Chapter 33: The Summations, and the Verdict

08/16/23 • 16 min

A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case

Prosecutor Thomas F. Murphy

In this Podcast, we hear the closing speeches, and the verdict of the second jury. In a mirror image of the first trial, this time it was Hiss’s lawyer Claude Cross who was quiet, even plodding, and it was Prosecutor Murphy (like Hiss’s barrister Stryker at the first trial) who delivered the barn-burner. Then — after a year and a half of HUAC hearings, Hiss’s libel suit, the Grand Jury proceeding, and two trials — finally comes the jury’s verdict. Further Research:- Alistair Cooke (at 335) described Mrs. Hiss after the guilty verdict was uttered as “a flushed and now ageless little gnome.” Hiss wrote that the jury’s verdict stunned him. (“Recollections of a Life” at 157.). I read elsewhere that he and his defense team had planned a victory press conference to be followed by a victory lunch. I have read in an unpublished biography of Hiss that, as he and his wife walked and then drove away from the courthouse, a few people yelled “Traitor!” but no one blocked his path or attempted physical harm. At sentencing several days later, Claud Cross was the only speaker who showed emotion. The verdict must have been crushing for him. He must have known that, despite his excellent reputation as a trier of complex corporate cases in the Boston area, fifty and a hundred years hence the only thing anyone would remember about Claud Cross was that he lost the Hiss Case. Stryker got a hung jury, but Cross lost. It must have added to his gloom that he went to his grave (in 1974) believing Hiss innocent. Alistair Cooke (at 339-40) had strong feelings at the sentencing: “It is a moment when all the great swirling moral abstractions are blacked out in a crisis of the flesh. The principles we try to live by . . . . dissolve into a formal ceremony . . . The defendant stands alone, the lawyers look through a glaze at their papers, the judge says: ‘to run concurrently.’. . . . People who had craved the confirmation of Hiss’ guilt sighed and looked palely miserable. Mr. Murphy . . . had been suddenly overcome with a rheumy blur of speech that could have come from the onset of a cold but most likely did not." Cooke recalled being at the sentencing in 1939 of Jimmy Hines, a monumentally corrupt and gangster-affiliated politician who had been unsuccessfully defended by Lloyd Paul Stryker. “[I]n that moment neither the crime nor the personality condemned is clear. You do not respond as you might expect to the case resolved or the victim labeled, or the fox run to ground. The defendant becomes a symbol of the alternative fates possible to all our characters.. . . . The man about to be sentenced is suddenly at the center of the human situation; and because he is totally disarmed he takes on the helpless dignity of the lowest common denominator.” Cooke, sad to say, never expressed the slightest sympathy for Chambers. As I wrote earlier, maybe Chambers was too much the ‘Red Hot American,’ unlike anything the very British Cooke had ever experienced. Questions: Do you agree with the second jury’s verdict? If you had been the judge, would you have sentenced Hiss to more or less time in prison? If you were Hiss speaking to the judge just before sentencing, would you have been tempted to confess, said that you had been a naive and ignorant intellectual in the depths of The Great Depression, and hoped for a lighter sentence?

Prosecutor Thomas F. Murphy

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Chapter 32: The Second Trial - The Surprise Witness

Edith Murray

This is a short podcast, describing a last-minute rebuttal witness for The Prosecution. Into court came a black woman named Edith Murray. Alistair Cooke (at 299) found her “lively.” She testified that, at times in 1935 and 1936, she had been the household servant (cleaning and cooking) for Whittaker and Esther Chambers. She knew them as the Cantwells and was told that Mr. Cantwell was home so seldom because he was a traveling salesman. The Cantwells, Mrs. Murray testified, had no social life except for one young white married couple from Washington whose female half she knew as “Miss Priscilla.” Guess who Mrs. Murray pointed at when she was asked if the young couple was in the courtroom. Some problems with her came out on cross-examination. But her testimony, if believed, showed the kind of close relationship between the families that the Chamberses alleged and the Hisses denied. Most damaging to Hiss, Mrs. Murray remembered Miss Priscilla staying overnight in the Chamberses’ apartment (in a seedy part of Baltimore) taking care of their baby when both Whittaker and Esther Chambers had to be elsewhere. How many people would you do that for? Also, this overnighter occurred in 1936, long after the Hisses swore they had got the deadbeat Chamberses/Crosleys out of their lives. Thus, the major testimonies at the second trial end on a bad note for Hiss. FURTHER RESEARCH: Remarkably, the pro-Hiss book by John Chabot Smith does not mention Mrs. Murray. Hiss, in his book “In the Court of Public Opinion,” (at 313-17, 325-26, 328, 334, 344, 366, 385-87, 396-97) mentions her at length, alleging unfair surprise, heavy-handed coaching by the FBI, and evidence against her that he didn’t have time to gather and present to the second jury. Weinstein describes Mrs. Murray’s testimony at 504. Alistair Cooke writes that, when Mrs. Murray, on the witness stand, recalled both Hisses visiting the Chamberses in the latter’s Baltimore apartment, she chuckled at the contrast between the two couples, presumably because the elegant Hisses were slumming. “And of course I could see the difference of the two couples, and right away I take notice . . . And when I see him I seen the difference in the two of them, and naturally I noticed.”(Cooke at 299, Second Trial at 4415.) Chambers (at 358-59, 393-94) describes a long and very friendly relationship between his family and Mrs. Murray. Interesting to me is Chambers’ unease (at 357-58) at an underground Communist family hiring a household servant. But almost every white family in Baltimore had one in those days, Chambers writes, and we decided that Mrs. Murray’s cleaning and cooking made her a worker as dignified and worthy as any man on a factory assembly line. The Chamberses paid her more than most whites paid their black help and, after she made dinner for the family in the evenings, Mrs. Murray sat at the table with them and had dinner with them as one of the family. To Chambers (at 358), the Communist requirement that blacks be treated as equals shows “the impact of Communism wherever it coincides with humanity and compassion, especially when the outside world denies them.” All human beings who work, even black servants, have human dignity. “Thus, by insisting on acting as Communists must, we found ourselves unwittingly acting as Christians should. I submit that this cuts to the heart of one aspect of the Communist appeal.” Equally interesting is the story of how the FBI found Mrs. Murray 12 years after she stopped working for the Chamberses. The Chamberses remembered her working for them, but recalled only her first name. Searches for “Edith” at all the Baltimore employment agencies for servants and in the Chamberses’ old neighborhood proved fruitless. Then Mrs. Chambers found in the attic a miniature portrait that she had painted of Mrs. Murray. The FBI made many photocopies of it and FBI agents fanned out into Baltimore’s black ghetto and asked people if they knew about the person in the miniature. Eventually, someone recognized Mrs. Murray and the FBI found her alive and well. She was delighted to be brought back in touch with The Cantwells because they had treated her so well and she liked the idea of working for them again. (Chambers at 359; Cooke at 300; Weinstein at 161-62; FBI FOIA Documents, https://archive.org/details/foia_Hiss_Alger-Whittaker_Chambers-NYC-53/page/n251/mode/2up?view=theater circa page 250.) This is one of several instances in this Case where the marvelous work of the FBI agents in the field contrasts to the ham-handed activities of J. Edgar Hoover (described in Podcast #37). Questions: Do you believe Mrs. Murray? If she is making it all up, her just-quoted recollections and those of the Chamberses, Mrs. Chambers’ miniature painting, and all the FBI FOIA documents (first ma...

