Hiss had to borrow $300 from the bank to meet the monthly installments on his own car. In the depressed 1930s families didn’t make such a sacrifice for a slight acquaintance who was known to be a poor credit risk. As for Mrs. Hiss’s story, the prosecutor asked the jury, “Is that the way you do it when you have a checking account and a charge account, and you’re not moved in? Do you take the $400 out in one lump? Do you go out and buy items for the house to be delivered later and pay for them in cash?” Two lady jurors smiled. Of course they didn’t. Neither had Priscilla Hiss.
***
On that blustery Saturday in January 1950 when the jury reached its verdict, Congressman Nixon was flooded with congratulatory messages, including one from Herbert Hoover: “The conviction of Alger Hiss was due to your patience and persistence alone. At last the stream of treason that existed in our go
vernment has been exposed in a fashion that all may believe.” Hoover had rarely displayed warmth, but the elation in those lines is unmistakable. It is easy to imagine his feelings that weekend. He had taken the measure of that New Deal crowd from the very beginning and now at last, at last, the country could see how right he had been.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum stood Dean Acheson. The Secretary of State had known Hiss since the younger man’s graduation from Harvard Law School. In his United Nations liaison work Hiss had worked under Acheson’s supervision, and when Acheson had resigned as Undersecretary of State in 1947, briefly to resume his private practice, his closest associates had presented him with a thermos carafe for ice water on a silver tray. Their names, inscribed around it, included Chip Bohlen, Loy Henderson, Dean Rusk, and Alger Hiss. On the Wednesday after the conviction, the same day that Hiss was sentenced to five years in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Acheson held a press conference. Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune asked the inevitable question: “Mr. Secretary, do you have any comment on the Alger Hiss case?” The response is remembered where other aspects of the trials have faded: “I should like to make it clear to you that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers may take in this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Everyone must act according to his principles, he explained, and there could be no doubt about his: “I think they were stated for us a very long time ago. They were stated on the Mount of Olives, and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34.”7
That night Acheson wrote his daughter Mary:8
…today I had my press conference. Alger’s case has been on my mind incessantly. As I have written you, here is stark tragedy—whatever the reasonable probable facts are. I knew I would be asked about it and the answer was a hard one—not in the ordinary sense of do I run or do I stand. That presented no problem. But to say what one really meant—forgetting the yelping pack at one’s heels—saying no more and no less than one truly believed. This was not easy.
The pack at his heels included Nixon, who told reporters he thought the secretary’s comment “disgusting,” and Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, who said Truman ought to turn his back on Acheson. The Hill was not interested in the Mount of Olives that month. It wanted scalps. Here it was less than five years after the war and the world had begun to disintegrate. China was gone, Stalin had the bomb, the State Department had been harboring spies—and there was worse to come. Six days after Acheson’s press conference the President announced that work had begun on the deadly hydrogen bomb. Albert Einstein chilled the country by appearing on television to warn that “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and, hence, annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of possibilities…. General annihilation beckons,” and four days after that Scotland Yard arrested Fuchs for betraying America’s atom bomb to the Russians. “How much more are we going to take?” Homer Capehart cried in the Senate. “Fuchs and Acheson and Hiss and hydrogen bombs threatening outside and New Dealism eating away the vitals of the nation. In the name of heaven, is this the best America can do?”
***
On January 7 the junior senator from Wisconsin dined at Washington’s Colony Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, halfway between the White House and Dupont Circle, with a Catholic priest, a professor of political science, and a Washington lawyer. He was, he told them, in desperate need of advice.
The past year had brought nothing but bad news to Joseph R. McCarthy. He had angered prestigious senators in both parties, and he had problems at home. Among other things, Wisconsin’s State Board of Bar Commissioners had nearly disbarred him in 1949 over a breach of ethics: he had run for the Senate while holding judicial office. The commissioners had let McCarthy off with a warning. As he himself paraphrased the ruling, “It was illegal—Joe was naughty—but we don’t think he’ll do it again.”
They didn’t know their man. In a crisis he would do anything, and he had reached such a turning point now. In Washington he had attracted public attention chiefly by his defense of some Nazi war criminals. A poll of Washington correspondents had chosen him America’s worst senator. In two years, he reminded his dinner guests at the Colony, he would be up for reelection.
He needed a campaign issue. Did they have any ideas?
Portrait of an American
EDWARD ROSCOE MURROW
Sometimes, when the wind is right and the London night plays tricks with the memory, one can almost hear the flak, the Luftwaffe armada droning overhead, and the din below. With a little imagination you can see the searchlights springing up. It is then, in fancy, that you can picture the lone figure of a gallant young American defying annihilation to tell his countrymen, through the static and the sputter of shortwave, what he felt they must know:
This—is London….
