Alger himself insisted that Chambers’ lawyers turn the dumbwaiter shaft papers over to the Justice Department. The Justice Department agreed with him – nothing secret, of no interest to the Soviets, no law broken by anybody, not even by Chambers. Assistant Secretary of State Sayre, in front of a grand jury, thoroughly debunked Nixon’s “absolute proof of treason”. And yet these are the pages that sat in front of the jury as the “immutable witnesses” to Alger’s treachery along with the typewriter that he’d looked so hard to find, then turned over too. We’re deep in the Queen of Hearts’ courtroom:
“I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it,” said Alice…“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
John Chabot Smith, a reporter for the Herald Tribune, calls Chambers’ papers an “odd assortment”. They certainly look that way. Twenty-two typewritten pages make up a nit-pickingly detailed – and unbelievably dull – report on economic conditions in Manchuria; it had passed from hand to hand in the US State Department for more than a month. There’s a thirteen-page aide memoire in German from October 1937, a sixteen-page comment on it from January 1938 – with excerpts, an undated, four-page memorandum on it, a twelve-page aide memoire on German relations with Brazil from June 1937. What Soviet spymaster could possibly be interested in any of this?
Much of the material had appeared in The New York Times, doubtless via press releases from the State Department’s Record Division, to which copies of low level information like it was delivered by shopping trolley. Some of it reports conversations with Russians that the Russians already had. The boring Manchuria report came from a series of articles that ran in the Japan Advertiser. Some of those “To the Secretary of State” cables – the ones that so excited Chambers – go into what Smith described as “vague reports about Japanese troop movements in China, lacking enough detail to give a clear picture”. Some are just ordinary letters, not marked “Private” or “Confidential”. Some are copies from abroad. Some never left Washington. Some pages are organized by place of origin: “Far East”, “Europe”, “England”, “Spain”, “Great Britain”, “France”. Some look like complete documents. Some are summaries. Some are both. Some summaries draw material from the same day, some from weeks or even months apart; some summaries are chronological, some not. Some are verbatim copies of the original, some accurately summarized, some not. Some are just garbled. Some of the originals had never gone to Alger’s office at all. Others have his initials on them.
His own initials? No spy is that stupid.
The original State Department copies of all the documents were easy to find, including the ones Alger had made handwritten notes on for his boss. Two look promising. One of the typewritten ones discusses Hitler’s takeover in Austria, the opening shot in World War II – probably the cable Chambers referred to in his deposition – and the Soviets would certainly have been interested.
But, but, but… the takeover part isn’t included in the papers Chambers turned over. One of the handwritten notes is similar; it leaves out the only information the USSR would have wanted: a stunning paragraph that says Japan was certain she could win a war against Russia.
Now the poor guy can’t figure out what’s spy-worthy and what isn’t.
I sent everything I had to Svetlana.
“What doesn’t let my brain stop,” she responded, “is that it’s so unlike the high-grade intelligence I used to see in the Soviet files of the period.” She checked intelligence reports from the 1930s in Stalin’s papers. “The contrast is striking – all reports from ‘agent sources’ in Berlin, Paris, Poland, and one in the USA – very analytical, many analytical surveys of what looks like diplomatic correspondence, confidential oral reports, etc.”
John Chabot Smith of the Herald Tribune writes that entering this strange hotchpotch into evidence was “tedious, frustrating, at times ludicrous and often exasperating”. It “stupefied” Alistair Cooke. At least the two of them were getting paid to sit and listen. Pity the poor trapped jury. A government witness explored in intricate detail the subtle distinctions between dispatches, reports, aides memoire, letters of transmittal. The prosecution presented three versions of every document, an “action copy”, a “code room copy”, an “information copy”. Murphy read every one of them out loud. Each exhibit had a number and each group of exhibits, another number. The prosecution referred to them sometimes by exhibit numbers, sometimes by date, sometimes by content, sometimes by origin. They displayed pages on a seven-foot-tall billboard but often showed only a summary without date or exhibit number. Nixon’s confabulation of fact and fiction is taking second place to an old, old trick sometimes known as an “evidence dump”. Legally-minded people use it to fiddle their income taxes: multiple-page, single-spaced, heavily cross-referenced letters accompanying their tax returns. A single glance should leave an inspector too cross-eyed to brave the return itself. That’s what the prosecution was doing, swamping the jury with a mountain of exhibits so dense, so boring, so complex that nobody could stay awake, much less burrow a way through it. Who can claim intent? Especially when there’s so much of it?
