Part 16

After a Miss Eunice A. Lincoln, Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre’s private secretary, had identified four of the Baltimore memos as being in the defendant’s handwriting, Murphy called Ramos S. Feehan, an FBI typewriter expert. It was the latter’s opinion that all but one of the Baltimore documents had been typed on the same machine as letters written by the Hisses during the thirties. Stryker was not prepared to dispute Feehan’s conclusions and conceded their accuracy.

With the documents out of the way, Murphy turned to the task of connecting Chambers with their theft from the State Department. For this purpose, he summoned Henry Julian Wadleigh, an Oxford alumnus, who freely admitted that he had begun “to take out documents and give them to unauthorized people as soon as I joined the State Department.” Although he had not given any of the papers in evidence to Whittaker Chambers, he had turned others over to him. However, he insisted that he had limited his thievery to papers which passed over his desk in the Trade Agreements Section. He, too, had been given a rug by Chambers in 1937.

It took Murphy three weeks to put in his case. Stryker’s defense was confined to showing 1.) that Hiss was a man of sterling character, and 2.) that Chambers was as chronic a liar as had ever lived. To prove the first proposition, he paraded to the stand as impressive a group of character witnesses as ever graced an American court. There was John W. Davis, the unsuccessful 1924 Democratic Presidential candidate, Charles Fahy, a former Solicitor General, Admiral Richard Hepburn, and Supreme Court Justices Felix Franfurter and Stanley Reed. They all agreed that Alger Hiss’s reputation “for integrity, loyalty and veracity” was excellent.

These imposing luminaries were followed by Mrs. Claudie Catlett, a rather stout Negress, who had worked as a maid for the Hisses during their early days in Washington. She remembered that Chambers had come to the P Street house once and that he had given his name as “Crosby, like in Bing.” When her employers had moved to either Thirtieth Street or Volta Place, they had given her children an old typewriter. But Murphy forced her to admit that “I don’t remember nothing about the typewriter.” In fact, it hadn’t been until 1949 that one of her sons told her that they had received a typewriter from the Hisses.

The Catlett boys, Raymond and Perry, succeeded their mother. Raymond had helped Ed McLean trace the machine--an ancient Woodstock--to one Ira Lockey’s house where the lawyer had purchased it on April 16, 1949, for $15.00. Raymond had kept the typewriter for a year or two after the Hisses gave it to him and then he had let his brother’s wife take it. She had transferred it to his sister and he lost track of it after that until it had been found in Lockey’s house. But he was unable to tell Murphy in what month or year he had received the machine. “I haven’t got no papers, no secretary to copy all that stuff down,” he explained.

Perry Catlett recalled that the Woodstock had been broken when he first saw it. He had taken it to a repair shop on K Street but some man there had told him that it wasn’t worth fixing. He was certain that the typewriter had been given to his family when the Hisses moved to Volta Street on December 29, 1936. But when Murphy asked him, “What if I tell you that the shop on K Street wasn’t opened for business until September, 1938?,” Perry shook his head and replied, “I don’t know the time.”

When Hiss, neatly dressed in a tan summer suit, finally took the stand, he denied almost everything that Chambers had said on his direct examination. He said that he had known a man named Crosley between 1934 and 1936 but that he had never, until the summer of 1948, ever associated him with Whittaker Chambers. When Stryker asked him if he had ever been a member of the Communist party “or a fellow traveler or a sympathizer,” he quietly answered, “I am not and never have been.” He had never given any “restricted, secret or confidential documents of the State Department of any kind” to Chambers “or any other unauthorized person.” Stryker, after taking his client from his birth in Baltimore to the high point of his government career as General Secretary to the San Francisco Conference, wound up with a crescendo.

Q. Mr. Hiss, you have entered your formal and solemn plea of not guilty to the charges here against you, have you not?

A. I have.

Q. And in truth and in fact you are not guilty?

A. I am not guilty.

With a perfunctory “your witness,” Stryker returned to the counsel table.

