THE PRESIDENT
Every position of great responsibility entails searching hours of loneliness. When decisions which have far-reaching consequences for others must be made, the person in the executive chair must stand alone and often suffer in silence from inevitable criticism and hostility. Nearly every step the official takes will be lauded by some and condemned by others. Perhaps no position is more exacting and more isolating than that of President of the United States. The president is constantly surrounded by people and incessantly faced with pressures and demands. He sees many people every day who wish to influence him in some way, but rarely does he enter into genuine and fundamental relationships. The one primary element in life—human depth in love for its own value—is often missing. The president is frequently subjected to malicious gossip, slander, and backbiting. Nearly every word he speaks, each and every act of his behavior, is made newsworthy and publicized. Forever, there is some individual or group which evaluates and maligns him, more often as a result of hindsight than foresight. And there are almost as many second-guessers as there are voters. The presidency is a position of vast scope requiring the making of decisions based on experiences and data which no one person can fully absorb.
In the preface of his memoirs, Harry S. Truman wrote:
Very few are ever authorized to speak for the President. No one can make decisions for him. No one can know all the processes of his thinking in making important decisions. Even those closest to him, even members of his immediate family, never know all the reasons why he does certain things and why he comes to certain conclusions. To be President of the United States is to be lonely, very lonely at times of great decisions....The pressures and the complexities of the presidency have grown to a state where they are almost too much for one man to endure. Important decisions cannot wait. A President must decide not only on the facts but the experience and preparation he brings to them. It is a terrible handicap for a new President to step into office and be confronted with a whole series of critical decisions without adequate briefing.{58}
No time is more isolating, more soul-searching for the president, than a time of war when each major decision he makes may result in the extermination of thousands of human beings. During war, as Commander-in-Chief, the president assumes new, far-reaching responsibilities; the whole future of human freedom is at stake. Inevitably, waging a war is an unpopular cause.
The isolation of command is deeply felt when there is no one with whom the responsibilities of the presidency may be shared, when there is no one with whom the president may talk openly and freely without fear of being misunderstood or without departing from the ethics of office. As a rule, the president is hesitant to admit his doubts, fears, ignorance, or conflicts because of the threat of violating the confidentiality of his office or of losing face or prestige. There is often no way to vital human companionship in the crucial issues. From the ultimate burden of decision there is no relief; his is a loneliness of command.
Nearly all his life Abraham Lincoln found himself alone. In his childhood, he walked, and thought, and read on his own—striving to find a meaningful place and bring a sense of enrichment to his life. He knew many hours of solitude, many hours of deep melancholy, and many hours of mental exertion in long-continued thought. He was frequently restless and gloomy and desperate. As a young man, he was denied fulfillment in his relationship with the one lady he truly loved. When Ann Rutledge died he was terribly grieved, so much so that his power of reason was endangered. He wandered aimlessly—alone—feeling entirely estranged from the world and not caring whether he lived or died. His depression and despair were so great that he came close to mental derangement. He often appeared on the brink of suicide. His first and perhaps only great love was rudely torn from him and all the world seemed empty and gray and cold. His affliction was almost beyond endurance.
He never felt the world as a place of joy. He was convinced he was doomed from the first to a melancholy existence. The one characteristic which remained fixed was his sad, pained facial expression. He was usually awkward with others and deeply sensitive to his clumsiness.
After his initial defection at the wedding with Mary Todd, he said:
I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, as it appears to me.{59}
Eventually he married Mary Todd—though he never loved her and after his failure to appear at the first wedding she never loved him. In her wrath, she was bent on avenging his abasement of her. In contemplating marriage with her, he was faced a second time with a great conflict: to keep his pledge, thereby maintaining his honor, or to continue to search for domestic peace. He chose to keep his word and because of it suffered years of self-inflicted torture and sacrifice and the loss of a happy home life forever.
His life with Mary Todd was filled with painful issues and demands in which he was constantly attacked, criticized, and belittled. At times in his law office, his distress was so plain and his silence so significant that his law-partner, William Herndon, unable to bear the loneliness and pain, was forced to leave the room.
Long before he became president, Lincoln contended he was destined for a terrible fate. He frequently repeated his certainty that he would come to some terrible end. Two things intensified his characteristic loneliness: one was the endless succession of trouble in his domestic life which he had to bear in silence and the other was his awareness of his own obscure and lowly origin.
Once in handling a divorce case in which the husband enumerated instances of marital suffering, Lincoln interrupted him and said, “My friend, I regret to hear this; but let me ask you in all candor, can’t you endure for a few moments what I have had as my daily portion for the last fifteen years?”{60} He spoke so mournfully and with such a look of distress the husband was completely disarmed.
When he was laboring under a dejection of spirit there was a song which struck a responsive chord in his heart. This song, which follows, reflects the sorrow, gloom, and loneliness of his life. It reflects his search for joy and happiness and freedom of spirit and his conviction that such soaring human elevation comes only with death.
Tell me, ye winged winds
That round my pathway roar,
Do ye not know some spot
Where mortals weep no more?
Some lone and pleasant vale
Some valley in the West,
Where, free from toil and pain,
The weary soul may rest?
The loud wind dwindled to a whisper low,
And sighed for pity as it answered, No.
Tell me, thou mighty deep,
Whose billows round me play,
Know’st thou some favored spot,
Some island far away,
Where weary man may find
The bliss for which he sighs:
Where sorrow never lives
And friendship never dies?
The loud waves rolling in perpetual flow
Stopped for a while and sighed to answer, No.
And Thou, serenest moon,
That with such holy face
Dost look upon the Earth
Asleep in Night’s embrace—
Tell me, in all thy round
Hast thou not seen some spot
Where miserable man
Might find a happier lot?
Behind a cloud the moon withdrew in woe
And a voice sweet but sad responded, No.