What needed hiding in the Hiss case was the simple innocence of the documents themselves. Just what Alice told the Queen of Hearts.
But where did the documents come from in the first place?
Nobody doubts that the four handwritten notes that Chambers handed over during his deposition originated with Alger. Chambers would have had no difficulty getting hold of them. His State Department job compiling an index ended early in 1938, but nobody would have stopped him coming and going for a couple of months after that; he had all the time he needed to rummage in Alger’s wastepaper baskets and office out-trays. But why do the rummaging himself? Bribe the guy who collects the trash. Or the cleaner. Or the file copy clerk. Maybe $30 at most. Isn’t that the way spies do it? Get low-level people for the dirty work? Not that this would have been Chambers’ only illegal foray into a government building. The man in the Baltimore telephone book – Jay Lea Chambers, the unfortunate who shared Chambers’ name – was a senior administrator for the Treasury Department. His personal dossier went missing. Whittaker’s wife Esther applied to the Baltimore Credit Bureau giving her own details but substituting the administrator’s for Whittaker’s: much more credit-worthy.
Then she went shopping.
Stealing somebody’s identity from a government file is a tidy crime if not a nice one, but rummaging around in wastepaper baskets? Chambers really was creepy. Guy Endore, who was at Columbia with him, told the psychoanalyst Dr Zeligs that it was a regular habit. Chambers liked searching people’s wastepaper baskets; he found “pieces of identity” there. Zeligs diagnosed a “psychic scavenger”. Friends and colleagues said that Chambers targeted people who obsessed him. Wastepaper was the least of it with the Hiss family. He collected bits of their furniture too: a love seat, a wing chair, a table, a child’s rocker, a child’s chest. He kept this booty in his basement storeroom along with a much more intimate prize: he’d removed a square of material from a chair that Alger had sat on, folded it neatly and tucked it away for safe-keeping.
Here’s Part One of a scenario.
When Chambers and Nixon started spending time together right after Alger’s first appearance at HUAC – back in early August 1948 – these handwritten notes were all the documentary material that existed. And what good were they? The dates were early 1938, and Chambers had sworn again and again – under oath and sixteen times over ten years – that he’d had nothing to do with Communists after 1937. He’d sworn to it just before Alger’s first hearing. He’d sworn to it in the first few minutes of his executive session with Nixon, the one where he was the “mystery witness” the Committee had flown all the way to New York to interview.
He interrupted that testimony to go off the record. There’s two hours and some of unrecorded whispering, and when the record picks up again the date-change has happened. And the handwritten notes he’s held onto for all these years: they fit into his story! It’s that glorious, perverse, mythic imagination at work. Who’s going to notice a change in year, much less care? Chambers told so many lies and created so many fancies that nobody was likely to pay attention to just one more.
But we still need motive.
The prosecution really grappled with the problem, and the best they could manage was pure patriotism. In those hysterical times – and well buried in Nixon’s confusion of fact and fancy – it almost worked. It does call for Chambers the saint – something of a stretch at the best of times – and was almost possible then only because the public couldn’t see HUAC’s testimony, Chambers’ many confessions to the FBI, the grand jury testimony or the Justice Department’s dismissal of the evidence. All anybody outside HUAC saw was Nixon’s media onslaught. Fear and titillation did the rest.
