That executive session of Alger’s was a triumph. It’s the kind of thing most people achieve only in daydreams. Especially when their lives lie in ruins around them. Even Alger admitted to a win: “I again had the sense of having accomplished something.”
On the train back to New York, he read about Harry Dexter White’s HUAC appearance on Friday. White was an economist, a formidable figure, one of those guys with his face on Time magazine’s cover: architect of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as a long-term friend of Alger’s. Chambers had been pointing fingers at him too. His appearance – like Alger’s first – was a “public grilling” in the huge Caucus Room with klieg lights and flashbulbs. Like Alger again, he had a good part of the audience with him. That irritated Chairman Thomas. “You are the guests of the Committee,” he scolded. “The Chair would appreciate it if you would not applaud.”
White mentioned playing ping-pong, and Thomas interrupted. “Just a minute, right there. One thing I cannot reconcile, Mr. White, you send me a note and you say that: ‘I am recovering from a severe heart attack. I would appreciate it if the Chairman would give me five or ten minutes rest after each hour’. For a person who had a severe heart condition, you can certainly play a lot of sports.”
White said he that hadn’t intended the note – or his illness – to be made public, that he had indeed played many sports before his heart attack, and this was only ping-pong. The audience burst into applause again.
“I would say you had an athlete’s heart,” Thomas grumbled.
Tuesday morning’s newspapers announced that White was dead: a second heart attack only hours after that grumble. The Committee was proud of its record in such things. The head of the South American desk of the State Department fell out of a window and died only days after HUAC had publicly damned him as a Red; Mundt bragged at a midnight press conference that proving Reds in government was easy, just count them “as they jump out of the windows.”
News of White’s death got buried beneath HUAC banner headlines in Tuesday morning’s papers.
HISS ADMITS ACQUAINTANCE WITH CHAMBERS
LIE DETECTOR TEST FOR ALGER HISS
The United Press story ran:
The Committee had been unable to reach a decision on who was telling the truth: Hiss or his accuser, Whittaker Chambers.
And the Hearst papers:
Alger Hiss, who first denied knowing Chambers and now admits that he lived with him briefly, refused today to submit to a lie detector test.
So much for oaths of secrecy – to say nothing of accuracy.
About mid-morning, Alger got a call from Donald Appell of the Committee staff; Rep. McDowell of the Committee itself was to be in New York late that afternoon and hoped to be able to see him for ten or fifteen minutes. Alger asked why. Appell didn’t know. Alger said he’d be in his midtown office at the Carnegie Endowment all afternoon; they could meet there.
McDowell didn’t telephone until the Carnegie offices were closing for the day; he invited Alger to the Commodore Hotel instead.
Then he added that Nixon and “one other” were with him.
The Commodore was built in the 1920s as part of Terminal City, which certainly sounds like an evil portent but comes about only because it was part of the complex built around Grand Central Terminal. A Donald Trump facelift in the 1970s turned the hotel into just any building, but postcards from the 1940s award it “the most beautiful lobby in the world”. Also the biggest. It once housed an entire circus – had a real waterfall in it too.
Instead of a drink with McDowell in that splendour, Alger was directed to Suite 1400. He knocked on the door. The suite was full of activity, men rearranging furniture into “an improvised hearing room”.
So here’s Nixon’s Eureka moment of yesterday. Here’s what has to have sprung into his head when that abrupt calm came over him and freed him to make a concession – to let Alger have a transcript of the hearing – even though he’d started out unshakeably against it. It’s an old-fashioned cowboy ambush, timed for rush hour when Alger wouldn’t be able to get hold of a clutch of lawyers or a group of supporters. Appell, who made the morning telephone call, sits right there; McDowell, who “invited” Alger to the Commodore for ten or fifteen minutes with “Nixon and one other”, is settling down behind the dining table as chairman of a panel with Nixon and eight others. What a gamble though. Alger was suspicious enough this time to bring a Carnegie colleague with him, George Dollard, one of the friends who’d urged him to have nothing to do with HUAC. Suppose the two of them just walked out and slammed the door behind them?
