Chapter 5: The First HUAC Hearing

02/01/23 • 13 min

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

Above, Elizabeth Bentley, who gave evidence at the first HUAC hearing. Pic: Library of Congress

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers is Time Magazine’s Senior Editor. He is forced against his will to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee about his past in the Communist underground. He names seven names, but the Committee zeroes in on one of them — Alger Hiss. With this begins the doom of both men, major climate change in American politics, and the career of a future President.

Further Research:

Episode 5: The best book about the colorful House Un-American Activities Committee is Walter Goodman’s “The Committee: The extraordinary career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1968). Goodman was a liberal, mildly mocking of HUAC, but even he had to admit that 1948 was HUAC’s “Vintage Year.” Pages 247-67 concern the Hiss-Chambers hearings.

Chambers’ account of his testimony is at pages 535-50 of the 1980 Regnery Gateway edition of “Witness.” Other accounts are in Alistair Cooke (1952) at 55-59 and Weinstein (2013) at 13-18.

A lacerating review of Alistair Cooke’s book (the 1950 edition) was written by the great British feminist and essayist Rebecca West, was published in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1952, and is available at https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2686&context=uclrev. I commend Mr. Cooke’s book especially for the narration of the trials, which I believe he covered for The Manchester Guardian. His verbal sketches of the courtroom scenes — the judges, lawyers, and witnesses — are almost worthy of Henry James. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Cooke retained so much of his English detachment that he fell for Hiss’s pose as an honorable gentleman; and Cooke simply does not get the red-hot Chambers. Cooke’s courtroom descriptions are wonderful, but my opinion is that Ms. West’s criticisms are correct. By the 1952 edition of his book, which covers Hiss’s claims of “forgery by typewriter” (Podcast #25), Cooke seems to have concluded that Hiss was guilty.

Richard Nixon, though he was almost silent during Chambers’ first testimony, recorded his impressions of Chambers in the first chapter of his 1962 book “Six Crises” (“Never . . . was a more sensational investigation started by a less impressive witness.”).

The transcript of most of HUAC’s 1948 Communist hearings was published in 2020 by Alpha Editions. “Hearings Regarding Communist Espionage in the United States Government, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, Second Session, Public Law 601 (Section 121, Subsection Q(2)).” Chambers’ first testimony is at 563-84. I find these transcripts fascinating because you see HUAC’s members first believe Chambers, then Hiss, and then slowly conclude that Hiss is, as Representative Hebert said, the greatest actor that America has ever produced.

Questions: Imagine you are Whittaker Chambers. You are forced in 1948 to testify about your underground Communist past. Do you talk about the chat group only, or the spy ring, too? The first was silly, the second was a crime. Do you name names, including the brilliant man who was your only friend in those years?

About naming the names of your co-conspirators, you had less than 24 hours notice before your testimony. There was no time to reach out and call them. Maybe they reformed shortly after you did and are leading upstanding lives like you are.

Before Congressional committees, there are no rules of evidence. Any question may be asked and any answer may be given. What questions can you anticipate? If you testify only about the chat group and you are asked point blank about spying, what answer will you give? Reveal the crime of spying, or commit perjury? How do you say something, something to alert the government and the public to the truth, without ruining your life and your friends’ lives?

Based just on this first testimony, do you find Chambers generally believable? Totally believable? Do you fear that, while telling the truth most of the time, he may succumb to the temptation to brighten pastel shades into primary colors to make his story more dramatic? What is his motive to tell the truth? What is his motive to lie? Does he seem a reluctant witness? Do you have a feeling that, once he got the subpoena, he thought to himself, “OK, let ‘er rip. There’s gonna be a big scene and I want to be the star”? Do the questions and comments of the HUAC members and staffers, especially Chief Investigator Stripling, give you confidence in HUAC as a finder of fact? What is your impression of the Acting Chairman, Karl Mundt, and of Hiss’s chief defender, the racist, anti-Semite, Democrat, and ardent New Dealer from Mississippi, “Lightnin’ John” Rankin?

Above, Elizabeth Bentley, who gave evidence at the first HUAC hearing. Pic: Library of Congress

Further Research:

Chambers’ account of his testimony is at pages 535-50 of the 1980 Regnery Gateway edition of “Witness.” Other accounts are in Alistair Cooke (1952) at 55-59 and Weinstein (2013) at 13-18.

Previous Episode

Chapter 4: Communism in the 1930s

Photo: Craig Whitehead on Unsplash

The backdrop of this case is American Communism — infatuation with it and disillusionment with it. Communism predicted a violent upheaval that would produce a better life. In actual practice, it produced only drab, poverty-stricken dictatorships that killed and starved millions. Around 1935, the American Communist Party stopped acting revolutionary and posed as “liberals in a hurry.” It got a few hundred Americans to join the Communist underground and work secretly for the Soviet Union. The issue is whether Hiss was one of those people.

Further Research Episode 4: Podcast 4: The great book of Communism is Das Kapital, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I’ve always found it impenetrably dense and boring; to follow it you have to know a lot about 19th century factories. The best short (and readable) works expounding Communist theory and action plans are two by Marx, The Communist Manifesto and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Among the many works from the Soviet Union describing Communism, the best short ones, in my opinion, are Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” and Stalin’s “The Foundations of Leninism.”

