November 4, the very day after Truman’s surprise win, was the first day of Chambers’ pre-trial deposition in Alger’s libel suit.
The legal system would fall apart without some way of settling in advance. There aren’t enough judges, juries and courthouses to go around; ninety per cent of criminal cases end in settlement before trial. The money saved is staggering. Full-blown criminal trials are hugely expensive for the government; for a private citizen caught up in a civil case like this one, they’re a quick route to bankruptcy. Just as important, full-blown trials are as much lotteries as hearings are. Judges, juries, witnesses are unknowns. Anything can happen.
Anything can happen at a deposition too.
This one took place in the library of the Marbury firm in the Maryland Trust Building, where Alger’s lawyers practiced. Chambers arrived, his head filled with thoughts that “William Marbury might be a Communist”, his lawyers, Cleveland and McMillan at his side. Here’s the setting as he describes it:
The library was a large room, with windows at the far end and part way down the two long sides. In the middle was a conference table. I took my place at one end of this table. At my right was McMillan, and, next to him, Cleveland. Facing me at the opposite end of the table sat William Marbury.
Chambers wrote that he “felt incredibly alone”. He says he sensed “gleeful malevolence” and “blistering condescension” in Alger’s lawyers, one with eyes “bugged” in a “stare of pure hatred”, another speaking in “a tone of carefully modulated evil”. He says the ordeal reminded him of school bullies who’d peed on a lollypop before they handed it to another boy, “only, now, that lollypop was being offered to me”.
All this terror and loneliness fit no better here than they did in September with Nixon and the FBI comforting him while he waited for Alger’s suit. The lawyers that flanked him came from a firm called Semmes, Bowen & Semmes, a huge, diverse enterprise – one of the most influential in Maryland – with arms in every branch of the law and branches in several cities, including Washington DC. The firm is huge and powerful to this day; its alumni include presidents of the Maryland Bar Association and of various US agencies. Richard Cleveland, sitting on Chambers’ left was the son of Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President of the United States. And that’s not all. Chambers doesn’t mention Harold Medina, a third on his team. Medina was a son of one of the most eminent judges in the country; he’d been specially picked for the job by Henry Luce, magazine king of his day, publisher of Time, where Chambers was a senior editor.
As for Alger, well, it’s pretty clear he assumes he’s won already. Which is to say we’re back with his Harvard arrogance. He doesn’t even show up. His lawyers? Friends. He’d waited for his childhood friend, William Marbury, to come back from Europe. Old boys together: unbeatable. Marbury was a corporate lawyer, pure and simple – tax and antitrust stuff – no experience in libel, espionage, crime courts. He opens the proceedings.
“Mr. Chambers, will you state your full name please?”
“Jay David Whittaker Chambers.”
“Jay” doesn’t appear as part of his name in his HUAC hearings until the day-long, televised extravaganza, although he was born with it. Not with “David” though. Or with “Whittaker”. The idea is to grill him about his background, find out just how reliable a witness he is, but Marbury’s inexperience shows up at once. He hands Chambers a piece of paper and asks him if he said what’s on it.
One of Chambers’ lawyers interposes, “Don’t you want to identify that in some way?” Shouldn’t lawyers do that kind of thing automatically? Never mind. This is Chambers’ show, and it has the surreal excitement of his fear and loneliness in this room where he’s so well protected.
He begins his tale. We watch an underground agent called Arthur take him to Grant’s Tomb on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to meet a Russian called Herbert, who leads him to another Russian, this one called Ulrich – nobody has a last name – who is the personal embodiment of “the international apparatus” and tells Chambers, “You can be shot by them or you can be shot by us.” Ulrich gets into a power struggle with yet another Russian called Herman – or is it Herbert in disguise? – who had “very soft brown eyes and hair clipped off that stuck right up and a deep bass voice”. Not wise to battle Ulrich. Herman is beaten to death by two thugs. Or murdered by the American Secret Police. Or recalled to Moscow, directly to Molotov, and murdered there. Then comes Oscar, then Henry, then Charley. In Chambers’ autobiography, there’s Don, Otto, Carl and Bob too. Henry lives in an apartment hung with Ethiopian appliqué and tapestry from Abyssinia. So Ethiopia and Abyssinia were one and the same. Who cares? The names are so wonderfully exotic. There are subversive dealings with a bishop – or is it a man called Bishop? – who lives in the turrets of a wooden castle on the Hudson River.