An alternate motive is “the woman scorned”. Chambers was delicately balanced. He was a sexual predator. Who can forget the shocked Good Samaritan who woke to find that devastated mouth wrapped around his penis? A predator like that gives off signals as he closes in. They’d have broken the spell of Alger’s noblesse oblige, and a harsh rejection just might explain a long-standing grudge for somebody like Chambers. He wasn’t alone. Bill Bullitt’s hatred of President Wilson was a lifelong obsession; he published his vicious attack on the president forty years after they’d parted company. The woman scorned could have provoked the name-naming in Chambers’ early confessions when he was a down-and-out loser, and Alger was a rising star; it might well have sustained a drive for revenge throughout the entire case.
The life of an informer can be a hard one emotionally, especially for somebody who fingers innocent people. Harvey Matusow, one of the turncoats who’d testified for the government in the Communist Party trial, fingered some he knew were innocent. He gave his reasons as “need, greed and fear”. But it cost him in unexpected ways. “As I reported on a friend, he was no longer my friend; I began to distrust and hate him. I stopped trusting people by knowing myself untrustworthy. I grew to hate people because I had injured them.” Tacitus said it first: “It is a part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.”
Even so, I don’t think Chambers was a willing participant in Nixon’s crusade. He hinted as much in an exchange about the case with William Buckley in 1954. “For you see, after six years, my side still does not really know what this is all about.” And there’s backing from Clare Booth Luce, rabid anti-Communist wife of rabid anti-Communist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine and Chambers’ employer; she was a journalist of serious substance on her own – famous for the phrase, “no good deed goes unpunished” – and the United States’ first female ambassador anywhere, Italy in her case. She describes Chambers as “a deeply tortured man who loathed the spotlight, and had no appetite for martyrdom – and indeed none at all for bringing Alger Hiss down.”
Chambers’s advocates say that in a bid to pre-empt disaster – nobody so much as suggests whose idea it was – he added an account of his sexual adventures to his many FBI confessions. He wrote out eight pages in longhand. He told the agents that the troubles in his parents’ marriage came about because of his father’s “homosexualism”, that he had inherited the trait but wasn’t aware of it in himself – had no personal experience of it – until 1933 or 1934 when he was “more than 30”.
The people of Lynbrook, where he grew up, weren’t so blind. Mrs George Morgan, whose kids went to school with him, told one of Alger’s investigators that from the very outset Chambers “was termed a sissy by the neighborhood children” and that he “retained his effeminate mannerisms as he grew into manhood.” The New York Post’s Oliver Pilat talked to Chambers’ seventh-grade teacher: “None of the boys had much use for him,” she said. His only companion during the eight years he spent at grade school was “a little girl named Vermilia”. Things didn’t pick up in high school. The FBI questioned every classmate they could find about Chambers’ “effeminacy”. Their reports are not available, and witnesses were sworn to secrecy, but the agents couldn’t have helped finding out what one of them said years later: the general view was that “he had a touch of lavender in him”. The June 1919 issue of South Side High School’s The Breeze features the graduating class and lists his nickname as “Girlie”.
When Chambers was twenty years old and first going to Columbia, his companion on the subway ride from Long Island to Manhattan was another freshman, 16-year-old Henry Bang. Henry had a younger brother called “Bub”, who was eleven or twelve; the three of them often went camping together in the woods around Lynbrook. According to one of Chambers’ biographers, several years later Chambers was shocked to hear his friends whispering about his “homosexual relationship” with Bub.
And yet his wife Esther could hardly have had any doubts that what was going on was physical. She was gay herself. When she met Chambers, she was in a lesbian relationship with a writer called Grace Lumpkin; Chambers was in bed with another writer called Michael Intrator. The four moved in together: an odd-couples distribution that started out as Whitaker-and-Michael and Esther-and-Grace, then somehow ended up as Whittaker-and-Esther and Michael-and-Grace. The story was too well known in New York for the FBI to have missed it, and Bureau agents questioning Henry Bang years later, simply assumed a sexual relationship between Bub and Chambers.