Tell me, my secret soul,
Oh, tell me, Hope and Faith,
Is there no resting-place
From sorrow, sin, and death?
Is there no happy spot
Where mortals may be blessed,
Where grief may find a balm And weariness a rest?
Faith, Hope, and Love, best boon to mortals given,
Waved their bright wings and whispered, Yes, in Heaven.{61}
His loneliness in life strengthened Lincoln, enabled him to develop a depth of awareness and sensitivity. It made possible his deepness of thought and feeling for humanity. It enabled him to realize the significance of genuine meetings in human life. It helped him to see the value of truth and candor, and of sincerity in his relations. It enabled him to listen to every person with utter respect and to listen with reverence. Through his solitude he developed a gentleness of spirit and a kindliness toward all men. When it came to justice and right and liberty no man could ever move him. He was as adamant and unrelenting as gravity itself. He held firm in his lofty ideals for humanity. He knew from his own lonely existence the meaning and significance of the good in contrast to evil, the value of love and justice and freedom in human life. He never refused to see people and was deeply sensitive to human suffering and misery, putting all his powers to work to effect a better life for those who lived in pain.
Lincoln was a controversial figure from the very beginning of his political career. He frequently was defeated in his attempts to secure public office. He was not willing to accept compromise but held to an exact position on the great social questions of his time. The hostility against him was extreme. Many threats on his life were made when he was about to be inaugurated as president. He was warned that he would never pass through Baltimore alive on his way to Washington—making it necessary for General Scott to provide military protection.
Rumors were rampant that once Lincoln had achieved the highest public office, he cared no more for his home or friends, that he was ashamed of his earlier affiliations and associations, that he did not remember any of the people who had assisted him to the presidency. Office-seekers pursued him relentlessly, dogging his steps wherever he went, edging their way through crowds and thrusting their papers in his hands, slipping through half-opened doors to the executive mansion, using every strategy and device to receive special favors and nearly worrying him to death. His life became so pressured and burdened that he moved about in an abstracted, mechanical way, seemingly cut-off from himself and unaware of the humanity for which he gave his life. His sadness and despair grew through the war years as he felt the tragedy of I death and the destructiveness of war. His melancholy was expressed in every breath he took; it literally saturated every word he spoke, every step he took. It was ingrained, so deeply impressed that he could only, rarely feel joy, gladness, concrete relatedness to man or nature.
He seldom depended on others; he was a man true to his own lights, relying on his own searching solitude for insights. He thought alone. His forte lay in digging out for himself and securing for his mind its own food, to be assimilated unto itself. He had a great power for seeing into the heart of an issue, for absorbing the raw elements, and reasoning in a pure way divested of all distortion and delusion.
Lincoln loved humanity but in an abstract way. He did not know the concrete love of individuals as it grew and deepened from the heart. His was a general love of human beings everywhere rather than a love for his neighbors. It is sad to relate that he was never aware of the deep and abiding love which human beings everywhere felt for him. Perhaps Americans themselves did not realize how deeply they revered him until after his death. He was a great man and he lived a life of deep sadness and loneliness. His love for humanity will live in the heart of man forever. America today can still feel the tragedy of his assassination. The decisions he made as president continue to affect man’s destiny and man’s strivings for a better world.
We can understand and appreciate the indescribable shock of his fellow countrymen when news reached them of Lincoln’s death. William Herndon expresses the wave of anguish which spread everywhere in these passages:
In every household throughout the length and bredth of the land there was a dull and bitter agony as the telegraph bore tidings of the awful deed. The public heart, filled with joy over the news of Appomattox, now sank low with a sacred terror as the sad tidings from the Capitol came in. In the great cities of the land all business instantly ceased. Flags drooped half-mast from every winged messenger of the sea, from every church spire, and from every public building. Thousands upon thousands, drawn by a common feeling, crowded around every place of public resort and listened eagerly to whatever any public speaker chose to say. Men met in the streets and pressed each other’s hands in silence, and burst into tears. The whole nation, which the previous day had been jubilant and hopeful, was precipitated into the depths of a profound and tender woe. It was a memorable spectacle to the world—a whole nation plunged into heartfelt grief and the deepest sorrow.{62}
Only after Lincoln had fallen, leaving “a lonesome place against the sky” was his true magnitude realized.{63} Only then was the loftiness of his soul recognized in all its aloneness.
Woodrow Wilson had a dream for world peace, a vision to which he could dedicate himself in a total sense. He worked feverishly to bring about friendship, love, harmony, unity in the world. After he had convinced other major nations of the absolute necessity of a world peace organization, after he had pursed his vision with tireless effort, after he had strained and stretched every physical resource and mental ability, after he finally achieved a significant victory in foreign lands, he was defeated by political jealousies and machinations in his own country.
Woodrow Wilson believed that to live in harmony the world required two simple but inclusive principles—the right of self-determination of peoples of every nation in the world and a world association for mutual aid and protection and for the elimination of war. Both of these central concepts—American in origin—were vanquished on American soil. Ralph McGill describes the ruination of Wilson in the following passages.
At whatever cost, Lodge and Baker, with their personal grievances, their partisan passion, felt Wilson must be destroyed. The way to destroy him was to discredit and defeat the great project which he had brought to the verge of success. Their own words of former days would come back to belie them, but they were too angry and desperate to care for that. It was a titanic task, but Lodge was a master at manipulating the forces which could be worked to confuse the people and defeat their desires.{64}
Wilson’s great efforts to bring a lasting peace to a war-weary world lost out to partisan politics and bitter personal feelings of retaliation. His defeat was a triumph for the isolationists. It was the final blow to a man who had struggled all his life to show his inner disposition and humaneness, a man who felt deep sympathy in his relations with others, but who was inevitably kept away as an icy, machine-like person. Woodrow Wilson experienced frequent feelings of isolation and restraint in his relations with others. He wanted people to recognize him as a warm, feeling person. He wanted people to understand and love him but he believed they never would—and for the most part, he was not loved as a humanitarian until sometime after his death.