Never once during his cross-examination did the prosecutor refer to the defendant as anything but “Mr. Witness.” He took Hiss through the entire period of his acquaintance with Crosley-Chambers, pointing up, in the process, what he obviously regarded as a bold-faced fabrication--the gift of the Twenty-eighth Street apartment and the Ford. As for the Woodstock typewriter, didn’t Hiss tell the FBI agents, who had questioned him on December 4, 1948, that he thought that his wife had given it away “subsequent to 1938?” He might have said that but “my knowledge today is that we gave the typewriter to the Catletts at the time when we moved from 30th Street to Volta Place in December, 1937.” Finally, after eight long hours, at the end of which he was trying to make some hay out of the fact that the witness had not insisted on a lie detector test, Murphy was through.

Priscilla Hiss, a thin, graying woman, followed her husband. She, too, denied any intimacy with the Chamberses as well as any typing of State Department documents. She identified the Woodstock, which sat on the defense table, as the machine her father had given her in the twenties, but insisted that she had never used it after buying a portable in the fall of 1937. Although she had told the Federal Grand Jury that she had given the Woodstock to either a junk dealer or the Salvation Army, the Catletts’ testimony had reminded her that she had turned it over to them just before the move to Volta Place.

Murphy scored early. After the witness denied that she had been a Socialist in 1932, he produced photostats of her registration showing that he had indeed enrolled as such that year. When he asked her whether she knew “that the records of the Socialist Party Morningside Branch list you as a member,” she replied, with some heat, that she did not. Lastly, remembering that Mrs. Chambers had sworn that Prossy, as she called her, had enrolled at Baltimore’s Mercy Hospital “to learn nursing,” he asked Mrs. Hiss whether this was true. It was not. Then how did she explain a letter which she had written on May 25th to the University of Maryland, applying for admission to a course in inorganic chemistry as a prerequisite for “Mercy Hospital’s training course in medical technology?” All the witness could say was that “medical technology” was different than “nursing.”

Stryker’s last witness was a mysterious man who had been sitting just behind the courtroom’s rail making copious notes as Chambers was testifying. At Murphy’s request, he had been identified on the trial’s third day as Dr. Carl Binger, a psychiatrist. After posing a hypothetical question which included every dereliction in Chambers’ past life, the defense attorney asked Binger, “now, assuming the facts as stated in the question to be true and taking into account your knowledge of his writings and translations, have you as a psychiatrist an opinion within the bounds of reasonable certainty as to the mental condition of Whittaker Chambers?” Before Binger could answer, Murphy stormed up to the bench to remind Kaufman that Chambers’ credibility was the central issue of the case and that the psychiatrist’s answer would be a usurpation of the jury’s function. The judge agreed and the good doctor walked out of the courtroom with the answer to Stryker’s question locked behind his beetled brow.

The defense promptly rested and Murphy called Burnetta Catlett, Claudie Catlett’s daughter, as his first rebuttal witness. Burnetta had begun working for a Doctor Easter when she was still in high school and had taken the Woodstock with her to type her homework.

When her employer died, she had left the machine at his house. A Vernon Marlow had found it among the doctor’s effects and finally passed it on to Ira Lockey in return for a hauling job the latter had done for him. Lockey had turned it over to his daughter who had used it to practice typing until she moved to New York in October of 1948. Finally, Ed McLean, Stryker’s cocounsel, had bought it from Lockey for fifteen dollars barely two months before the trial.

Since Perry Catlett had testified that he had taken the Woodstock to a repair shop on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street, Murphy produced one Henri P. Henry, a real estate operator who managed the building. Henry was sure that there had been no typewriter repair stores on Connecticut Avenue at the time, although he did remember that the Woodstock Typewriter Company had rented a second-floor office on September 15, 1938 for two years. When the defense intimated that the company may also have had an office on K Street, a block or so away, just before it moved into Henry’s building, Murphy produced another real estate man who swore that it had done nothing more than sign a lease for the K Street quarters which had been cancelled on June 18, 1938.