Chambers’ poems from the period are blatant. This is when he was comparing cottonwood saplings to “boy-trees” with
The leaves so pensile, so tremulously hung, as they leaned toward one another;
Unable to strain farther into one another
While beneath the ground they’re
Writhing in struggle; heavy, fibrous, underearthen life, from which the sap mounts filling those trembling leaves.
And another poem, published in another magazine the very same month
As your sap drains out into me in excess Like the sap from the stems of a tree that they lop.
By the time Chambers was 30, he was sexually attacking the good Samaritan who put him up.
Chunks of Chambers FBI longhand confession remain blacked-out to this very day, but putting aside his usual confabulation of dates and events, he wrote that his first gay encounter was “a revelation”. It “set off a chain reaction” in him that was “almost impossible to control” until 1938. Which would indicate he was a sexual predator throughout his relationship with Alger.
The notoriously homophobic FBI treated the information “in a strictly confidential manner”.
Nobody could swallow a tale like this. He didn’t have to write it down. How could writing it down pre-empt anything? It put both him and the prosecution in greater danger. It was proof of the prosecution’s withholding evidence from the defence. Besides, it wasn’t even remotely necessary. HUAC had already laid the grounds for swatting off any inconvenient rumours. Chambers had had an episode of serious mental instability after his brother died; there’d been what used to be called a nervous breakdown. Alger himself brought up the question in one of the hearings: “Is he a man of sanity?”
“A typical Communist smear” – this is how representative Hébert of the Committee answered that very question – “when a man gets up to testify, and particularly a former Communist, is to say he is insane or an alcoholic or something else is wrong with him.”
Like homosexuality: a security risk as well as a leper-like disease. Preachers damned homosexuals to hellfire. Doctors used shock therapy, lobotomies, castration to cure them. If that didn’t get them, the law did. Sodomy was a felony in every state in the union. The government certainly wasn’t going to expose Chambers. If his sex life got out, their case would collapse.
And it looks as if there could be more to that sex life than mere homosexuality.
A man called Ernie Lazar has been flooding the National Archives with Freedom of Information requests for decades, nearly 9,000 of them; he’s collected and archived something like 600,000 files. I ran across a stunning one while I was seeking out newspaper reports of Chambers’ childhood. A few months after the handwritten FBI confession, the Special Agent in charge of the Washington office is telling the Special Agent in charge of the New York office about a rumour that Chambers himself reported:
“Sometime in 1936 or later, Hiss is supposed to have discovered that Chambers was having homosexual relations with Timothy Hobson –”
Alger’s stepson Timmy? But Timmy was only eight years old in 1936. That’s even younger than Henry Bang’s little brother, Bub.
“– and thereupon Hiss ordered Chambers from the house and forbade him to return.”
There is support for the allegation in the HUAC testimony itself. In Chambers first secret hearing, he’d told Nixon that “Timmy was a puny little boy, also rather nervous… He was a slightly effeminate child. I think there was some worry about him.” It’s not so. Pictures of Timmy in the 1930s show a confident, stocky boy, big for his age; in one of them, he’s sitting on the grass, feet solidly planted and well apart, elbows on his knees, hands examining a piece of foliage with Tom Sawyer’s insouciance.
What’s more shocking in the agent’s report than the charge itself is that there is no denial from Chambers, nor does the FBI seem surprised by the information or so much as interested in finding out if it’s true. Perhaps they knew all about it. Perhaps it’s what lies beneath some of the still-blacked-out sections of the confession.
The Washington Special Agent’s report goes on to say that “Chambers is supposed to have returned to the Hiss home when he knew that Alger and Priscilla Hiss were not there and that on such occasions Chambers had been admitted to the house by Timothy Hobson.” Years of sexual abuse? This does worry the FBI, but not because of the crime or its duration. They’re afraid the defence could claim that if Chambers was abusing Timmy into 1938, he’d have had all the time he needed to type the dumbwaiter-shaft documents on the Hiss typewriter. Follow-up investigations indicate that Timmy could indeed have been home alone and available.
