Dreamers and Deceivers (28 page)

As he stood at the podium looking out at the crowd, Hiss realized just how far from his humble Baltimore roots and life of small-bore tragedies he’d come. He also knew that it was only the beginning.

Washington, D.C.

April 8, 1930

Alger Hiss watched as Oliver Wendell Holmes bristled at what he clearly viewed as an impertinent and unprofessional suggestion.

“It won’t work,” he told his young clerk. “It’s too personal.”

Hiss was undaunted. He wished to achieve a higher level of intimacy with Holmes, one that would distinguish him from the other clerks, all of whom had sterling pedigrees similar to his own.

When he first met the justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes had already been on the bench for twenty-seven years. His health was clearly on the decline—there was no doubt about that—but he still had the finest mind of anyone on the Court. Even as he completed his ninth decade, Holmes was so proficient at expediently turning out stunningly lucid and scholarly opinions that Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes sometimes withheld work from Holmes to save his slower colleagues the embarrassment.

But Hiss could see time had caught up with him. Now, at eighty-
eight years old, Holmes’s eyesight was failing. Before his beloved wife, Fanny, died earlier that year, she had taken to reading him literature out loud. But now, with her gone, Holmes missed the enjoyment of a good book. Seeing an opening, the ambitious Hiss saw an opportunity.

“Mr. Justice, it would be an honor if I could read to you,” Hiss suggested to him one evening. Holmes rejected the idea out of hand. A clerk spending hours alone with him was far too much of an imposition. It was also inappropriate and much too personal—which is exactly why Hiss wanted to do it.

He saw himself becoming a confidant of the justice, learning from him, sharing his secrets. Holmes could also help him strengthen his façade of established wealth, breeding, and social class. But, if he really examined himself, and if he were willing to admit it, there was more to it than that. In Holmes, Hiss saw the wise, revered fatherly figure that he’d lacked all of his life.

One didn’t push Oliver Wendell Holmes, and one certainly didn’t pester him. So Hiss devised a different strategy. “Mr. Justice, the decision is yours, of course.” Hiss was always unfailingly polite, but he did note to the jurist that there was an existing precedent. “But, sir, in case you were not aware, Esme’s secretary reads to him.”

Hiss knew that Sir Esme Howard, the British ambassador, was one of Holmes’s favorite visitors and a man Holmes very much admired. If he knew that the respected Sir Esme had his secretary read to him, Hiss figured that Holmes might reconsider.

And he was right. Holmes soon relented and let Hiss read to him almost every weekday. Of course, Hiss did not mention to Holmes what might have been a useful fact: Sir Esme’s secretary did indeed read to him, but that was because the secretary was also his son.

How easy it was, Hiss thought, to get what one wanted with nothing other than a simple omission of a key fact or two.

16 Years Later

Washington, D.C.

January 22, 1945

Two days after being sworn in for an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt arrived at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Underneath the building was a secret rail line where his specially outfitted private train car, the
Ferdinand Magellan,
was waiting to take the wheelchair-bound president on the first part of a long, arduous trip that would eventually culminate in Yalta on the Crimean Sea. There he would meet with Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill to plan for the aftermath of what was now an inevitable Allied victory over Hitler’s Germany.

Among the American delegation that accompanied Roosevelt was the elegant and erudite Alger Hiss. Since joining the federal government in 1933, Hiss had excelled in his career. This was not all that surprising given that he had arrived brimming with qualifications and endorsements from men like Justice Felix Frankfurter—appointed to the Supreme Court by FDR in 1939—and the late Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Hiss was a perfect match for what many called “the striped pants set” at the State Department compound popularly known as “Foggy Bottom”—young men with Ivy League degrees, great self-assurance, and occasionally batty ideas about the world. The previous spring Hiss had become special assistant in the new Office of Special Political Affairs within the State Department, where he spent most of his time on postwar planning. He wasn’t that concerned about the Soviet Union—he believed they would continue to be a key American ally after the war; but he
was
concerned about Great Britain attempting to protect what was left of its empire.

Hiss was enthusiastic about his next assignment. He had been tasked with preparing all of the background material to be used by the U.S. delegation at the Yalta Conference, even for matters outside his department. It was clear to anyone paying attention that Hiss’s career
was on an impressive trajectory—one with seemingly no limits. The establishment didn’t just embrace him; they admired and even loved him. He felt like nothing could stop his ascent.

Nothing, that is, except for one little secret.

U.S. Capitol

Washington, D.C.

August 3, 1948

The freshman Republican from California had been in Congress for less than two years. He’d been sent to Washington through the hard work of small-business owners, ranchers, and bankers who had drafted him to run and represent California’s 12th District.