Sometimes I am a bit ashamed of myself when I think how few friends I have amidst a host of acquaintances. Plenty of people offer me their friendship; but, partly because I am reserved and shy, and partly because I am fastidious and have a narrow, uncatholic taste in friends, I reject the offer in almost every case; and then am dismayed to look about and see how few persons in the world stand near and know me as I am—in such wise that they can give me sympathy and close support of heart. Perhaps it is because when I give at all I want to give my whole heart, and I feel that so few want it all, or would return measure for measure.{65}
He often felt even his own individuality, his own freedom blotted out, eradicated in the terrible burdens of public life. He was beseeched at every turn by callers galore who sought to influence his thinking or gain his support. He was expected to attend innumerable public ceremonies. He had to participate in endless meetings. As president, he was never able to be himself, never able to meet people on a fundamental basis. He described a typical Sunday as a day in which he sat at the edge of his front porch flanked by a row of militia officers, gazed at without relief, while a chaplain conducted services on his lawn, with a full brass band to play the tunes for the hymns; followed by lunch in his home for the chaplains, Catholic priests, and anyone else who happened along. In the afternoon he received and paid military calls and attended reviews. In the evening callers from all over the country beckoned at his door. He had no time for his own thoughts, no time to be alone, to be free with his own loneliness, no time to call up his own stirrings of the heart and mind, to experience the sweet richness of a life that emerges in its own time and way. He had no private life at all. The office of president brought him no personal blessing, only “irreparable loss and desperate suffering.” He yearned to disguise himself and be a free man and have a joyous time again. To a personal friend, he wrote:
It’s an awful thing to be President of the United States. It means giving up nearly everything that one holds dear. When a man enters the White House, he might as well say, “all hope abandon, ye who enter here.” The presidency becomes a barrier between a man and his wife, between a man and his children. He is no longer his own master—he is a slave to the job. He may indulge no longer in the luxury of free action or even free speech.{66}
As president, he could not express all that he thought. His opinions could not be uttered freely and spontaneously. They had to be toned down and filtered to a respectable and solemn level.
There were always rumors, malicious gossip, and name calling. Theodore Roosevelt called him a “Byzantine legothete” (a man who expounds but never acts) and a “damned hypocrite.” He was frequently denounced as lacking moral and intellectual fibre. He was maligned with words to tear him down, “Egotist,” “Coward,” “Faker,” “hogging the whole show.” A torrent of verbal missiles followed him wherever he went, aimed at destroying his reputation and his honor. He expressed the fear of being overwhelmed and crushed by the constant maledictions against him. He exclaimed in a solitary moment in a quiet place:
the world grows sometimes to seem so brutal, so naked of beauty, so devoid of chivalrous sentiment and all sense of fair play, that one’s own spirit hardens and is in danger of losing its fineness.{67}
Mr. Wilson sadly proclaimed that he had never read an article in which he recognized himself. He sometimes wondered whether he was some kind of fraud because of the consistent discrepancy between his own perceptions and the views of others who wrote and spoke about him. He spent many lonely hours trying to understand how he could create so many varied and false impressions.
When his first wife died, while he was in office, his isolation and loneliness increased terribly and became widespread. Even this suffering could not be done nobly, alone, peacefully. There were slanderous rumors that he had carried on affairs with other women, that his marriage had been empty of love and hope and beauty, that his home had been filled with icy meetings and discordant situations. Later, when he married Ellen Bolling, rumors spread that she “bought off” the “other women.” Yet she alone could assuage his increasing, intolerable suffering during the terrible years of war, when he sought passionately to find a formula which would end the slaughter. Only intimate associates were aware of his growing anguish and knew the pain of his restless soul. Bowers observes how Wilson’s excruciating distress at the declaration of war was rarely recognized by the public:
He suffered from the slings and arrows of his enemies, but he did not reveal his wounds in public, since he was proud....His secretary has given us one picture that throws a vivid light on his character. The editor of a paper of the opposition had written him a letter that was kindly and sympathetic just before our declaration of war. “That man understood me and sympathized,” he said as he drew his handkerchief and wiped tears from his eyes. Then laying his head on the table he sobbed. He faced his enemies with cold pride but a kindly word revealed the heart, of the man, a lonely man, facing the necessity of sending American boys to war.{68}
Wilson hated and dreaded war. He suffered continual agony throughout the war and ached over every terrible death and maiming.
He sought in vain for some respite from the relentless pressures and the tragedies which faced him every day. He played golf, went to the theater, plunged into various activities which might amuse him—but the deadening weight was always there. “Even then,” he wrote, “it is lonely, very lonely. And it is then that I have time to miss my friends and consciously wish for them.” He searched inwardly to find some answer to his grief and loneliness, to bring meaning and new life to his responsibilities as president, but he became increasingly isolated, separated from his own spontaneous and tender nature, from his own fun-loving, prankish ways.
Woodrow Wilson loved his fellow countrymen with a deep and genuine compassion. He gave his life for central values and convictions which he came to only after much internal struggle, deliberation, and lonely self-reflection. His dream was for all humanity everywhere; but he was regarded with suspicion and seen as a heartless intellectual. In the end, he fell a victim in spite of his courage and valor. Only a few realized that humanity had suffered a tragic loss. Now we know that his vision was a humanic enterprise born out of a hatred for evil, destruction and war, grown from a desire for peace and harmony and freedom. Only now are we certain that his dream must become an enduring reality or humanity faces extinction. In his time he lived in isolation, but today Woodrow Wilson is cherished and loved, for he provided a way to a friendly life among nations. He crusaded and died for a plan for world peace with which his name will be identified forever.