Clearly something profound happened to Chambers in 1938 to force him to suppress his passion for men for the rest of his life; what’s available of his confession gives no hint of what that might have been. But if homosexuality alone could have destroyed the government’s case, the government’s cover-up of homosexual abuse of an eight-year-old boy that gave Chambers access to that typewriter would have been political disaster for the entire Republican Party.
So if there’s truth to it, why didn’t Alger use it in his defence?
Nobody can do other than guess at another person’s motives. What the evidence does show is that both Alger and his lawyers were adamant about not involving Timmy in the case because this sexual element turns out to be complicated. Timmy was tossed out of the Navy for being gay. If Alger had allowed him to testify, the Naval discharge would have come up; Timmy would have become subject to those legal and medical punishments. Timmy himself was willing to make the sacrifice. Alger overruled him absolutely and was prepared to go to prison to protect him. Alger’s lawyers were more pragmatic; homosexuality was viewed as so disgusting that a gay stepson might be enough to turn a jury against any accused.
And then Alger was most distinctly a man of his generation, and his generation’s puritanical outlook is remote even from somebody like me, a single generation later. Along similar lines, a pornographer called Samuel Roth signed an affidavit saying Whittaker Chambers had submitted some erotic poems with the request that Roth “publish the poems under the name of ‘George Crosley’”. Alger refused to let Roth testify even though there was no other proof that Chambers had used the name. His reasoning? Somebody who’d been prosecuted several times for pushing porn would damage his credibility.
There is another aspect to the code. If this happened, it happened on Alger’s watch. It helps explain the extremity of his fury when he finally realized Chambers’ real identity during Nixon’s ambush: an explosion into physical assault from this most gentlemanly of men. I think it would have been very, very hard for Alger to admit before the world that he’d failed to protect a child in his care from something as terrible as this.
But whatever Chambers had in mind when he said to Buckley that after all those years his side didn’t know what the case was about, just think of the poor man’s position as he faced it!
His whimpering and self-pity are an annoyance, but nobody could doubt that he was in real agony. While HUAC and Nixon secured their political futures, he was terrified, on tenterhooks all the time. How could he be otherwise? He’d committed perjury all over the shop. He’d done the dead baby trick to get an illegal passport. He’d confessed to sodomy. The FBI had reason to expect that he’d abused an eight-year-old child and continued the abuse over a period of years. One false step, and he was behind bars himself; Nixon and HUAC could put him there without blinking.
As Alger said, the prosecution had Chambers “under their thumb”. After Chambers secured immunity from charges of perjury himself – when Nixon no longer had that hold on him – he could stop lying. He could stop playing fanciful games with the mass of trivia that HUAC and the FBI had collected on Alger. He could just say, enough is enough. But not with that handwritten statement in the FBI files. Felonies carry a minimum of a year in prison; back then the penalty for sodomy was far, far harsher, and child abuse was literally unthinkable.
Hoover was an old hand at coercion of witnesses. Agents could have threatened Chambers with many things. The dead baby trick he’d used to get a passport was a felony that could get him up to ten years. Sodomy could get him twenty. On top of those, there was identity theft – the unfortunate who shared a name with him in the Baltimore telephone book – credit fraud and the theft of the files from government offices that gave him the information to carry it out. A handwritten confession to depraved sexual adventures sure as hell looks like insurance that Chambers would stay on track throughout the trials and keep his mouth shut when they were finished. Just getting him to write it out by hand shows the power they had over him: either write it or we charge you with any or all of the above – and be fully aware that if there’s a peep out of you before you die, we publish.
Here’s Part Two of my scenario. It starts with the typed pages and brings more people into play.