As a result of all this Chambers had “fortnightly” meetings with the acting secretary of the Communist Party, a man called Max Bedacht. Or is it “weekly” meetings? Bedacht said no such meetings happened, not ever, much less on a regular schedule. Chambers said he was out of the Party for a bit, then back in “in fifteen minutes” to edit the New Masses. The publisher said, “Impossible.” It not only didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened.
William A. Reuben was a widely-published investigative journalist who spent the last four decades of his life on the Hiss case. Nobody knew the case like he did. And the single most important observation he made as a result of his forty years of research was that “The first thing to note about Whittaker Chambers’ confessions” of Communist underground work is that “it has never been corroborated, either by documentary evidence or by the word of any other human being.” This is yet another truly crucial element of the tale that Nixon’s vast midden of detail has completely obscured.
This extraordinary sense of disorder continues even into Chambers’ record as a money-earner. He told Nixon and HUAC he’d quit Columbia University in 1924 to become a full-time, paid employee of the Communist Party. “I believe my nominal salary was something like $10 a week,” he tells Marbury; it seems “incredible”, but this is what he lived on until he left the Party. A little later he’s holding down a $15 a week job as well – for “about a year and a half” – as a clerk in the Newspaper Division of the New York Public Library. Except that in a few pages more, he pares that down to “perhaps six months”. And yet he worked in the library from 1923 right up into 1927: three and a half years at a beginning salary of $60 a month, rising to $90
Marbury asks why he left the job.
He spins his fantasy of cops forcing his locker open and finding not only “Communist hand-bills” but “evidence that there was a Communist cell working in the library”. He doesn’t say a word about the armfuls of books he’d stolen from the stacks, but the library’s records are clear. There was no Red material in the locker; he’d even defaced those books to hide their provenance, and he was fired because he was a thief.
Then there’s money from translations. Marbury has to press to get the information; Chambers admits to a fee of $250 for translating the children’s classic Bambi from the German. Translators really are badly done by, but the book had an introduction by the great John Galsworthy. Reviewed everywhere. Massive sales. He could get whatever work he wanted.
Marbury asks, “Did you publish any other translations during this period?”
“No,” Chambers says, “I don’t think that I did.”
What about the other fifteen? Later he does admit to a couple of them, but only a couple. He mentions his erotic poems. No money there. What about his wife’s income? She worked for the Soviet Trading Company Amtorg. No mention of it. What about the $10,000 from his father and his two grandmothers? A hell of lot of money back then, especially for a committed Communist. No mention of it.
He says of his wife, “We were married in 1930, which will give you one landmark to go by.” The landmark fades almost at once into 1931. He can’t seem to get straight when he graduated from high school either, when he went abroad, when he returned, how many years he was in the Party, where he and his wife lived and for how long. He says his mother was a housewife who never worked even though she’d spent twenty years as a highly paid investigator for the Welfare Department of the City of New York. He gets his own brother’s suicide wrong. His father’s death too, both date and cause. Then there are all those aliases, so many that even he starts getting lost in them. He isn’t embarrassed at contradictions or inaccuracies or confusions; he just shifts a little this way or that and goes on.
He’s been doing it for years. In his first confession to Adolf Berle in 1939, he’d named thirty-eight communists. Confessing to the FBI two years later, he left out twenty-six of those and added twenty-two new ones. Another three years and the list fattened up into fifty-eight names, well over half of them no part of either previous list. The same year he named a mere twenty-odd to Raymond Murphy, the Chief Security Officer of the State Department.