THE PERSON WHO STANDS ALONE
The person who expresses strong convictions in everyday life inevitably stands alone. He experiences many hours of loneliness because he adheres to his own values and refuses to compromise. The lone dissenter often must withdraw from the world; his deviation is threatening and disturbing to others. His ideas and thoughts require others to examine their own inner conscience and responsibility. Such a challenge provokes conflict and arouses fear and insecurity in others.
The individual who stands alone is often reviled when he acts contrary to public opinion or when he threatens the security of his nation. The poet, the statesman, the president, the person in public life who is disgraced, all are individuals who have suffered from a sense of being alienated from society, a sense of being misjudged, misinterpreted, and dispossessed. All are individuals who have been exposed to the loneliness of public condemnation and rejection. All are individuals who have submitted to the loneliness of fame or infamy and to the loneliness of public responsibility or private confinement. All are individuals isolated from society, yet they often maintain an unyielding integrity and strength.
Benedict Arnold was one of the most lonely, and perhaps most hated, persons in American history. Many Americans since the days of the revolution have united to curse his memory, to execrate him, and to keep his infamy alive. In 1780, one of his former “friends” wrote, “Even villains less guilty than himself will not cease to upbraid him and tho’ they ‘approve the treason they will despise the traitor!’”
All his life, from his early childhood to his untimely, poverty-stricken death, Benedict Arnold sought respect and status. He strove for acceptance and recognition from the aristocratic families, the cultured and educated groups, the leaders of the American Revolution and the Congress. He was never actually held in esteem by any of these groups. His one stirring ambition was to achieve social rank. In this he was constantly checked and stifled. His unceasing effort to be valued by the status and power groups ended in failure. He suffered frequent rebuffs from the Congress and frequent character assaults by his enemies. He was deprived again and again in battle of a clear and shining victory because of the competitive strivings for power of American officers who were above him in command and to whom Arnold consistently refused to subordinate himself. Although he was recognized as an outstanding field commander with flaming personal courage, in one way or another his brilliance in battle was marred either by other generals or unfortunate circumstances.
His success at Fort Ticonderoga was contested by Ethan Allen. The continual deceit and bickering between them as to who was the real hero and who was in charge, coupled with the political intrigue within the Congress, left Arnold with a feeling of uncertain achievement. The crushing blow to Arnold at Ticonderoga was delivered by the state of Massachusetts, which cast aspersions on his character and insultingly placed him under the command of a lesser figure. He was frustrated again and again in his attempt to conquer Quebec. He had marched from the Maine wilderness to Quebec, enduring sickness, terrible disease, starvation, and cold, finally besieging the city during the worst winter in a generation. Many of his men deserted or left as their enlistment period ended; an entire division returned to Massachusetts. Through the treachery of his own advance messengers the British had been warned, and during inspection, Arnold discovered that a large part of the rifles, muskets, and cartridges were defective. At last he realized there would be no surpassing honor in Quebec. The assault failed, Arnold was wounded in action, and withdrawal from Canada was the only course left. Even for the great victories at Saratoga in which he figured prominently, he did not receive the accolade for splendid triumph.
If ever there was a maligned and maltreated officer of the army it was Arnold. He was a constant victim of deceit, betrayal, politics and politicians, both military and civilian. His intense feelings of grievance and injustice were not without justification, though his own defects of personality and character certainly contributed to his misfortunes.
Near the end of his career as an American general, he was placed in command of the Philadelphia area, the most unlikely place for him to be in the light of the constant rebuffs and rejection of influential, aristocratic groups despite his great ambition for success and acceptance by them. If there was a person who needed understanding and guidance, who needed a place where he would be respected and valued for his contribution to the American cause after his severe wounds at Saratoga, it was Arnold. Instead, he was given an impossible command in a hostile city and this contributed greatly to his defection. The Council of Pennsylvania was a band of single-minded, vindictive patriots who were bent on ruining General Arnold from the first. They were out to “get” him. Eventually this influential group demanded that the Congress court-martial him on a number of charges. At this time he was so disturbed and alienated that he wrote to Washington:
If your Excellency thinks me criminal, for heaven’s sake let me be immediately tried and, if found guilty, executed. I want no favour; I ask only justice. If this is denied me by your Excellency, I have nowhere to seek it but from the candid public, before whom I shall be under the necessity of laying the whole matter. Let me beg of you, Sir, to consider that a set of artful, unprincipled men in office may misrepresent the most innocent actions and, by raising the public clamour against your Excellency, place you in the same situation I am in. Having made every sacrifice of fortune and blood, and become a cripple in the service of my country, I little expected to meet the ungrateful returns I have received from my countrymen; but as Congress have stamped ingratitude as a current coin, I must take it. I wish your Excellency, for your long and eminent service, may not be paid in the same coin. I have nothing left but the little reputation I have gained in the army. Delay in the present case is worse than death, and when it is considered that the President and council have had three months to produce the evidence, I cannot suppose the ordering a court-martial to determine the matter immediately, is the least precipitating it. I entreat that the court may be ordered to sit as soon as possible.{69}
At length, although he was acquitted of most of the charges against him, he received a reprimand. The reprimand was sufficiently galling and the public disgrace so painful that even the Council was somewhat regretful. But it was too late! Arnold, whose power strivings, aggressive demands, and uncultured ways, whose personal defects and social rejection interfered with his achieving unconditional acceptance, success, and triumph, became the first great American traitor and plummeted swiftly to execration. On the night of September 23, 1780, he defected to the British and was subsequently commissioned a brigadier general in the British army.
