Whittaker Chambers was the HUAC informant whose name Alger had recognized from an FBI file. His testimony was that Alger had been the leader of a Communist cell inside the State Department; he said that he and Alger had been close friends, that he’d tried to get Alger to quit the Party and that Alger had wept at the thought.
He didn’t know much about Alger’s present job, got the Endowment’s title wrong, didn’t know what city it was in. A Committee staff member checked Alger’s dossier: New York. Which is odd. Official lists of Reds ran to hundreds of thousands, and they have Alger’s dossier right on hand? How did they know Chambers was going to name him? Come to think of it, how did a newspaper know the day before?
Rankin – the Congressman who exempted the Ku Klux Klan from investigation – grumbled that Alger had got the position only because state law prohibited asking him whether he was a Communist or not. “Of course, he can get into an institution of that kind in New York, but he couldn’t do it in Mississippi.”
Karl Earl Mundt, Congressman from South Dakota, threw in his bit: “Certainly there is no hope for world peace under the leadership of men like Alger Hiss.”
HUAC added some thirty names to their list during that hearing, quite a net to spread in a few hours. Only three were foolish enough to reply. The first two were a Mr. and Mrs Gold of Pittsburgh. The Committee read their telegram into the record: a Miss Bentley’s charges against them were “shocking and utterly untrue. The woman is entirely unknown to us, and in all fairness we urgently request the earliest opportunity to testify publicly and under oath to the utter falsity of her charges.”
The Committee decided to let the Golds – relative nobodies – defend themselves “as soon as we can arrange the hearing”.
Then came Alger’s cable:
“My attention has been called by representatives of the press to statements made about me before your committee this morning by one Whittaker Chambers. I do not know Mr. Chambers and insofar as I am aware have never laid eyes on him.” Alger did not say, as the Golds did of Miss Bentley, that Chambers was “utterly unknown to him”, a detail that will become absurdly important all too soon. But like the Golds, he said, “There is no basis for the statements made about me to your committee,” and he’d “appreciate the opportunity” to deny them “formally and under oath”.
The Chairman’s comment: “The Committee will hear Alger Hiss in public testimony tomorrow.”
This committee knows a PR opportunity when it sees one.