But this deposition is about libel and how well he knows only one of the people he fingered, his close friend, Alger Hiss, and yet he can’t quite remember how, where or when he first met Alger, except that it was with a man called Ware. But he’d sworn before HUAC that he never met Ware. He swore that Alger knew him by the name Carl; now he can’t recall which name Alger knew him by, although the name George Crosley “is not beyond possibility”. So many details start out concrete then turn to gossamer like this that nobody can keep track of them. One of his biographers documents seven full versions of his involvement with Alger and spies; in the course of them a quiet study group of four ordinary citizens blossoms into a Communist cell of seven hardened spies committed to espionage.
It’s a dazzling performance. But how is Nixon going to make anything out of it that will hold up in a court?
It’s a point for Alger’s lawyers too. Perjury calls for only one witness but it needs documentation. On the first day of the deposition, Marbury asks that Chambers turn over any documentation he has from Alger. Chambers says, “I never obtained documents from him.” On the second day, he implies he has some papers. He talks about Alger showing him “not particularly interesting” State Department documents from around the time of the German invasion of Austria, including “Mr. Messerschmidt’s reports from Vienna.”
Now wait a minute here. Nazis charging into Austria lit the fuse for World War II. That’s what started the whole thing off, and everybody back then knew that Messerschmitt – forget the spelling – was manufacturer of the first jet engine, fighter planes faster and better than anything the Allies had been able to produce. And it’s “not particularly interesting”?
As the next day’s session starts, Marbury presses the subject.
“Have you any such papers with you Mr. Chambers?”
Chambers says, “No, I have not.”
But one of his lawyers interposes, “Mr. Chambers has advised us that he has not explored all the sources where some conceivable data might be.”
He’s given twelve days to produce something.
When the time is up, he doesn’t appear. He sends his wife instead. She doesn’t have any papers either.
Pictures of Esther Chambers are hard to come by. The one I found shows her as high-cheekboned and attractive. But Alistair Cooke, who watched her testify, described her as a “small severe figure”, “very dark, thin-lipped”, “a frail body and a small voice and a habit of licking her thin lips”. He said she fingered her handbag nervously.
It must have been difficult for her to appear like that when Alger’s lawyers expected Chambers himself, but it sounds as though she coped pretty well to start with. Unlike her husband, she seems to know the details of her own life, background, education, marriage, birth of children. But when it comes to life with him, the accuracy slips away. She can’t remember what kind of work he was doing when they met. Like him, she insists their income was a mere pittance from the Communist Party. But she lets it escape that she employed three maids – and bursts into tears when asked how she and Chambers could afford maids and then stretch the Communists’ pittance to a new car, an apartment, a house and a farm that Alger had taken a fancy to before them.
As for the details of her husband’s Communist activities and his relationship to Alger, her account is novel, not covered by any of her husband’s various scenarios, often contradicting all of them. When pressed, she says her memory is “vague” about such things. She says that after Chambers left the Party they went into hiding, saw nobody, never dared go out of the house. But a few minutes later she’s talking about how they took a trip to Florida and how he went to New York during this period to meet his publishers. When she sees the two stories couldn’t possibly marry, she bursts into tears again.
The real oddity of all this is that she’d been a strong character before she met him, a staunch and committed “revolutionist”, and yet as soon as she’d married him she became an automaton. She was later to testify at Alger’s trials that she agreed with everything her husband did, never asked him what he was doing, gladly accepted work assignments and his every word without question.
One of the lawyers prompted her, “If he told you that starting tomorrow we are going to Ypsilanti and your name was Hogan—”
“We would go to Ypsilanti,” she interrupted, “and we would be the Hogans.”
The poor woman shows up at the Marbury law office again the next morning, again alone. Alger’s lawyers finish with her before lunch. If this case seemed open-and-shut before, it’s doubly so now.
After lunch Chambers himself arrives with his team.
His lawyers announce, “Mr. Chambers desires to make a statement at this time.”
Chambers begins. “In response to your request to produce papers from Mr. Hiss, I made a search and I have certain papers in Mr. Hiss’s handwriting and certain other papers.”