But Nixon is the poker player who won $1,200 from a superior officer with only two deuces; he knows his man. Alger’s arrogance is no barrier. Nixon has learned to handle it. It’s the trap itself; it’s perpetrated by the men Alger sees as no less than White’s murderers. These are the very same men who’d taken only days to destroy his own reputation and a life devoted to public service. And now they set a trap for him? Injustice burns. Outrage makes the smartest people blind, reckless, stupid. Nobody knows that better than Nixon, and he knows that anger makes Alger rash. Now he has fury. All he needs is a match to ignite it.
Hotels liked to call themselves “palatial” in those days: deep carpets, satin drapery, cornices and mouldings, panelling and mirrors, handsome prints on the walls. The Committee clusters in team formation at one end of the room with that dining table and a sofa. Nixon sends Alger and Dollard to the other end of the room, a make-shift dock facing the ten-inquisitor panel, their backs to the bedroom door.
McDowell opens. “The record will show that this is a subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities sitting now in the city of New York in the Hotel Commodore.” He names the people present. “Mr. Hiss, will you please take the oath?”
And Alger does. He lashes out at yesterday’s leaks, especially one that appeared in the Herald Tribune.
“In that connection, Mr. Hiss,” says Nixon – there’s no hint of yesterday’s dithering – “I might suggest that in order to satisfy your own mind as to how that information may have gotten into the press that you get in touch with Mr. Carl Levin, the correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, who wrote the story.” Levin worked under Bert Andrews, Nixon’s inside man on the paper.
But this is not why Nixon has gathered us here.
“Mr. Russell,” he says, “will you bring Mr. Chambers in?”
“Short, plump, perspiring and very pale”: that’s what Alger sees. No call for noblesse oblige here. It is Chambers who ranks in this hierarchy. Nixon directs him into Committee territory, surrounds him with the Praetorian guard of HUAC.
“Mr. Hiss,” Nixon says, “the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before.”
“May I ask him to speak?” There’s no eye contact; the guy just stares at the ceiling. Alger turns to Nixon, “Will you ask him to say something?”
“Mr. Chambers, will you tell us your name and your business.”
“My name is Whittaker Chambers.” The mouth is nearly shut; the sound comes out “tight”, “high-pitched”, “strangled”. Yesterday Alger told the Committee that Crosley spoke “with a low and rather dramatic roundness”. I wanted to hear it myself, found it on YouTube. Any actor would prize a voice like that – intensity, conviction, emotionally charged pauses and hesitations, range, resonance.
“Could you open your mouth wider?”
“My name is Whittaker Chambers.”
“I said, would you open your mouth?” Not easy to see devastated teeth in a shut mouth. “You know what I am referring to, Mr. Nixon.” He turns back to Chambers: “Will you go on talking?”
“I am senior editor of Time magazine.” Voice as weird as before.
“Are you George Crosley?”
“Not to my knowledge. You are Alger Hiss, I believe.”
“I certainly am.”
“That was my recollection.”
A bafflement. Alger, the “name” person, doesn’t know how to make a pattern from what he sees and what he’s hearing. Months later, Chambers admitted that he might have been George Crosley back then. A year and a half more, and he confirmed it.
“Some repartee is going on between these two people,” Nixon says. “I think Mr. Chambers should be sworn.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” says Alger, Harvard sarcasm in full flow.
“Mr. Hiss,” says Nixon, “when I say something like that I want no interruptions from you.”
“Mr. Nixon, in view of what happened yesterday, I think there is no occasion for you to use that tone of voice in speaking to me.”
Chambers is sworn, and Alger tries to pick up where he’d left off. “I would like to ask of Mr. Chambers if I may—”
“I will ask the questions at this time,” interrupts Nixon.
“I feel very strongly that he is Crosley” – Alger addresses the Committee in general – “but he looks very different in girth and in other appearances – hair, forehead, and so on, especially the jowls. The voice sounds a little less resonant than the voice that I recall. The teeth look to me as though either they have been improved upon or that there has been considerable dental work done.”