The best books about the reality and results of Communism are the short “Communism: A History,” by Richard Pipes and the long “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,” by Stephane Courtois and others.

Two excellent descriptions of what it felt like to live in the 1930s and lose faith in laissez-faire Capitalism, and perhaps briefly to fall for Communism, are (1) Alistair Cooke's book about the Case, "A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss" (Knopf 1950 and 1952), the first Chapter, titled "Remembrance of Things Past: The 1930s," and (2) Murray Kempton's essays about the radicals of the 1930s, "Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties" (Simon & Schuster 1955 and The Modern Library 1998), the first chapter, titled "A Prelude."

All these books are available on Amazon.

Questions: What do you think was the appeal of Soviet Communism in the 1930s? What did Communism have that fascism, socialism, and The New Deal lacked?

If you came to believe in Communism, what would make you lose your confidence in it? The obvious lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, the American Party’s slavish adherence to every 180 degree change in the Party line from Moscow, the purge trials of 1936-38, and Stalin hopping into bed with Hitler in their 1939 Non-Aggression Pact?

Does Communism sound like a secular religion — with its all-encompassing philosophy, sacred texts, worshipped founders, and martyrs?

Might part of Communism’s appeal in the 1930s, compared to conventional religion, be that (1) it claimed to be rational, even scientific, (2) it promised paradise here on earth in just a few years (you don’t have to wait for heaven), (3) you don’t have to work for it (it’s on the inevitable ‘timetable of history’), and (4) it frees the individual from any sense of personal sin?

If you devoted your life to Communism and the Party and became disillusioned, what would you do? Decide you had a bad picker when it came to politics and move on to baseball or real estate? Remain a Marxist but not a Party member — hope another group will form and be “real Communists”? Become a Socialist, or ‘get real’ and join the Republicans or the Democrats? Or, like Chambers and a few others, make anti-Communism the mainspring of the rest of your life?

Next Episode

Chapter 6: Hiss' Denial

Richard M. Nixon, Library of Congress

Alger Hiss calmly and patiently denies Whittaker Chambers’ two charges: that the two of them were in the Communist underground in 1934-37 and that they became close friends. The Commie-hunters on the House Un-American Activities Committee are swept away by his poise and simplicity and tell him what a wonderful witness he is. Only two listeners smell something fishy in Hiss’ carefully phrased testimony: a staffer named Robert Stripling and a freshman Republican Representative named Richard Nixon. The two form a team of rivals (each claiming credit for the tall thinking and smart talking) and change history. All four men are now inextricably intertwined in a scandal that will rock the nation. Further Research

Episode 6: Robert Stripling’s book (largely ghostwritten by the popular writer Bob Considine) is “The Red Plot Against America” (Bell 1949); it describes Hiss’s testimony and reactions to it at 110-16. More accounts of Hiss’s first testimony are; Nixon at 5-11; Smith at 161-83; Toledano at 151-54; and Weinstein at 21-28. The full transcript of Hiss’s testimony is in the Alpa Editions reprint of the HUAC hearings at 642-59.

Alger Hiss’s memoir of the Case, “In the Court of Public Opinion” (Knopf 1957) describes at 3-14 Hiss’s reaction to Chambers’ accusations and his first testimony in response. This book is so dry (in it, Hiss never once describes having a feeling) that it has been called the only boring book ever written about this Case. More interesting pro-Hiss reading is the John Chabot Smith book referenced above and a pro-Hiss book that focuses on Nixon’s misstatements and craftiness (a territory almost as target-rich as Hiss’s testimonies), “A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss” (McGraw Hill 1979) by Morton and Michael Levitt.

Questions: You’re Alger Hiss, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a minor luminary of America’s post-War foreign policy establishment. Whittaker Chambers testifies to HUAC that the two of you were in a secret Communist chat group 10-15 years ago and that you two became best friends.

What do you do?

Several options: (1) Do nothing, because no one who matters to your life cares a fig for what goes on at HUAC; (2) appear before the Committee with both guns blazing, in the style of the Hollywood Communists (but remember they came to a sticky end); (3) admit, sheepishly, that back in the dark days of the Great Depression, when you were just out of grad school and had more youthful idealism than good judgment, you did something very foolish that, fortunately, did no harm in the long run and you stopped doing it years ago; and (4) calmly deny Chambers’ charges like a gentleman who will not stoop to wrestle in the mud; tough it out, hope Chambers gets tangled up in melodrama, and that, with your sterling reputation and friends in high places, you can emerge in two weeks as fabulous as always and with the added sheen of having repulsed a despicable smear campaign. Hiss chose #4.

If you were Hiss, would your choice depend much on whether Chambers’ charges were true? What if they were true and you knew that you two had also been in a spy ring, a major league crime that Chambers could blackmail you with for the rest of your life if you admitted to the chat group and the friendship? But since he was in the spy ring, too, you could blackmail him for the rest of his life.

Extra Credit Question: I assume that by now you have read parts of Hiss’s testimony and its dissection by Nixon and Stripling. As you read Hiss for the first time, did you notice any of the suspicion-raising bits that Nixon and Stripling saw?