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Chapter 34: The Impact of the Guilty Verdict on America

Alger Hiss is taken to prison Alger Hiss’s conviction — technically for perjury, but effectively for treason — was a major event. It was a disaster for The Establishment, especially liberal Democrats, and vindication for Republicans and populist Democrats. The 18 month labyrinth of HUAC hearings, depositions in Hiss’s libel suit, grand jury proceedings, and two criminal trials were the long, long overture to the so-called McCarthy Era. Senator McCarthy, in fact, gave his famous “I have a list . . .” speech just weeks after Hiss’s conviction. This Podcast gives an overview of the many and complex reactions to the guilty verdict. Everyone, it seems, accepted the factual correctness of the verdict. But many liberals could not help making up excuses for Hiss, or damning Chambers for being fat and melodramatic. And many conservatives and populists could not help painting all liberals and Harvard graduates with the black pitch of Hiss’s treason. Most interesting and encouraging to me, a significant number of liberals and Democrats were sufficiently mature and morally alive to engage in genuine introspection and self-criticism, to admit they had ‘blown it big time’ when it came to Soviet traitors in our midst, and to resolve to fashion a liberal anti-communism that was just as vigorous as what Republican conservatives had been offering for decades. FURTHER RESEARCH The McCarthy Era, although sparked by this Case, is an oceanic subject beyond the scope of these Podcasts. If you want to read about it, among the best conservative books are George H. Nash’s “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” (Basic Books 1976), esp. 84-130; and Richard Gid Powers’ “Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism” (Free Press 1995), esp. 191-272.See also Professor Harvey Klehr’s essay “Setting the Record Straight on Joe McCarthy,” https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/setting-record-joe-mccarthy-straight-harvey-klehr/. Among the far more numerous, totally anti-McCarthy books are David Caute’s “The Great Fear:The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower” (Touchstone 1979), esp. 56-62; Fred J. Cook’s “The Nightmare Decade:The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Random House 1971); Victor Navasky’s “Naming Names” (Viking 1980) (especially the early pages); I.F. Stone’s “The Truman Era: 1945-52” (Little Brown 1953) (Stone was himself a secret agent of the Soviet Union); and James A Weschler’s “The Age of Suspicion” (Random House 1953). I must note that it was a stroke of genius for the minimizers of Communist treason to name the era after anti-Communism’s most irresponsible big name. This is as if racists had succeeded in labeling the civil rights movement The Al Sharpton Movement. Concerning the impact of the Hiss verdict in particular, Dean Acheson, in his autobiography “Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department” (Norton 1987), titles his pertinent chapter (at 354) “The Attack of the Primitives Begins.” Alistair Cooke (at 340) also saw nothing good coming from Hiss’s conviction. A more mature view, at page 267 of Walter Goodman’s “The Committee:The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1968), is that the Hiss-Chambers Case “whip[ped] up a storm which did not last long but left ruins in its wake.” Other more realistic analyses of the Case’s impact on America are in Weinstein at 529-47 (chapter titled “Cold War Iconography I: Alger Hiss as Myth and Symbol”); the best single essay on this Case in my opinion, Leslie Fiedler’s “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” at 3-24 of his “An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics” (Beacon Press 1955) and Diana Trilling’s essay “A Memorandum on the Hiss Case,” first published in The Partisan Review of May-June 1950 and re-published at 27-48 of Patrick J. Swan’s anthology of essays on this Case, “Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul” (ISI Books 2003). The latter two essays I highly recommend. Questions: If you had been adult when Hiss was convicted, what would have been your reaction to his conviction? ‘Justice at long last,’ ‘a miscarriage of justice,’ ‘guilty but a fair trial was impossible,’ ‘technically guilty but with an excuse,’ or something else? Would your reaction have been purely emotional/political/tribal, or would you have cited one or more facts to support your reaction? Would you have been totally certain that your reaction was the right one, or would you have harbored some doubts?