Out comes the explanation that the work on Chambers had been really something. I can’t follow all of it, but it sounds as though a whole new mouth has replaced the blackened stumps and sockets. Also, he’s a blimp. He’d put on something like forty pounds. He’d been skinny, bony. Wore a moustache. No moustache now. Receding hairline. A pulpy face that’s aged badly and sags despite the fat. Even so, Alger tells Stripling, “If this man had said he was George Crosley, I would have had no difficulty in identification. He denied it right here. I asked if I could ask some further questions in identification. I was denied—”
“I think you should be permitted—”
“—that right. I am not, therefore, able to take an oath that this man is George Crosley.”
Stripling and McDowell urge that Alger be allowed to ask questions.
“Do I have Mr. Nixon’s permission?” When Nixon accedes, Alger says to Chambers, “Did you ever go under the name of George Crosley?”
“Not to my knowledge.” Exactly what he said before.
“Did you ever sublet an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street from me?”
“No, I did not.”
“You did not?”
“No.”
Alger rephrases the question. “Did you ever spend any time with your wife and child in an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street in Washington when I was not there because I and my family were living on P Street?”
“I most certainly did.”
“Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?”
“Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.”
There it is, prettily rephrased from Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee: “I was a child and she was a child in a kingdom by the sea.” Not a poem anybody would expect to encounter here. “Would you be responsive and continue with your answer?”
“I do not think it is needed,” says Chambers.
The line from Poe even has Chambers’ trademark erotic undertone. The next line: “We loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee.” I assume that by now the voice has dropped its strangled, tight sound and moved back to the low and rather dramatic roundness, because Alger says, “That is the answer.”
Nixon had an epiphany in the previous hearing. Here’s the beginning of one for Alger. If Crosley, the Communist, thought Alger was one too, it explained why he’d never bothered to pay rent or repay small loans. If Chambers lived in the Hiss apartment, he was Crosley, denial or no denial. A Communist would change his name. An ex-Communist turned anti-Communist would attack people he thought had been Communists. Alger wrote later that he felt “a vast sense of relief” that at last he knew his tormenter.
The relief exploded into rage. “To come here and discover that the ass under the lion’s skin is Crosley—” he breaks off. “I don’t know why your committee didn’t pursue this careful method of interrogation at an earlier date before all the publicity.”
“Well, now, Mr. Hiss,” says McDowell, “you positively identify—”
“If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off, I would be sure.”
McDowell turns to Chambers. “Mr. Chambers, is this the man, Alger Hiss, who was also a member of the Communist Party at whose home you stayed? You make the identification positive?”
“Positive identification.”
Alger gets up. It says so in the transcript. He was tall, athletic, in good condition. He takes a step towards Chambers. “I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this Committee without their being privileged for suit for libel. I challenge you to do it, and I hope you will do it damned quickly.”
The threat is real. Staff member Russell jumps up, grabbing at Alger’s arm. In Nixon’s description, Alger “recoiled as if he had been pricked with a hot needle”.
“I am not going to touch him,” Alger says. “You are touching me.”
“Please sit down, Mr. Hiss,” Russell pleads.
“I will sit down when the chairman asks me.”
Russell tries again. “I want no disturbance.”
“I don’t—”
“Sit down, please,” McDowell interrupts.
“You know who started this,” Alger fires back.
McDowell calls a short recess, and after it, Chairman Thomas – soon to be an inmate at Danbury Correctional Institution – arrives to take over the hearing. Nixon delivers a summation of the testimony so far.
Mr. Hiss maintains that Mr. Chambers was the man known as George Crosley to him. He rented his home, took over a lease, an informal affair, nothing signed, if I recall.
Mr. Hiss insists that he paid no rent, he gave him a rug as part payment on the house, and Mr. Hiss included in this transaction the gift of a 6- or 7-year-old car, a cheap car, a Ford.