Taken just as objects, the pages are even odder than what’s printed on them. A mere sixty-five show ribbons changed four times, sometimes halfway through the page. Why would anybody do that? Those old ribbons could eke out a couple of hundred pages easily, and new ribbons were literally wet with ink. They made the hands dirty. They smudged. They blurred the letters, got fingerprints on the pages.
The paper itself has oddities. Some of the pages have deteriorated. Some haven’t. Pressure marks and staining marks show that the Baltimore batch couldn’t have been stored in the same place in the same envelope for ten years – not in Chambers’ dumbwaiter shaft or anywhere else. Oddest of all is the type of paper: onionskin, all of it. People used onionskin for carbon copies on those old machines, but nobody typed directly on it. It jammed the platen. It slipped. The letters blurred; they’d have made very poor photographs. No spymaster would accept copies of documents like these, especially given Vernon Hinchley’s comment that the spy’s hardest task wasn’t to get information but to persuade his boss that it was accurate.
So why this onionskin?
A good possibility is just to add to the drama. This whole tale bubbles with theatrics fit for a Christmas pantomime. Assassination plots. Yiddish colonels with only one arm. Spies with only Christian names creeping about in the dark. A dumbwaiter shaft and a pumpkin spewing top secret documents. Especially that pumpkin: a sleight of hand so magnificently farcical that it diverted an entire country’s attention from what was happening right in front of their eyes. Chambers knew exactly what he was doing. “The point about the pumpkin,” he writes in Witness, “was not that it was absurd, but that it worked.”
It worked so brilliantly that nobody had to explain how innocent documents could threaten national security. Who could follow the reasoning anyway? At least Nixon had given the grand jury a hint. He’d said to them, “The message involving China, which Mr. Bullitt wrote—”
Bullitt? Again!
In court, prosecutor Murphy displayed a part of this message, but only a part, a bare two paragraphs; they went up on the seven-foot billboard. In the first paragraphs Bullitt is in conversation with French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos; they’re discussing French hopes for reconciliation with Hitler’s Germany. Delbos doesn’t tell him anything he wouldn’t have discussed with the Russian ambassador, but that innocent material was all the court was allowed to see. Everybody assumed that the missing part had been in the pumpkin too. Rumours flew. Was it the secret of the atom bomb? Names of double agents? The code Bullitt used? Was this what Nixon meant about the pumpkin threatening national security right now? More than ten years after the event?
Whatever else it meant, it meant that this man Hiss was still a threat.
And then abruptly, the missing section burst onto front pages all across the country. Here’s The New York Times:
BULLITT MESSAGE SHOWN TO HISS JURY;
Cable to Hull, Which Chambers Says
Defendant Gave Him
A secret high-level cablegram from France…
the highlight of the documentary exhibits.
The disclosure was sensational. Bullitt reported the Soviet ambassador’s warning to Delbos that “if France should begin serious negotiations with Germany, the Soviet Union would come to terms with Germany at once.” This was in January 1938, when official Soviet policy was implacable hostility to Germany. An American ambassador aware of a possible secret rapprochement between a friend and an enemy? That was a prize titbit for a spy and without doubt “the highlight of the documentary exhibits”. But, but, but…
The Times’s readers couldn’t escape the impression that the “highlight” had been in the pumpkin along with the rest of the cable and that Murphy concealed it only because it was so shocking. The jury couldn’t help thinking the same thing. Even so, that “highlight” hadn’t been in the pumpkin at all. Where did it come from? That’s something of a question, but not from Chambers’ vegetable patch. Not even Nixon claimed it had.
Just as important, both sections of the cable had gone to Alger’s office; his initials were on the originals of both. Which is to say, if he were the spy, here once again, he’d prepared to pass worthless information on to the Soviets and withhold supremely important information.
It made a real splash in the headlines – and how many people read more than headlines? How many realized that what looked like serious secrets being revealed to enemies of state was a total non-event? Had never happened at all?
