The Case for Hiss

...The job is compact and easily read, and the effect of stringing the beads of contradiction in the prosecution's case is indeed unsettling, as intended...

...Other expert proofs, perhaps significant, but too intricate to summarize here, were assembled by the defense, intended to show that Woodstock No...

...Thereafter, every means of upsetting the conviction was exhausted, including an elaborately developed motion for a new trial and every possible appeal...

...If Cook's effort leaves us unper-suaded that Chambers (and the FBI, the House Committee, and the Justice Department) accomplished "forgery by typewriter," it is nevertheless a vivid reminder of an ugly time: a time when a passionately ambitious Nixon must still have been "young" indeed, when J. Parnell Thomas still sat in judgment on others, when the House Committee with Nixon in effective command was setting the stage for McCarthy's blastoff in February, 1950 (the month following Hiss' conviction...

...But to make the ultimate point he is bound to make, Cook is reduced to a suddenly wild and utterly unsupported charge: that the FBI followed a trail to the real Woodstock...

...When sentenced, Hiss had voiced confidence that some day he would be able to show how Chambers had committed "forgery by typewriter...

...After another lengthy trial, a second jury found him guilty on January 21, 1950...

...The defense hired a typewriter expert, after the second trial, to construct a duplicate of the ancient Woodstock 230,099, and he was surprisingly successful—after a long, costly, and technical process...

...It became necessary to change the date of the soul-searing experience...

...On a map of the 1937-1938 world of the New Deal, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler and Mussolini, is placed an over-lay of the 1948 world of the A-bomb, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Truman-Dewey campaign...

...It could hardly be otherwise...

...But on November 17, at a hearing in Hiss' libel suit against him, Chambers produced certain documents, and on December 2 the "pumpkin papers".—and espionage abruptly became the charge against Hiss...

...This cold finality, like the closing of the coffin, is a torment and frustration quite familiar to members of the bar...

...Chambers' explanation is that his "feeling for all humanity, in its good and evil, an absolving pity," prevented him from doing this irreparable harm to Hiss until no alternative was left him...

...230,099 had been altered radically since its manufacture (in about 1928) and also that Woodstock No...

...1952 brought Witness, Whit-taker Chambers' weird account of a weird life...

...Alistair Cooke tried to evaluate the case in a balanced and perceptive book, Generation on Trial (1950...

...Perhaps the enormity of the charge is insufficient to condemn it...

...only then can there be a "final judgment...

...Conscience cannot rest," he says in The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss, until certain nagging mysteries in the case have been solved...

...230,099 (the typewriter in court) was not the same Woodstock which the Hisses had once owned...

...The strange complex of reasons why so many of us wanted Alger Hiss proved innocent has already evoked plenty of comment, some penetrating...

...It is settled doctrine in the law that there should be an end to litigation...

...But the dates on the State Department documents which Hiss was charged with smuggling to a Chambers still active in espionage ran as late as April 1, 1938...

...Beyond a reasonable doubt" in a trial with such political overtones might well have meant one thing to a jury in such a time, quite another in 1938, still another today...

...Chambers changed it so that by the time of the first Hiss trial the break was said to have occurred about April 15, 1938...

...Reviewed by James E. Doyle Alger Hiss was tried for perjury in 1949 and the jury disagreed— eight for conviction, four for acquittal...

...The conviction stood...

...To the public and perhaps to the jury, however, the flaws in Chambers' story and the sordid quality of his past were offset, and more, by Woodstock No...

...The next year The Earl Jowitt, once the Lord Chancellor of England, offered his careful and somewhat ponderous analysis, The Strange Case of Alger Hiss...

...When the day in court is over, when the efforts to win a second day in court have been rebuffed, when the appellate courts have refused to upset the judgment, then the case is closed, the issue decided...

...then backed off without taking it...

...For all of the law's purposes, the truth has been determined and declared...

...It is a matter of wry amusement to lawyers that, in the wake of trials commanding wide public attention, many a non-lawyer also suffers the pangs of what-might-have-been...

...Few ever found much to admire in Whit-taker Chambers, and some found the heavy religious embellishments in his testimony and writing particularly distasteful...

...Now, a third map of a world ten years older is laid across the other two, and what are we to think when Cook comes along with his partisan book—though not frankly so—reminding us sharply of the holes in the case against Alger Hiss...

...Fred J. Cook, a newspaperman who writes for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, is such a sufferer...

...Item: Also as early as September 1939, and frequently and consistently up to and including his sworn testimony to a federal grand jury on October 14, 1948, Chambers had steadfastly declared that Hiss had not engaged in espionage...

...There is no need once again to dissect the motives of those who read the old map through the new and yearned for Hiss' conviction or prayed for his acquittal...

...then connived in switching a phony typewriter for the real one...

...But specific and fundamental flaws in his story have tended to escape our memory: Item: As early as September 1939, again in 1940, in 1942, in 1945, in 1946, in his first and second appearances before the Un-American Activities Committee in 1948—and even in Witness, published two years after Hiss' conviction—Chambers said and wrote consistently that 1937 was his year of agony when he repudiated Communism, disappeared, lived in endless fear with a loaded gun ever within reach...

...But logic, legal method, and common sense demand that the charge be supported by some direct and plausible evidence...

...an expression of compassion to be measured against Chambers' earlier assertion that Hiss' true mission—infiltration, influence—was "of very much more service to the Communist Party...

...When the government in the Hiss case, as in many others, avoids the statute of limitations (a statute with much to be said for it) by resort to a perjury charge (we will punish you for falsely telling us now that you did not commit ten years ago a crime for which we can no longer punish you), the effects are often bizarre...

...The same year saw a violently partisan pro-Chambers, anti-Hiss job, Seeds of Treason, by Toledano and Lasky...

...230,099, the typewriter which "sat there in court like a hulking and accusing monster, its effect incalculable upon the jury," as Cook writes...

...The motion for a new trial, and now Cook's book, represent mighty efforts to accomplish this formidable task...

...then arranged for the defense's diligent search to lead it to the phony, let the defense produce the phony at the first trial, and hung Hiss with it in the end...

...A year ago, his prison term behind him, Alger Hiss published his own painstaking review of the case, In the Court of Public Opinion...