Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case That Ignited McCarthyism

273 Pages·2013·5.648 MB·English

by  Lewis Hartshorn

Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and
the Case That Ignited McCarthyism
Lewis Hartshorn
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-0281-3

© 2013 Lewis Hartshorn. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any formor by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopyingor recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system,without permission in writing
from the publisher.

On the cover: left to right Whittaker Chambers (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS), Alger
Hiss testifying before the HUAC (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS), Hiss in Lewisburg
Federal Penitentiary (Federal Bureau of Prisons); background image (iStock-
photo/Thinkstock)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To the memory of
Albert Goldman and Bess Marie
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
I. Enemies Within
II. Richard Nixon Ascending
III. Close Friends
IV. Star Chamber
V. HUAC Questions Hiss Privately
VI. Showdown at the Hotel Commodore
VII. “The Truth Doesn’t Matter”
VIII. Wall Street Lawyer
IX. Confrontation Under Klieg Lights
X. Libel: Hiss v. Chambers
XI. Comrade Carl
XII. Saint Whittaker
XIII. Suicide Watch
Appendix: Adolf Berle Notes of Meeting with Whittaker Chambers, Sep-
tember 2, 1939
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
List of Terms
Acknowledgments
Since the Hiss-Chambers controversy broke publicly in the summer of
1948, a number of books have been written to which I’m indebted. Many are
noted in the text but I especially acknowledge Meyer Zeligs’ Friendship and
Fratricide (1967) and Allen Weinstein’s Perjury, The Hiss-Chambers Case
(1997). Both books were meticulously researched, though I find fault with their
interpretations. Zeligs’ Freudian slant added little to the essential common
sense truths he discovered, yet provided a weapon for his detractors to criti-
cally flail him, and Weinstein’s major interpretations simply fly in the face of his
research and investigations, largely because he relied heavily on Chambers as
a credible source or he suppressed evidence favorable to Hiss.
The writings and papers of the late William A. Reuben, a veritable encyclo-
pedia on the “case” for over fifty years, were indispensable.
Thanks to Robert (Bob) Clark, FDR Library archivist, who found Adolf Berle’s
1939 handwritten notes of his meeting with Chambers, believed lost for
decades. Those original notes prove that Berle’s designations “underground es-
pionage agent” did not apply to Chambers himself (as suggested by the FBI’s
copy of the notes) but to Philip Rosenbliett, accused by Chambers. The whole
truth of the Berle-Chambers meeting, distorted and misrepresented by Cham-
bers, Weinstein, and others, is presented here for the first time.
Thanks also to Jeff Kisseloff, especially for helping me obtain the Hiss
grand jury transcripts, and to Svetlana Chervonnaya for information on Col.
Boris Bykov (actually Bukov) and on Chambers’s expulsion from and readmis-
sion to the Communist Party.
Roger Sandilands, professor of economics at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, and biographer of Lauchlin Currie, read the transcript as it developed
and provided valuable criticism and enthusiastic encouragement, for which I’ll
always be grateful.
The H-Net web site H-HOAC (History of American Communism), http://www.
h-net.org/~hoac/, supported a spirited debate on the Hiss-Chambers affair for
several years, particularly from 2003 to 2007. Most interesting were the posts
by Julius N. Kobyakov, a former Soviet intelligence officer who had personally
conducted an official search of KGB archives to see if Alger Hiss had ever been
a paid or unpaid Soviet agent or source. Kobyakov discovered nothing to impli-
cate Hiss, and he was further assured by his colleagues with access to the clas-
sified GRU archives that Hiss had never been a source for military intelligence.
Preface
This book does not pretend to present an exhaustive chronicle of the Alger
Hiss–Whittaker Chambers controversy—one which encompassed months of
congressional and grand jury hearings in 1948–49, two of the longest federal
criminal trials in U.S. history, legal appeals spanning thirty years, dozens of
books and innumerable articles, a three-hour documentary, a television drama-
tization, and Internet web sites (AlgerHiss.com, WhittakerChambers.org) obliga-
tory for the twenty-first century—but this book does purport to be definitive of