John Foster Dulles was easily the Government’s most impressive witness. He said that he had sounded out Hiss at the end of 1945, when both men were en route to England for the first meeting of the United Nations, as to whether he contemplated leaving public life. Although it was Hiss’s recollection that Dulles had, during this voyage, “asked me whether I would be interested in becoming President of the Carnegie Endowment,” the latter denied that he had done so. “I don’t think,” he testified, “I discussed at that time with him the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment, because I was only one of twenty or more trustees, and the trustees did not until their main meeting take up definitely the matter of seeking a president.”

In December of 1946, after Hiss’ election as President of the Carnegie Endowment had been announced, Alfred Kohlberg, the late publisher of _Plain Talk_, wrote to Mr. Dulles that he had reason to believe that Hiss had been a Communist. Although Hiss had testified that Dulles had contacted him at once and asked him for help in preparing an answer to Kohlberg, the witness insisted that “I did not discuss with Mr. Hiss about the letter ... until some days later on.” As far as the letter’s writer was concerned, “I never wrote a letter to Mr. Kohlberg.”

Nothing daunted, Kohlberg wrote two more letters to Dulles who then asked Hiss to come to his office for a conference. At that meeting, Hiss had testified, Dulles had told him that Kohlberg was the author of the letters he had received. In his testimony, Dulles didn’t say whether he had mentioned Kohlberg’s name or not. As he remembered the conversation, Hiss had informed him that he had just testified before the Federal Grand Jury and that “he had been asked ... of an acquaintanceship with a number of people.”

On the evening of August 3, 1948, the day on which Chambers first testified before the House Committee, Hiss (if he was to be believed) had telephoned Dulles, who was then Chairman of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment. In view of Chambers’ testimony, he had offered to resign if Mr. Dulles thought that his fellow trustees would be unduly disturbed by the allegations that the _Time_ editor was making. Although Dulles could not remember any such conversation, he did recall that he had had a discussion with Hiss late in August. “Mr. Hiss said ... that he had come to the conclusion that he had probably better resign, but that it would be questionable whether he ought to resign while the hearings were going on, because that might seem to be some admission on his part--and I quite agreed with him that any action like his resignation ought not to take place while the hearings were going on.” Hiss did indeed tender his resignation on December 12, 1948, but it was not accepted and he had remained as President until his term expired on May 31, 1949.

After Murphy tried--unsuccessfully--to put Hede Massing, the former wife of Communist Gerhard Eisler, on the stand, the trial ground to a halt in a welter of minor rebuttal witnesses on both sides of the fence, none of whom contributed a great deal to anyone’s store of essential information. An FBI agent who had interviewed Hiss in 1946, the assistant registrar of the University of Maryland, a counselor at a camp attended by Hiss’ stepson, and the proprietor of a small summer hotel in Chestertown, Maryland, who, because of illness, testified by deposition, did little more than add a few hours to a trial that was already into its sixth sweltering week.

Stryker’s summations lasted more than four hours. As far as he was concerned, it was simply a question of Chambers’ credibility. Murphy, he reminded the jury, had summed it up best himself in his opening when he had said that “... if you don’t believe Chambers then we have no case under the federal perjury rule.” And who could believe a chronic perjurer, a fornicator, a confessed spy, an atheist, a pornographic poet and a blasphemer? “The case comes down to this,” he told his twelve auditors, “who is telling the truth? Alger Hiss or Chambers?” There was no doubt as to how he had answered this question for himself. “I would not believe Chambers on a stack of Bibles if the FBI stacked them as high as this building!”