I’m standing on a rooftop looking out over London…. I think probably in a minute we shall have the sound of guns in the immediate vicinity. The lights are swinging over in this general direction now. You’ll hear two explosions. There they are!… I should think in a few minutes there may be a bit of shrapnel around here. Coming in, moving a little closer all the while.
The plane’s still very high. Earlier this evening we could hear occasional—again, those were explosions overhead. Earlier this evening we heard a number of bombs go sliding and slithering across, to fall several blocks away. Just overhead now the burst of the antiaircraft fire. Still the nearby guns are not working. The searchlights now are feeling almost directly overhead. Now you’ll hear two bursts a little nearer in a moment. There they are! That hard stony sound.
He was on top of the BBC building, a major German target, a place so dangerous that Winston Churchill’s personal intervention was required before broadcasts from it could be permitted. Night after night Murrow went up there and elsewhere to describe the havoc around St. Paul’s, the Abbey, Trafalgar Square. Buildings collapsed around him, his CBS office was destroyed three times, yet his measured, authoritative tones continued to bring the war ever closer to American homes. His effectiveness owed much to understatement. There were never any heroics in his newscasts. At the end he would simply sign off with the current London phrase: “So long—and good luck.”
Though few realized it—particularly during his later duel with Joe McCarthy—Murrow was essentially a conservative. He believed in patriotism, personal honor, and the values of western civilization. At Washington State College, where he worked his way through in the traditional manner of ambitious poor boys, he was the cadet colonel of the ROTC unit. He had chosen Washington State because it offered the country’s first collegiate course in radio broadcasting; in his steady, level-headed way he already knew what he wanted to be. He liked to describe himself as an accurate, objective old-time newsman (“I try to be a reporter; a commentator is a kind of oracle, and I am never so sure I’m right”), but in practice he was closer to an old-time missionary. In a revealing letter to his parents from London he wrote: “I remember you once wanted me to be a preacher, but I had no faith, except in myself. But now I am preaching from a powerful pulpit. Often I am wrong but I am trying to talk as I would have talked were I a preacher. One need not wear a reversed collar to be honest.”
He had joined CBS in 1935 after five years with student and educational organizations, and in 1937, at the age of twenty-nine, he sailed for England to take over the CBS European bureau. It wasn’t much of a job then. Most of his work was boring: scheduling speeches, concerts, cultural broadcasts. He was traveling to Poland in 1938 to set up a CBS School of the Air program when Hitler entered Austria. Chartering a plane, he reached Vienna in time to describe the arrival of the Nazi troops. Then he hired William L. Shirer, built a staff, and went on to cover Munich, the fall of Czechoslovakia, the London blitz, and the major European battles of World War II.
In 1945 CBS made him a vice president, but he
quit after two years; he didn’t understand budgets and couldn’t bring himself to fire anybody. He returned to the air with a nightly 7:45 newscast which opened with the letters N-E-W-S in Morse code. London having made him, he retained the well-remembered phrases of those years in altered form, beginning each broadcast with “This—is the news,” and signing off, “Goodnight—and good luck.” In 1948 he and Fred W. Friendly produced their first I Can Hear It Now album, preserving voices which had made history in their time, and soon Murrow’s annual year-end news roundups with CBS correspondents became as much a part of the Christmas holidays as Lionel Barrymore playing Scrooge.
He was reluctant to leave radio for television, but the switch was inevitable; he had become the country’s most celebrated newscaster, and as Cue noted, he was “handsome enough to play a movie war correspondent.” Millions who had never seen him had read of his “Doomsday look,” or read Ernie Pyle’s description of Murrow at his mike during the war: gesticulating, nodding, perspiring, glancing at the clock—and fumbling, always, for another cigarette. Beginning in 1951, with the debut of See It Now on CBS-TV, Americans could see Murrow at work on their living room screens. Because he was now at the height of his powers and insisted on complete independence from the network, they also saw some of the greatest broadcasts in the history of mass communications.
On December 28, 1952, Murrow took his cameras into the Korean front line to show the country what Christmas was like in foxholes. Nothing was too difficult, or too controversial, for See It Now and a companion program, CBS Reports. He interviewed Truman on MacArthur, MacArthur on Truman, and Khrushchev in the Kremlin. He investigated the cases of Harry Dexter White, Annie Lee Moss, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Irving Peress, and Lieutenant Milo Radulovich. See It Now was the first television program to discuss the relationship between cigarettes and lung cancer—a subject which Murrow, more than any other commentator, would have preferred not to think about. Most memorably, on the evening of March 9, 1954, See It Now tackled Senator McCarthy when he was his most powerful and exposed him as a fraud.
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