But picking up a document like that is very different from rummaging in wastepaper baskets. No way Chambers could have been responsible. Papers like that don’t just lie around. Nor are they kept in ordinary files like Jay Lea Chambers’.
Enter Bill Bullitt.
Svetlana told me that quite a number of Bill’s cables languish in Soviet archives; they’re from back when he was ambassador to the USSR, in love with Roosevelt and Russians. Nobody doubts that Bullitt himself is the one who got them there. A Soviet spy called Ludwig Lore told the FBI all about “his dear old friend comrade Bullitt” who was “doing a wonderful job both as ambassador and as a comrade in keeping the ‘crowd’” – that’s Soviet intelligence in Moscow – “informed on the inside goings on in Washington”. Bill did lots of little favours for his comrades. Lore asked Bill for an American passport stamped for travel to Spain. “Nothing easier than that,” Bill said. “I do that for dozens of comrades almost every day.” The job took five minutes.
Svetlana says the information that Bullitt supplied to the “crowd” gives a sense of what real espionage looks like. She was studying Stalin’s “personal archive” where he kept his most important intelligence – with “notations in his own hand” – when she “located Russian translations of two of Bullitt’s” cables. They looked nothing like Chambers’ papers. They were “microfilm copies from photocopies of documents for Moscow as against typed copies” that no spymaster would accept.
Fifteen years later, Bill was a rabid anti-Communist, wreaking revenge on Roosevelt and anybody in Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Like Alger.
Especially Alger. Jealousy again. Just as he’d coveted Sumner Welles’s job as Under Secretary of State, he’d coveted Alger’s job as president of the Carnegie Endowment. His cousin William Marshall, pamphleteer, was a trustee of the Endowment and in a position to guarantee the job. He wrote to Bill’s brother Orville about his hopes that “Bill might be selected”; he’d “talked many times with Bill about it”. It would have been a “splendid opportunity”.
Alger stole the plum right out from under their noses. William Marshall must have been as furious as Bill. A Philadelphia Bullitt exposed as unable to swing a vote? One he’d bragged to his cousin he could swing?
With all the players on stage for the second half of my scenario – Nixon, Chambers and the two Bullitt cousins – how did they get together?
Chambers knew Marshall Bullitt. He says so in Witness. He claims in italics that they didn’t meet until after the trial – the italics are his – but who believes Chambers? His emphasis makes the meeting all the more suspect. Why bother to emphasize that? Nobody cares. As for Bill, Chambers says that Daladier told Bill about Alger. Which means he knew Bill too, because Witness was published in 1952, and Bill wasn’t publicizing the tale about Daladier until he testified to it that very year. But then a rabid anti-Red editor of Time like Chambers could hardly help knowing Bill, favoured columnist of his boss, the rabidly anti-Red Henry Luce, owner of Time.
Nixon?
Two guys on Capitol Hill with opinions so closely allied as his and Bill Bullitt’s were likely to be fully aware of each other if not the bosom pals they became, and they certainly did become that. The singer/songwriter Ray LaMontagne bought Bill’s mansion in Pennsylvania for more than a million dollars; a local called Russell Williams, talking about the purchase, remembered the old days and “Richard Nixon landing there in a helicopter to visit Bullitt.”
The source of the papers themselves though: that remains the mystery of mysteries in the Hiss case. Not even the most energetic anti-Hiss writer can tie him to all of them. But if not him, then who? There are lots of theories. A really rabid anti-Red called Isaac Don Levine, Chambers’s bosom pal, kept file cases full of State Department documents. Why not him? Then there’s that small army of low-level people – trash collector, cleaner, file clerk – that Chambers could so easily have hired to lift stuff. As to the typing, his wife Esther was a professional typist. So was Pat Nixon. Ben Mandel – the HUAC staff member who gave Chambers his party card – had access to practically anything he wanted, and he’d taught typing in a high school before he became an investigator of Reds.