Toward the end, Stryker’s face was as red as the hand with which he relentlessly pounded the rail of the jury box. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begged them, “if I have done anything that you don’t like, if I have offended you, any one of you, in any way, hold it against me, not against Alger Hiss.” Exhausted and shaken, he turned slowly and looked toward the counsel table where his impassive client sat. “Alger Hiss, this long nightmare is drawing to a close. Rest well. Your case, your life, your liberty are in good hands. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”

Murphy, retreating somewhat from his ill-chosen definition of the federal perjury rule, confessed that he wasn’t resting his case on Chambers alone. There were the documents and the Woodstock. If Hiss’ contradictions about the apartment and the car he had turned over to Chambers weren’t convincing enough, how could the handwritten documents be explained away? Even the defense’s location of the missing typewriter was suspect--if the FBI couldn’t find it, why was it so ridiculously easy for Ed McLean to trace it to Ira Lockey’s house? “I submit that two things must be clear; one, that the typewriter was in the possession of the Hiss family until at least Mr. Chambers’ defection, until he left the Party; and two, that the Catletts had the typewriter for some time after that....”

“We have shown you here,” he thundered at the jury, “the typewriter, the original State Department documents, the documents in this case--three solid witnesses.” The dozen or so character witnesses the defendant had put on the stand couldn’t change that. “Mr. Stryker said that he was going to call the shade of Oliver Wendell Holmes and have the ghost of that revered Justice testify on behalf of the defendant. And I said to myself, if he is going to call the shade of Justice Holmes, there are a couple of shades that I would like to call here. One man’s name was Judas Iscariot and the other’s Major General Benedict Arnold.” He paused a moment to let that sink in. “But let me dwell a moment on reputation. I dare say that Judas Iscariot had a fairly good reputation. He was one of the Twelve. He was next to God, and we know what he did. Benedict Arnold came from a fine family. He was made a major general and sold out West Point. He wasn’t caught. But, if he had been caught, don’t you think he could have had George Washington as a reputation witness?”

He was almost through. “You are the second jury to hear this story,” he told them. “The Grand Jury heard the same story. The Grand Jury heard this traitor and Mr. Chambers, and that Grand Jury indicted Hiss. It indicted Hiss because he lied. He lied to them and I submit he lied to you. The Grand Jury said he lied twice on December 15th. And as a representative of 150,000,000 people of this country, I ask you to concur in that charge of the Grand Jury. I ask you as a representative of the United States Government to come back and put the lie in that man’s face.”

The jury retired at 4:20 on the afternoon of July 7th. Six hours later, after their foreman had informed Kaufman that there was no possibility of reaching a verdict that night, the jurors were sent to a hotel. At noon the next day, they filed back into the jury box to listen to Kaufman’s repetition of the portion of his charge dealing with corroborative and circumstantial evidence. Three hours later, the foreman asked a bailiff to deliver a note to the judge informing him that “the jury feels that it cannot arrive at a verdict.” At 4:45, he forwarded a similar communication. Kaufman begged them to try once more, but at 8:55 they announced that “the jury finds it impossible to reach a verdict.” This was enough for Kaufman who discharged them “with the thanks of the court.” The trial was over.

Four months later, the United States of America _versus_ Alger Hiss encored, this time with District Judge Henry W. Goddard at the helm. Tom Murphy was still around but Stryker had yielded to Claude B. Cross, a quiet, unassuming Boston elder who looked as if he had never pounded a counsel table in his life. A jury of seven women and five men was quickly selected and, on the afternoon of November 19, 1949, the Government began its second go-round in its attempt to convict Alger Hiss of perjury.

With only minor discrepancies, most of the witnesses who had testified at the first trial repeated their stories. But there were parvenus. Goddard was determined to admit any evidence that was vaguely relevant and several of the witnesses who had been rejected by Kaufman were permitted to tell their once-verboten stories. Hede Massing, for instance, said that she had met the defendant in 1935 at the Washington home of Noel Fields, an erstwhile League of Nations official. Mrs. Massing, an ex-Communist, who admitted that “I have a bad memory,” stated that she and Hiss had had a conversation as to which one of them was going to win Fields for his cell.