Alger Hiss’s innocence, for it reveals without question that the story Whittaker
Chambers told about himself to the authorities and in his bestselling autobiog-
raphy, Witness (1952), is largely untrue and that the story he told about him-
self and Alger Hiss as confederates in the U.S. Communist underground of the
1930s is completely fraudulent.
My narrative focuses on the early months of the affair, from August 1948,
when Chambers publicly denounced Hiss and several others as dues-paying
Communists in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activi-
ties, to the following December, when Alger Hiss was indicted for perjury. The
truth emerges during these months, so I leave it to others to examine and elab-
orate on the subsequent trials and appeals, or to futilely debate whether Alger
Hiss was a Soviet agent codenamed ALES as suggested (though only in a quali-
fied footnote, added to the document years later by the FBI) by Venona decrypt
number 1822.
My goal is to illustrate that in a case long considered closed and picked
clean, history may not always be what we so confidently believe.
CHAPTER I
Enemies Within
“There could be no greater error than to suppose that historical myths
cannot be actually created by design.”1—George F. Kennan
In the late 1990s historian Theodore H. Draper remarked that anyone
under the age of fifty—and certainly forty—knows hardly anything about the
Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair.
Yet not so long ago the case stirred up the most agonizing conflict; it
separated friends and divided families. The reason for the difference today
is the change in the country and the world. The Hiss-Chambers case
turned on the threat of communism and was exacerbated by the element
of espionage. That threat has evaporated; the espionage is antiquated;
and it is necessary to use some historical imagination to see into the in-
nards of the case.
Draper wrote those words in a favorable 1997 review of two books which
are still largely accepted as the affair’s defining texts: Perjury: The Hiss-Cham-
bers Case by Allen Weinstein, and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam
Tanenhaus.2 Weinstein concluded that the jury made no mistake in convicting
Alger Hiss of perjury in 1950, and much of Weinstein’s research was made
available to Tanenhaus, who concurred. But after two decades of my own in-
vestigation of the Hiss-Chambers case I am convinced that those two books,
along with much else written about Hiss and Chambers, are deliberately con-
structed myths (i.e., stories or narratives, as myths were defined by the Greeks)
contrived, for political and professional reasons, to feed the self-satisfied chau-
vinism of the Right and to validate the prejudices of the generations who ac-
cepted and still accept the Cold War clichés symbolized by the Hiss-Chambers
case: that the liberal, the New Deal Democrat, the socialist, and the Commu-
nist were all of the same type; that a Communist equals a spy equals a traitor.
Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, but his only sacred impera-
tive is to seek the truth about what he has been told and read, and to dissemi-
nate that truth to others.3 By that standard, Weinstein and Tanenhaus, fore-
most among many, have violated that revered trust. Instead of exposing the
myths surrounding Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, and revealing the men
behind the masks, they have remodeled the facts to fit the fantasies that
shaped the myths and glossed the masks with pseudo-historical cosmetics.
“Myth, after all,” biographer Albert Goldman wrote, “is what we believe natu-
rally. History is what we must painfully learn and struggle to remember.” The
conflict of myth and history is the quintessence of the Hiss-Chambers story.4
Nevertheless, Allen Weinstein deserves credit where it is due. He begins the
1997 edition of Perjury by conveying a sense of fairness:
[S]ince the jury at Alger Hiss’s second trial [the first jury had dead-
locked, eight to four for conviction] pronounced him guilty of perjury, the
case remains controversial and the verdict leaves questions unanswered.
Did Hiss become an underground Communist while serving as a New Deal
official? Did he turn over classified State Department files to Whittaker
Chambers, a self-confessed former underground agent for the Communist
Party? Or did Chambers, for obscure and malevolent reasons, deliberately
set out to frame and destroy a respected public official?
No critical reception of any book on the controversy, whether favorable
or hostile, will resolve the debate. For any historian to assume that his re-