My theory though is that Bill Bullitt supplied the original material, and an FBI team – or an army team or an OSS team – did the typing.
Nixon quotes Bill in Six Crises on why the documents were important. “An ambassador’s reports to his government can only be as reliable as his sources. These messages disclose the names of my best sources – representatives of other governments who were providing information to me on a confidential basis. Once their activities became known to others, the source immediately dries up.”
And yet not a single vulnerable name appears, and the Justice Department ruled that the information wouldn’t be of any interest to the Soviets: nobody even could have been compromised – although I imagine a number of people were compromised in the cables Bullitt himself passed on to Stalin. Why would he let Nixon quote him spouting such nonsense unless they were both in on it?
The pages themselves make the possibility even stronger. There’s the testimony from Walter Anderson, chief of the State Department’s Record Division – he was on the stand for several days of unbelievably boring testimony – explaining that low-level information like this, delivered to hundreds State Department officials in a shopping trolley, was also available to qualified people not in the government. Ex-officials at work on memoirs for example. People just like Bill.
And Bill was probably the only person around who would have been interested enough in that long, dull economic report on Manchuria to keep a copy. In The Great Globe Itself, he devotes a considerable number of pages to just that. Group this cache by country, and they look very much like research. China, Japan, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France: Bullitt’s book covers them all. For Nixon’s purpose, any handful of such papers would serve if their dates fit with Alger’s handwritten notes.
The one really important cable though, the one that made such a splash in The New York Times, the “highlight of the documentary exhibits”, the one no cleaner or trash collector or file clerk could have lifted: who’d written it? Bullitt. Who might have a copy of the entire cable on file? Bullitt. And then it looks to me as though all the ambassadorial cables from the pumpkin – as against the ones from the dumbwaiter shaft – were typed out on a European machine: the letter “e” comes out as “ε”. These aren’t transcriptions either. They’re carbon copies, identical to the originals. How come nobody showed any interest in finding that typewriter? Who on the US side of the Atlantic could have supplied documents from a European typewriter but the guy whose office decrypted them in Europe?
Nixon underestimated Alger’s integrity, just as Dexter’s cousin Niels did. The dumbwaiter shaft papers were useful only if mystery and intrigue surrounded them; it probably never occurred to him that Alger would insist they go at once to the Department of Justice. When he did, Nixon knew that Justice would do just what it did do. He had to improvise, and the pumpkin has all the feel of a rush job. Rolls of film with a few more of Bill’s originals and a clutch of completely unimportant papers, but how to catch the headlines in discovering them? Chambers’ website says that he got the idea from a Russian spy movie, Transport of Fire.
Just so.
Then there’s the onionskin paper of the dumbwaiter shaft material. Aside from the drama it introduced, there’s the date of its manufacture. William Marshall’s files in Louisville, Kentucky – the ones Dexter and I scoured for material on Evariste Galois – were almost all onionskin carbons, and most of what we saw dated before 1938. I still have the copy of G. H. Hardy’s letter to William Marshall.
Dear Mr. Bullitt: Harald Bohr of Copenhagen happened to be staying with me when I got your letter…
That’s the one Dexter carried in his wallet to show at parties. It’s very tattered now, but it’s the same kind of paper that was used for Chambers’s documents; there were lots of spare sheets in the Bullitt files. The Bullitts were pack rats. They kept everything.
With Bill as the source of the papers, another oddity of Chambers’ material finds an explanation. Most ambassadors in the cache are represented by only one cable, a couple by two, old Joe Kennedy by three. Bullitt contributed nine, one of them in a series of four, making a dozen cables in all. He was very vain. He’d have been unable to resist the temptation to show his importance in the conduct of international affairs.
Pumpkin Papers? Not to me. I call them the Bullitt Papers.
And with William Marshall Bullitt working as the liaison for all this, there’s at last a full explanation of Nixon’s heart-felt gratitude in his condolence to Mrs Bullitt.