Within a very short time, Alger’s life will be buried in hundreds of household details – leases, rugs, cars are the least of it – all of them so tangled up in dates, cross-references and concocted stories of spies and Russians that to this very day, more than half a century later, the sheer confusion keeps people from getting close enough to see what’s actually there. It’s an old magic trick. Fool the senses. Distract the eye. And just as with magic tricks, what’s really going on is painfully simple: all Nixon has to work with is the year that Alger assumes is 1937 – yet to appear in full form – and Alger’s not knowing Chambers. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
The midden of inconsequential details, the half-remembered junk data that clutter every life – and mile upon mile of FBI files – is key to Nixon’s strategy. Over the next hour he dumps everything he can think of onto it. How long was the lease for the apartment? Weeks? Months? Did it include July? October? What kind of transfer document was there for the Ford? Did Alger eat meals with Chambers? Walk with him? Drink with him? Give him any furniture? Loan him any books? Give him any books?
How about those Party dues?
There they are again, the single, easily provable charge. The Committee hammers away at it, repeating it half a dozen times. Alger gets angrier with every repetition but fails to grasp its significance. Nixon seems to miss it too.
Meantime, Stripling has his own drum to beat. “You are fully aware,” he says to Alger, “that the public was led to believe that you had never seen, heard, or laid eyes upon an individual who is this individual, and now you do know him… You led the public and press to believe you didn’t know such a person.”
This is the very distortion that Nixon has been feeding the press day after day. “Will you show me where that is?” Alger says.
“Reading from your statement…” Stripling pauses, then begins again. “I’ve started in on it, but here is one sentence ‘So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so.’”
“That is correct,” says Alger. “I did not say that I have ‘never seen’ this man. I said, ‘So far as I know I have never seen Whittaker Chambers.’”
‘“Never laid eyes on him.’”
“I wouldn’t have been able to identify him for certain today without his own assistance.”
A little later Alger asks, “You are still looking for the statement you said was in there?” And a little later still, “Have you found the testimony, Mr. Stripling, you were referring to?”
“I have several references here, Mr. Hiss, but, as you stated, it is purely in my opinion based upon these.”
It’s a real tribute to Nixon’s genius that Stripling, his right hand man, can’t bring himself to believe he won’t find what he’s looking for, even though yesterday’s testimony demonstrated to him that it didn’t exist.
Thomas calls for another private powwow, sending Alger and Dollard off to the bedroom. When they return, he announces, “The Committee has decided to bring about a meeting of the full Committee in public session Wednesday, August 25, at 10:30 in the Caucus Room of the old House Office Building. I instruct the chief investigator to serve a subpoena on both Mr. Hiss and Mr. Chambers to appear on that date.”
So Alger is to lose his status as a “friendly” witness even though yesterday ended with all parties in full agreement to the meeting, and yesterday’s Associated Press story gave the venue as “probably in secret”.
Again it’s the expense that defies explanation. It wasn’t unusual then – and isn’t now – for people in New York to hire a suite for the day: brides for their weddings, Hollywood filming a New York scene, clubs for meetings and parties, especially if hookers are involved. But it was – and still is – very expensive. Who authorized it for ten members of a subcommittee? It’s not just a suite for a day either. Ten men going from Washington to New York – nobody says whether by train or plane – it’s meals for ten, rooms for ten. All these guys are staying here tonight. And how does the Junior Congressman swing the snazzy suite for himself? We know Nixon stayed there that night because the hearing ended with him telling Alger that Priscilla would have to testify tomorrow; Alger was to call Nixon at the suite as soon as he’d made arrangements.
Alger did try; the line was engaged hour after hour. He called Dulles instead and told him that he was now at war with the Committee. The next morning HUAC’s leaks flooded America.
The United Press Service reported Stripling. “Alger Hiss not only knew ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers but lived with him for a short while in the middle 1930s.”
The Associated Press got the big cheese himself. “‘The impression given to the public,’ Representative Nixon said, ‘was that he (Hiss) had never known this man at all. This identification today is a direct contrast with that impression.’”