search has conclusively resolved the case in all its varied dimensions
would constitute self-deception at a level even higher than that achieved
by the two protagonists.
And then Weinstein sets out to show how deceptive he can be. He also tells
us that he once believed Alger Hiss was innocent. His interest in the case
began in 1969, and he subsequently published an article on Hiss-Chambers
that concluded “both men had probably lied; that Hiss hid facts concerning his
personal relationship with Chambers, while the latter had falsely accused Hiss
of Communist ties and espionage.”
Perhaps Weinstein actually changed his mind. Or perhaps, like an ancient
Greek logographer, he elected to legitimize a myth.
The Hiss case was the trial of the century of its day, yet it was much more
than two divisive trials, and anyone interested in post–World War II domestic
politics who attempts to understand the battles over the New Deal, Commu-
nism, and the Cold War can scarcely ignore it. The case emboldened Senator
Joseph McCarthy to make his first pugnacious assault on the State Department
in 1950, less than a month after Hiss’s perjury conviction. It launched future
president Richard Nixon, a first-term congressman who stage-managed most of
the Communist espionage hearings of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) in 1948, to a Senate seat in 1950 and the vice-presidency in
1952. Moreover, Hiss’s guilty verdict marked the reemergence of the conserva-
tive movement and elevated Whittaker Chambers from renegade Communist
informer to hero of the Right. Though the case had little, if any, bearing on
United States foreign policy, Victor Navasky, The Nation’s editor, said in 1980
that if any “single individual can claim credit for establishing the link between
the international cold war and the domestic one, between Soviet aggression
abroad and the red menace at home, it is Whittaker Chambers … [who] estab-
lished the fundamental cold war assumption that to be a Communist was to be
an agent of a foreign power.”5
Conservatives seized on the guilty verdict to further rebuke the policies of
the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. Hiss had joined FDR’s New Deal in
1933, advised Roosevelt at the infamous Yalta Conference in February 1945,
presided over the founding of the United Nations and personally delivered the
UN Charter to President Truman. The Right had maintained since the 1930s
that Roosevelt was a “useful idiot” of the Soviets. Truman defended Roo-
sevelt’s policies; they were sound, but we had been betrayed by Russia, our
wartime ally. By early 1947 Truman was proclaiming Communism a grave
threat to the nation. So why, conservatives asked, had we once allied ourselves
with that threat? Whittaker Chambers provided the answer they wanted to
hear:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Com-
munism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great
socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, in-
completely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has
been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades…. And with that
we come to the heart of the Hiss Case…. Alger Hiss is only one name that
stands for the whole Communist penetration of Government. He could not
be exposed without raising the question of the real political temper and
purposes of those who had protected and advanced him, and with whom
he was so closely identified that they could not tell his breed from their
own.6
For Alger Hiss and his supporters the case stood for something quite the
opposite. Hiss wrote in 1988:
I have had forty years to reflect on the origins of my case, as it was fab-
ricated by an unholy trinity bound together by the theology of anti-commu-
nism. They joined forces against me—each at an important time in his ca-
reer—in their zeal to make their theology the dominant religion of the land.
They were Richard Nixon, the power-hungry politician; J. Edgar Hoover, the
ultimate bureaucrat; and Whittaker Chambers, the perfect pawn.7
But for Democrats and liberals who sided with Whittaker Chambers at the
time (and from blue-collar workers to cosmopolitan intellectuals there were
many), the choice must have been excruciating. Not only were they helping to
promote an era of political reaction and ideological mythmaking, they were also
condoning an informer who turned on his erstwhile friend.
Even the mythmakers agree on the salient facts of the case. Whittaker
Chambers, an editor of Time magazine, appeared publicly on August 3, 1948,
as an expert witness on Communist infiltration of government before HUAC’s