His name has become synonymous with treason, which has become an odious offense in all nations of the world. The denunciation of him by his countrymen remains without parallel. He was hanged or burned in effigy in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, and scores of smaller places. In his own home state of Connecticut in New Milford, Middletown, and New Haven his effigy suffered particularly humiliating treatment, and in Norwich a mob stormed into the local cemetery and destroyed his father’s tombstone because it bore the Arnold name. Washington said of him:
From some traits of his character which have lately come to my knowledge, he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy, and so lost to all sense of honor and shame that while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits there will be no time for remorse.{70}
Arnold was never heroic or confident in exile. His defection to the British did not change his status; he was continually mistrusted and damned, and he never had a sense of recognition or belonging as a British general. One observer remarked:
General Arnold is a very unpopular character in the British army, nor can all the patronage he meets with from the commander-in-chief procure him respectability. The subaltern officers have conceived such an aversion to him that they unanimously refused to serve under his command, and the detachment he is to lead was, on this account, officered from the Loyal American Corps.{71}
As a British officer, he was never given a real opportunity to attain significant victory. He was never given valorous recognition. He never achieved fame.
Unable to establish himself as an important commander, General Arnold went to live in England where he continued to search for a place of distinction and respectability. Every effort failed—both socially and financially. He never spoke of his traitorous behavior as an American general. It was to him a secret shame which he could not bring himself to face openly. When Talleyrand met him and asked him where he was traveling, he replied, “I am perhaps the only American who cannot give you letters for his own country—all the relations I had there are now broken—I must never return to the states.” He refused to give his name, but Talleyrand recognized him and felt a deep sense of pity for him for he had witnessed his utter dejection and agony.
Certainly he was no longer the brilliant and courageous soldier. He was no longer even hopeful of any kind of success. He was totally alone in the world. He could never discuss his exploits as a general or any aspect of the life which had meant so much to him. He was no longer ambitious, no longer striving for fame. His life was a hopeless void. He was a ruined man, hated by the land of his nativity, despised, ignored, or forgotten in his new country, and ravaged by ill health and severe financial reverses. He died in poverty and debt. His tragic, lonely fate is horrible to conceive! How he struggled all his life to overcome the limits of his early environment, to attain respect, to become genuinely related to the reputable and cultured class. His powerful ambition and aggression grew out of a sense of isolation and estrangement from the desired in-group, even his act of treachery was a thrust for financial and social victory. In the end, his sense of alienation was complete. He was more violently cursed and anathematized, more totally cut-off than any other American soldier in our history. Yet he followed the only way he felt he could in reaction to political and social deceit, treachery, and rejection.
No man in modern times has been more thoroughly castigated than Alger Hiss. A trusted government official who had a part in the creation of the United Nations Charter, he was indicted and found guilty of perjury with reference to espionage activities and communist affiliations. The prosecuting attorney, during his trials, called him another Benedict Arnold, another Judas Iscariot. Whether one believes Hiss was lying or not, perhaps the great need to punish him grew out of his unyielding refusal to acknowledge guilt. In America we make allowances for the penitent confessor, but we are particularly vengeful when the evidence points to a man’s guilt and he absolutely refuses to concede any breach of conduct. The public mind may expiate the avowed evils of a man, even respect him for his public acknowledgment of guilt, but it does not ordinarily cherish innocence of thought, purity of values, and the ways of a good life. We are more sympathetic with confessions than we are rewarding of intransigent honesty. Perhaps this reflects the state of man’s morals and ethics today. Modern man is not expected to say what he means, and he is not expected to do what he says particularly when he is seeking notoriety, status, and monetary gain. Sometimes we acclaim the reformed individual. Why is there such joy in America in defaming a man of good character and great reputation? Perhaps because we are all sinners at heart and fear our own public exposure.
Much of the hostile public clamor during the Hiss trials so clearly reflected in the newspapers and journals came about because Hiss would not confess. He maintained his story throughout. Perhaps his refusal to admit guilt was his real crime. We become annoyed with a man who is “evidently” lying but will not admit it. Perhaps we are threatened because he leaves a trace of doubt within us that our punishment is an act of grave injustice. We have to live with our conscience when we condemn a man who consistently maintains his innocence.
What happens to a man who has a reputable place in society, a responsible public position, which is dissipated, when social opinion turns against him? He becomes an estranged person, cut-off from his own talents and capacities, alienated from society, removed from the very sources of his own inner self. He is denied resources and opportunities for a creative life. He lives in isolation as a socially condemned and maligned person. Alger Hiss must have experienced terrible loneliness—maintaining his innocence throughout the terrible ordeal of committee investigations, Grand Jury hearings, and two public trials. He repeatedly claimed he was telling the truth, but he was not trusted or believed. In the end, he used all his resources, financial and otherwise, to prove that he had not been a Communist and that he had not stolen and photographed confidential government documents. He expended every energy to prove to his friends and the American people that he had not violated the trust placed in him. But finally, a jury decided he was lying. Alger Hiss claimed the hearings were unjust. He consistently maintained his innocence even though the antagonism against him increased; and, in the eyes of the public, he was worse than a thief because he would not confess his obvious crimes and would not beg to be forgiven. What terrible anguish he must have suffered—what bitter loneliness, what torments and tortures of the spirit, when increasingly and everywhere men who once trusted him turned away from him and doubted his integrity and veracity.
When Hiss first learned he had been accused of communist activities he immediately and publicly denied the charges. He requested a hearing before the Un-American Activities Committee to deny the charges under oath. From the beginning he felt the committee considered him guilty, with Mundt declaring “Certainly there is no hope for world peace under the leadership of men like Alger Hiss,” even before his first hearing before the committee. He felt that some members of the committee had a political stake in punishing him and, more than the judge and jury, he felt he had been tried and found guilty by the committee. His associations with Whittaker Chambers were regularly and dramatically displayed by the committee, in hearings, reports, articles, speeches, and remarks to the press, radio, and television. He believed that Richard Nixon (who rose to fame as senator and vice-president after the Hiss trials and who came into the public eye as a result of them) was prejudiced against him from the first and was particularly bent on vilifying him. He discovered that Nixon had befriended Chambers. He quoted Chambers as follows:
Senator Nixon’s role did not end with his dash back to the United States to rally the House Committee when the microfilm was in its hands. His testimony before the Grand Jury that indicted Alger Hiss is a significant part of the Hiss Case. Throughout the most trying phases of the Case, Nixon and his family, and sometimes his parents, were at our farm, encouraging me and comforting my family. My children have caught him lovingly in a nickname. To them, he is always “Nixie,” the kind and the good, about whom they will tolerate no nonsense. His somewhat martial Quakerism sometimes amused and always heartened me. I have a vivid picture of him, in the blackest hour of the Hiss Case, standing by the barn and saying in his quietly savage way (he is the kindest of men): “If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil.”{72}
Specifically, Hiss was accused of perjury on two counts before the Grand Jury. These charges grew out of Chambers’ story that he had seen Hiss every week or ten days from early 1935 until mid-April of 1938, and that from 1937 on he had come to Hiss’ house regularly, at night, to receive from him State Department documents in their original form or in typewritten copies. Hiss’ denial of these charges led the Grand Jury to indict him for perjury. Yet this same Grand Jury failed to indict Chambers who admitted he had perjured himself.
Hiss felt the loneliness of not being listened to, not being understood, not being trusted. In the second trial (the first ended in the jury’s failure to render a verdict) Hiss felt he could no longer call on former friends—the public bias and hostility had become so great.
It seemed as though strong forces would attack any step, however justified, that was taken in my behalf—jurors, judge, witnesses all were vilified. As with the attacks on Judge Kaufman (the presiding judge in the first trial) and the jurors the effect on these attacks was definite. Because we did not wish to cause further attacks on the two justices (of the Supreme Court) who had known me well enough to be qualified to testify as to my character, we did not ask them to testify at the next trial.{73}
Alger Hiss felt he had not had a just and unbiased trial. He felt he was tried by slanted articles in newspapers and radio reports in which a verdict of guilty with the maximum penalty was urged. He felt he was condemned by members of the Un-American Activities Committee who continuously persecuted him in the hearings and pronounced him guilty in public statements. The trials against avowed Communists were held in the same courtroom during Hiss’ first trial. Judith Coplin (a government worker caught with confidential documents in her possession) was being judged during the second trial. Both these hearings fanned public resentment against Hiss.
Whether one believes Hiss was too dishonest or too honest, whether one believes he was crafty or naive, whether one believes he was crucified by political ambitions and a hostile anti-communist feeling sweeping America at the time, or whether one believes his punishment and imprisonment were justified, the tragedy remains that he has maintained his innocence and continues to search for evidence which will ferret out the truth. The tragedy remains that he has been deprived of a creative public life and society has been deprived of his valuable talents and resources. Mr. Hiss continues to suffer defamation of character and the social rejection of an unreconstructed rebel. His rebellion is his refusal to accept the verdict of the American people that he is guilty of perjury and espionage. This struggle, this determination to be vindicated in the court of public opinion, means he must continue to use his resources to defend. Being cut-off and alienated from his society, his only solution is that of a lonely person whose achievement or glory remains in the past.
Perhaps the entire truth may someday be revealed, a truth which both Chambers and Hiss could honor, one which would enable Hiss to live as a creative person, using his creative mind and capabilities to enhance himself and human life everywhere in the world. Only the future can determine what the torment and utter loneliness and dejection Hiss has experienced in being publicly damned will lead him to do but it already seems clear that he has achieved a depth of sensitivity and awareness, that he has come to himself as a person in a way that only lonely suffering could have helped him achieve. He may have lost his place in society but he has gained his own self. He has come to himself through hardship, and suffering, and through a sense of separation, social isolation, and private internment. He has been forced to examine his life and to depend for his nourishment and growth on his own being. In doing so, he has exercised self-potentialities, realized a depth of human experience, and known an affinity to nature and life which are beyond the insights and awarenesses of ordinary men. In the fullest sense, he has come to be a courageous man in the hours of deepest pain when he had to stand entirely alone
In exposing Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers believed he was opening before the world, in a compelling way, the inevitable clashing of two irreconcilable forces in modern life, Communism and Freedom. Mr. Chambers identified himself with Freedom and associated Hiss with Communism. Yet this issue which motivated Chambers to denounce Communists in America was never recognized as significant by millions of Americans who were concerned primarily with the question of who was telling the truth. The general public failed to understand his mission and Mr. Chambers keenly felt the vitriolic contempt of people in numerous and widespread attacks against him. In his own words, he conveys the feeling of being victimized, exclaiming:
Against me was an almost solid line-up of the most powerful groups of men in the country, the bitterly hostile reaction of much of the press, the smiling skepticism of much of the public, the venomous calumnies of the Hiss forces, the all but universal failure to understand the real meaning of the Case or my real purpose.{74}
The almost violent opposition, the sudden aloofness of former friends and the outright withdrawal of others, made Chambers realize how utterly alone he was in the world. He began to sense the weight of his own personal inadequacies and the enormous futility of his efforts. He longed for solitude, for isolation. He could not bear the torment of constant condemnation. He wished to be completely alone. As the pain increased, slowly, gradually, then suddenly, he wished not to be at all. For him, as the hearings proceeded, a physical freezing settled around his heart, a feeling of such total repulsion that he died in spirit and will long before the wish for physical death overcame him.
Loneliness for Whittaker Chambers did not begin with the Hiss-Chambers confrontation. From his earliest years, he suffered a deep sense of alienation from his family, from other children, and from his teachers. His had been an extremely difficult birth, a painful, torturous ordeal of which his mother never ceased to remind him. She gave him the name Jay Vivian which he deeply hated, and which he changed as soon as he was able. The initial experience of being singled out for rebuke and ridicule by other children occurred on his first day of school. His name was called by his teacher and a loud ripple of laughter swept the other children and resounded in his ears long after the incident was over. It left him feeling bitter and loathsome. He soon hated school and everything about it. His torment continued throughout public school and left deep emotional scars to remind him of his odious nature. His family could give him no support against the alien world, for within his life in the family there was a marked, weird separation, an absence of genuine love and respect, and beyond this a cold familial atmosphere and an indefinable, pervasive sense of doom. He was constantly at odds with his mother and father and in very different ways. He was frequently belittled and made to feel worthless. He was often subjected to a bizarre, extremely inhuman, and unhealthy family existence. To escape the malady of life in school and the malady of life at home, Mr. Chambers sought refuge in the fields and woods. Here he could live quietly, in silence. Here he would not be harassed by the jests and raillery of his classmates or broken in self-esteem and confidence by his family. In nature he could find temporary peace and some joy. He could see and hear and feel at one with growing life. Even at night the loneliness of the woods was never as disturbing as the presence of people by daylight. The woods were his haven in a world filled with pain and rejection.
Loneliness pervaded his early life wherever he went. The loneliness at home and school increasingly destroying his sense of value and his feeling for humanity while the loneliness in the woods gave him strength to live and enabled him to relate to nature at a time when no other relationship was possible.
As he reached young manhood, the tragic suicidal death of his brother nearly destroyed him. This death severely increased his bitterness and sense of resentment against the deteriorating values of society. He cursed the world as vulgar, stupid, complacent, inhumane, materialistic. He felt that the toxins of a slowly decaying world poisoned all life within it, that the human world had died in soul and in essential values, that there was nothing in life to facilitate genuine growth and healthy relatedness. He had struggled a long, long time to keep his brother alive, saving him repeatedly only at the last moment from successful suicide. This death was not only a terribly lonely lamentation and mourning but it was like a final blow, a crushing psychic defeat to Whittaker who had so little to love. His feeling of terrible loneliness and desolation is conveyed in a poem he wrote as he left his brother’s burial place for the last time.
Fall on me, snow,
Cover me up;
Cover the houses and the streets.
Let me see only in the light of another year
The roofs and the minds that killed him,
And the earth that holds him,
Forever dead.{75}
At last, he felt he found the answer. The only hope for the world would come through communism. He believed this for some years and worked for the communist goals until his direct experience enabled him to realize that communism violated fundamental religious truths and threatened freedom of life everywhere in the world. His thinking changed radically as he sought to expose the destructive components of communism and to reveal to the world how communism violates the soul, and God, and freedom. He was willing to disturb the tranquil life he knew on a farm with his wife and two children and his position as a senior editor with Time magazine because he believed that disclosing the names of the Communists he had associated with, many of whom had been in the State Department, would be a resounding victory for God and freedom in America. With each informing came the certain conviction that something within him was dying. What was dying was his right to live, his right to be a person, his right to work and develop his potentialities. He realized he could not destroy another human being without at the same time degrading and destroying himself. Mr. Chambers describes in the following passages the meaning and impact of being a witness against men he had respected and even loved.
There is in men a very deep-rooted instinct that they may not inform against those whose kindness and affection they have shared, at whose tables they have eaten and under whose roofs they have slept, whose wives and children they have known as friends—and that regardless of who those others are or what crimes they have committed. It is an absolute prohibition. It is written in no book, but it is more binding than any code that exists. If of necessity a man must violate that prohibition, and it is part of the tragedy of history that, for the greater good, men sometimes must, the man who violates it must do so in the full consciousness that there is a penalty. That penalty is a kind of death, most deadly if a man must go on living. It is not violent. It is not even a deepening shadow. It is a simple loss of something as when a filter removes all color from the light.{76}
He could not free his mind from the organic revulsion he experienced with every word of denunciation, with every accusation. His sense of tragic doom, the spirit of loneliness so compelling in his childhood and youth came to the fore, again disrupting the peaceful years of marriage and fatherhood and his productive work with Time magazine. The pressures were personal, social, editorial, disruptive, slanderous, and, above all, unremitting. He was constantly subjected to insubordination, hostility, and insulting behavior by members of his own staff.
In the end, he felt he must testify against the Communists he had known. He felt he could not be spared, that this, however revolting, was the whole purpose of his existence—to awaken America against the evils of communism, to alert America to the dangers and secretive activities that are being plotted in tunnels and in the dark and behind closed doors. Testifying meant he would be execrated, and, though he would vilify others, not doing so meant he would deny his only mission in life and destroy his own soul. So he chose to tell his story—all of it—but as he did the meaning and value of work and life and love died too.
His powerful friends, who might have been expected to help him, were distinguished chiefly by a prudent use of their resources. Whittaker Chambers was more alone than he ever thought possible during hearings before the Un-American Activities Committee, the New York Grand Jury, and the two public trials, the last of which ended in the conviction of Alger Hiss.
I was master neither of the situation nor of anything else. My sole thought was to endure a situation that I felt in prospect, and much more acutely while it was going on, as pure horror. In face of that intensely hostile crowd and the ordeal of taking the stand publicly again, I scarcely cared whether or not the hearing was all that stood between me and powerful enemies.{77}
The pain was sometimes overwhelming. The constant glares and attacks were exhausting. He often experienced the strongest feeling of being treated with blistering condescension of being looked upon as a kind of human filth. He was aware of hidden meanings and unrelentless nuances of expression playing over him directed towards breaking him. It brought an eerie, creepy feeling which aroused suspicion in him and kept him filled with tension, shook him, and affected his ability to speak and think sharply and clearly. He would slip to his knees, bowed down with worry and fear, and pray to find peace within his heart and soul, pray for the strength to continue.
From the beginning, he felt that the press had sought to break him. It was an attitude very hard to bear because it was set like cement. There was no way to counteract it. There was no defense against it. He felt the whole world beyond the borders of his farm surging out against him, motivated by curiosity, hostility, or simple intellectual prejudice. No depravity was too bizarre to “explain his motives.” No speculation was too fantastic, no interpretation too preposterous to uncover the “disturbed, psychopathic” nature of his personality. All kinds of doctrines were discovered to account for his “distorted visions.” He felt deeply alone too when he saw that the nation considered the battle between Hiss and himself a grudge fight, when he saw that the nation would not accept as fact that his only purpose was to defeat the forces of communism in America and to glorify freedom of thought and a Christian way of life. He could not make others see that it was a life and death struggle for democracy, not simply a matter of who lied and who told the truth. Unable to communicate his vital message, he felt increasingly alienated, increasingly lonely. He wondered that no friend ever came, ever penetrated to the roots of his function and responsibility as a witness. No person ever genuinely understood his call. In the whole nation there was no priest, no minister, no fellow Quaker, no neighbor who truly grasped what he was trying to do. No one ever came to him to say, “I do not want to ask or to tell you anything. I simply want you to know I am with you.” There was no one at all. No one ever came.
He felt he had already caused his family irrevocable loss and grief. He could not share with them the vast torment of his testimony and examination. He laid himself open to God, sought guidance in prayer, let himself enter into the spiritual silences of the universe. Emptied of thought and feeling, he was momentarily delivered of his wretchedness and his terrible isolation, and in its place was an image, the image of a Russian revolutionist who, as the only protest he was able to make against the flogging of his fellow prisoners, drenched himself in kerosene, ignited himself and burned himself to death. Desperately, more and more he wished to be by himself, alone. At one point the pain of loneliness, the suffering in being mistreated, misunderstood, and mistrusted, and the restrictiveness of not being able to share his experience with any one were so great that he attempted suicide.
Everything in his life, his every act seemed futile. All the torment, suffering, attack and counterattack, were entirely futile, contributing to his sense of total defeat and his sense that he had misunderstood life with consequent disaster to all he met. He was reaching the limit of his strength to go on. He felt that no act less extreme than his abortive suicide could have disciplined him to be able to endure the public tirade and rebuke which he was to face until the trials came to an end. From the experience, he took away the indispensable certainty that all he ever had a right to pray to God for was the strength equal to meet necessity.
Whether Whittaker Chambers told the truth or perpetrated a grand impersonation of unmatched deception, he lost his sense of value in life and his existence became a static one. His vast reservoir of literary talent, his keen mind, his rare ability to depict in a deep significant way issues of human consequence now remain unexpressed in a veritable wasteland. Alger Hiss has deeply suffered too—a brilliant career has been cut short—a talented American has been deeply wounded. Was Chambers’ mission successful? Has communism suffered a severe defeat in America? Have freedom, peace, individuality, creativity, been advanced? Has anything constructive happened as the result of the Hiss Case? Mr. Chambers answers these questions himself. He believes the world has become even more threatening, and cold, and lonely. He believes the world is heading for an even more terrible witness or total disaster. His last years, as he describes them in Witness, are tragic.
For myself, I now view the stars with the curiosity of any man who wonders in what form his soul may soon be venturing among them. For the Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people—not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in. Repeatedly, in this last autumn of unseasonable warmth, my wife has drawn me out to stand with her among our gardens, once so pleasant, now overgrown with weeds, because, as we say, neither of us really fooling the other, we no longer can find time to tend them. It is not time that we cannot find. Repeatedly, my wife has planned what we must do to bring them back to life. We do not do it. I do not think we shall unless time itself can lift from us the sense that we have lived our lives and the rest is a malingering.
This, which we both feel, we force ourselves seldom to entertain as a thought. For, with us, discipline must take the place of energy in that life to which it is our children, of course, who bind us. It is for them that we run through the routines of our days, outwardly cheerful, for we count among our blessings the fact that, a very few years more, and we shall be safely dispensable. Our trouble is that the smallest things now have power to disturb our precarious self-discipline—an unkindness, a meanness, or, on a greater scale, a sudden insight into the smugness of the world before its vast peril, or an occasional reminder that we are still beset by enemies that are powerful and vindictive. Then it becomes an effort to sustain those formal good spirits that are our hourly improvisation—the necessary grace notes to lead the ear away from the ground-bass which is our reality. For there are kinds of music that the world should not hear.
In the countryside, people are already beginning to plan for the spring which they can sense, like a thaw-wind, just beyond the drift of winter. It is three years since I have been able to plough a field on this farm. I have sometimes thought that, if, in this coming spring, my son and I could simply work and seed a field and watch it sprout, an absolute healing would follow. Or my wife and I have sometimes said that a year, or even six months, completely unharried by the world and its agencies, would refit us for struggle. For it is a season of peace that, like the world, we most crave, and, like the world, are most unlikely to get. Failing that, our spirits fall back upon an ultimate petition where our fears and hopes are one....In a world grown older and colder, my wife and I have no dearer wish for ourselves—when our time shall have come, when our children shall be grown, when the witness that was laid on us shall have lost its meaning because our whole world will have borne a more terrible witness or it will no longer exist.{78}
It is sad to read these words, to see Whittaker Chambers dying, immobilized, paralyzed, unable, insensitive to the riches of life. It is heart-rending to feel his stationary existence as he waits to die, to know his talents and potentialities lay buried in a passive, meaningless life. What a terrible loss! Here is a man with vast potentialities, a rare skill of perceptiveness and sensitivity and insight. Here is a man with a precious ability to see through to the heart of events and issues and to articulate them broadly, genuinely, uniquely, in a beautiful, elegant, creative literary style. Here is a man who thinks for himself, who experiences deeply enough and writes artistically enough to require his audience to contemplate and relate—not simply to read but to give serious consideration and meditation to important questions, issues, and values of our time. Here is a gifted man who speaks no more.