Henrikas Rabinavicius, a former Lithuanian diplomat, later testified for the defense against Mrs. Massing. According to him, he had met her at the home of Eugene Lyons in the Fall of 1949. There, she told him that, during the early thirties, she had been assigned by the Party “to endeavor to contact young men in the Department of State.” She had carefully concealed her Communist affiliation from her “young men,” she had told him, “because that would have frightened them away from her.” When Rabinavicius had intimated that he doubted the truth of her remarks, she threatened to write a devastating article about him.

William Rosen, the elusive vice-president of the Cherner Motor Company, to which the old Hiss Ford had been transferred, had been located by Murphy in California after the first trial. He proved to be a far from loquacious witness. Outside of admitting that he did not know either J. Peters or Alger Hiss, he refused to answer every question Murphy threw at him on the ground that “any answer I may give may tend to incriminate me.” When Rosen stepped down, Goddard warned the jury it was not to draw any inference unfavorable to Hiss because the witness had claimed his constitutional immunity.

Sergeant George Norman Roulhac had been stationed in the Aleutians during the first trial. Murphy now called him to prove that the Woodstock had not been in the Catletts’ possession until after the date of the most of the typewritten documents and not on December 29, 1937, as Priscilla Hiss had claimed. Roulhac had signed the lease for Mrs. Catlett when she had moved to P Street on January 17, 1938, because the rental agent would not deal with a colored lady. He was sure that he had not seen any typewriter at P Street until “about three months after we lived there.” The machine he had seen in a downstairs hallway was “the same design” as the Woodstock he had been shown in court.

Cross called Dr. Binger back to the wars. The answer to the famous hypothetical question that Kaufman had blocked in July was about to be delivered with Goddard’s blessing. Binger waited patiently until the question was in the record, and then, with his eyes on the ceiling, opined that “Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as a psychopathic personality, a disorder of character the distinguishing features of which are amoral and social behaviour.” One of the most significant symptoms of this malady were “chronic, persistent, and repetitive lying and a tendency to make false accusations.” However, he admitted to Murphy that doctors frequently disagreed on diagnosis and that he had been wrong more than once in his own professional life.

On the trial’s last day, Murphy produced his one surprise witness--Edith Murray who had worked as a maid for the Chamberses at their two homes in Baltimore from the Fall of 1934 to the Spring of 1936. She swore that she had seen Mrs. Hiss there four times and the defendant once. However, when she had first been shown a photograph of Mrs. Hiss by FBI agents, she was not quite sure of her identity. “They asked me did I know this lady, and I said it looks like someone that I know. It looked like--I thought maybe it was an actress or something. I say it looks like someone I know, but I just couldn’t remember at that time.”

On November 17th, the first day of the trial, she had been stationed in the corridor outside of the courtroom. She was told by the FBI agents who had brought her to New York that “all they wanted to do was bring me up here to see if I could recognize the woman that was in the picture and the man on the picture.... I just stood out in the hall and it was a crowd of people. They asked me did I see anybody in the crowd that I know, and I looked around, and I didn’t see anyone at this time, and stood there; so then, after a while, in the back of me where I was standing was an elevator, in the back of me, like, and I looked around, and then I see Mr. and Mrs. Hiss come over, and right away I knew them.”

The jury filed out at 2:50 p.m. on January 20th. On the afternoon of the next day, it found the defendant “guilty on the first count and guilty on the second.” Four days later, Goddard sentenced him to five years on each count, the terms to run concurrently. A few minutes earlier, Hiss had thanked his Honor for allowing him to say a few words. He denied again that he was guilty of the charges against him and promised that “in the future the full facts of how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.”

Goddard set $10,000 bail and paroled Hiss in Cross’ custody. In December, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the conviction. When the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene, the last door was closed. On March 22, 1951, Alger Hiss entered the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut. What Whittaker Chambers once called “the spectacle of tragedy” had run its course.

8

_They Gave the Bomb to Russia_

The United States of America

_versus_

Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell