August 1948
“Are you Mr. Alger Hiss?” Stripling asked.
“Yes; I am.”
“Please stand and be sworn. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.”
“Be seated.”
I could see we had a very different witness in Alger Hiss. This wasn’t the doughy, mush-mouthed Chambers we were up against. Hiss was tall, thin, prim, and patrician in manner. He’d gone to Johns Hopkins and, inevitably, Harvard Law School. He was cut from the same cloth as Jerry Voorhis—a high-minded liberal reformer.
The hearing room was more than a third full this time. The usual clerks and interns and hangers-on, but also a few reporters who could already smell blood in the water. A very tall man stood leaning against the back wall. Another lawyer? I couldn’t tell.
Alger Hiss didn’t seem at all shaken at being called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He took the stand and faced the committee with the poise of an Olympic fencer. He told us how he’d worked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and served as secretary-general at the United Nations charter conference. He told us very plainly that he had never met anyone named Whittaker Chambers, that he was not and never had been a Communist, and that the whole business was absurd and confusing.
He played to the crowd. Here was an honest American singled out for Kafkaesque persecution by an utter stranger who claimed to have lived with him and been his close friend and who alleged that together they’d stolen U.S. government secrets and given them to the Soviet Union. Hiss was politely, firmly, innocently baffled.
What the hell was this? I was ready for a conspirator out of a melodrama. I expected evasion, fear, bluster, righteous anger, something I could beat down and break. But this?
I realized with a sick dread that I might really have gotten the wrong man. I’d been swept up in this grand idea that now seemed incredibly thin and, arguably, a little childish. Was I actually going to try to convince the world this guy was a Soviet secret agent? Where was my evidence? It was like accusing him of being a leprechaun. As proof, I had only the word of weird Mr. Chambers with his slurred speech and his sleepy demeanor and his foul breath, and I began to wonder why I’d staked my career on this guy’s fairy story of ultimate evil.
I couldn’t just apologize and walk away. I had grandstanded for the press and vowed to bring a dangerous conspiracy to light. Hiss was my star attraction and there was no way out but to try to convict him. And Hiss knew it; he saw that it was him or me, that one of us was going to be ruined over this. I could tell from the way he faced up to me on the stand. He hadn’t come looking for this fight, but he obviously had every intention of destroying me.
I thought about whether Hiss might be innocent, but I had a terrible feeling that it was too late for that. The decision had been made. At thirty-five I knew this much about myself, that if I had to choose between ruining my career and convicting Hiss, I would go ahead and convict him. And if he was innocent, maybe I would do something for him later? Of course I would. Once I was in the Senate, I would fix everything.
The following day we brought Chambers back in to explain himself. I demanded, coaxed, begged him to give some solid evidence to support his story. He knew Hiss. He gave a detailed and intimate portrait of Hiss’s life in the 1930s in a quiet, spare little apartment on a dead-end street in a Washington suburb. He had an eye for the telling detail and he seemed to nurse some private grievance. He described Hiss’s wife, another Communist, as “a short, highly nervous, little woman with a habit of blushing red when she is excited or angry, fiery red.” Her son Timmy by an earlier partner was “a puny little boy, also rather nervous.”
The Hisses were struggling, decent, overeducated civil servants; Chambers was a persistent lodger and hanger-on and, possibly, a friend. Chambers’s self-portrait was unsentimental, unsparing, and uncomfortably pathetic. He had been a struggling writer who couldn’t pay his bills. He received the Hisses’ car as a gift, and they forgave him his unpaid rent. Finally he told us in unambiguous language that Hiss was a Communist and a true believer. Hiss and Chambers stole United States government secrets together until Chambers had a change of heart. He’d seen something that changed his mind, something disturbing he refused to divulge. He pleaded with Hiss to leave the Communist Party, and when Hiss wouldn’t, Chambers ended their friendship forever.
When Hiss returned eight days later, he corroborated the domestic details with cool exactness. He was candid and quietly dignified as we rummaged through his personal history. He and his wife were still together. Timmy had grown up, served in the navy; he’d run off somewhere but was in touch through a psychiatrist. Hiss didn’t know a Whittaker Chambers or anyone of this description. The hearing room was shifting uncomfortably—people had come for a story, a drama, and they were getting something a little more human and disappointing. Someone here was acting in bad faith—someone besides myself, that is—but who?
Finally, after long deliberation, Hiss gave us something. That morning, he said, a name occurred to him, a lodger from 1933. A failed writer, he said, a man with bad teeth who had neglected to pay his rent. He had disappeared from their lives in 1935. He wrote the name on a pad of paper in front of him—George Crosley. We agreed that the following day both men would appear together and meet face to face. And we would learn whether this was an international Communist conspiracy, or a dumpy, delusional middle-aged man.
The next morning the hearing room was packed. The story had been building in the papers all week, the spy syndicate, the accusation, all hinging on the conundrum of the missing friend, and now we’d learn the truth. I could do only so much to stage-manage this. Chambers (or George Crosley, or whoever) would simply have to make the charges stick and my political career would live or die accordingly.
Hiss arrived and pointedly did not look at Chambers. He took his time through the opening questions, speaking slowly and clearly. He coolly requested we call the Harvard Club to tell them he’d be late for an appointment. Chambers sat quietly across the room until the time came, and we called him to the front.
“Mr. Hiss,” I said, “the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before.”
Alerted, Hiss stood and approached by a few steps, gunslinger taut. “May I ask him to speak? Will you ask him to say something?”
Hiss examined Chambers, who complied with a childlike docility. He answered biographical questions, read from a copy of Newsweek to demonstrate his speaking voice. Hiss had him open his mouth so he could inspect his teeth, strangely decayed. He sat down and cross-examined him until he reluctantly identified him as a man he had known casually under the name George Crosley.
All the while, Chambers spoke to Hiss as he would to an intimate friend, gently and with a certain violence—an intimate friend whose reputation he was going to ruin.
Hiss got out of his chair and advanced on Chambers and had to be restrained. He seemed pushed past the point of endurance. Chambers watched Hiss with a look that was both wounded and nakedly hungry, like he was gazing at a lost love.
The terrible thing was that I thought I understood them; the story made perfect sense with or without the spying. They’d been friends back when they were also people struggling to make their mark, people like me, just as talented, just as intelligent, only a millimeter less fortunate. Moving from one slightly too shabby apartment to the next; begging favors, falling behind on rent. They had shared some secret, too shameful or fearful for their friendship to sustain.
Hiss had made himself into a very different man than the one Chambers had known. He was a rising star now, brilliant and respected. That memory of a closeness between the vulnerable, awkward people they’d been was still with them, a delicate, embarrassing bond unwillingly shared. I was slowly, publicly dragging him out of that lie and he’d rather perjure himself before a grand jury than admit to being the man who was friends with Chambers long ago in a walk-up apartment on P Street. I was spending taxpayer money excavating the ruins of a friendship that had ended a decade ago just so I could stay alive politically, and Hiss knew it.
Hiss made his closing remarks while glaring at me with a sad contempt. I didn’t even have the heart to glare back. Instead, I looked past him to see the tall, dark-suited man again standing at the back of the hearing room. He’d been there all day. Not watching Hiss at all. He’d been watching me.