He was an odd choice. He certainly did not look the part of a typical congressman. His most noticeable features were his prominent jowls, bushy eyebrows shadowing his small darting eyes, and an omnipresent five o’clock shadow.

But Richard Milhous Nixon was a bright man, and an ambitious one. He was looking for a chance to excel and move up the ladder. Sitting on the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was set up to investigate whether communists had infiltrated the U.S. government, Nixon thought he might very well have found that chance.

Along with the rest of the country, Nixon had been startled by allegations made a few days earlier by Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet spy. The attractive blonde testified that she had been a courier for a Communist Party spy ring in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the ring included key members of the U.S government. She said that her involvement with the Soviet espionage ring was so integral to their plans that the Soviets had made efforts to take her life. Her testimony caused a sensation in the press, emboldened congressional investigators convinced that communists had infiltrated the government, and put the administration of Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, on the defensive.

Nixon, like other members of the committee, knew they needed a second source for the allegations. Bentley had, after all, admitted to being a communist herself, so her credibility was very much in doubt. At today’s hearing, Nixon believed they just might get that corroboration.

Whittaker Chambers was not an ideal witness. He was short and plump and unattractive. He was also an admitted communist, though he told the committee that he had broken with the ideology in the 1930s, at which point he had defected to U.S. authorities. Now, working as an editor for
Time
magazine, Chambers had a reputation for being intelligent and accomplished. Sitting in front of the committee, he corroborated Bentley’s testimony and provided further names.

Among those names was one in particular that shocked the committee: Alger Hiss, a former State Department official currently serving as president of the Carnegie Foundation.

The story Chambers told was persuasive: Shortly after moving to Washington following his graduation from Harvard, Hiss had become a member of a discussion group organized by Harold Ware, a member of the Communist Party. But, in reality, Chambers told investigators, it was much more than a discussion group; it was also engaged in advancing the communist agenda. Although Ware died in a car crash, the group’s activities continued and, according to Chambers, involved individuals in numerous federal agencies. Chambers claimed that he got to know Hiss and his wife, Priscilla, while living rent-free in an apartment owned by Hiss.

Chambers acknowledged he previously had given names of communists to federal authorities after his defection to the United States.

“Did you name Hiss?” Richard Nixon asked.

“Yes,” Chambers replied.

“Mr. Chambers, were you informed of any action that was taken as a result of your report?”

“No. There was none.”

The revelation infuriated Nixon. It was clear to him that the State
Department and the Washington establishment had been protecting Alger Hiss all along. He was, after all, one of their own.

A Few Hours Later

Washington, D.C.

August 3, 1948

“I don’t know Chambers.”

Learning of the allegations made against him, Alger Hiss was indignant—and convincing. “There is no basis for his statements about me,” he told reporters who called after the hearing.

Sitting in his office and contemplating his course, he barely had a moment of quiet to think things through. The phone rang constantly. His many friends in Washington were calling to check in. Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt had rung. Now his old mentor, the man to whom he owed his entire career, was on the line.

“Let the matter drop. If it was a lie, then why should you address it and give it more credibility?” asked Justice Frankfurter. Hiss knew he had a point. Everyone else who had been named as a communist had pled the Fifth and declined to testify.

Hiss said, “I have no reason to beat around the bush. That’s what guilty people do. I’m an innocent man. I don’t know who this Whittaker Chambers is and why he has gone to such lengths to smear me. He’s a troubled soul, that much is obvious. But I cannot tolerate such things being said about me.”

“Well, Alger, whatever you need, know that I will always vouch for you,” Frankfurter reassured him.

After they hung up, Hiss dashed off a telegram to be wired to the committee immediately:

I DO NOT KNOW MR. CHAMBERS AND, SO FAR AS I AM AWARE, HAVE NEVER LAID EYES ON HIM. THERE IS NO BASIS FOR THE STATEMENTS ABOUT ME MADE TO YOUR COMMITTEE. . . . I WOULD FURTHER APPRECIATE
THE OPPORTUNITY OF APPEARING BEFORE YOUR COMMITTEE.

It was not long before his request was granted.

U.S. Capitol

Washington, D.C.

August 5, 1948

It had been just forty-eight hours since Whittaker Chambers had sworn an oath and made his allegations. Hiss was eager, even thrilled, to be given the chance to respond. He would show his accusers that the reputation he had worked so hard to build could not be pulled apart by a former communist with a clear agenda.

Alger Hiss walked into the hearing room looking like a poster child for establishment elegance. Dressed in a gray suit and dark tie, a white pocket square carefully tucked into his breast pocket, he stood up straight and walked with a purpose. He knew that his résumé had entered the room before him and would underscore every word he’d utter. Johns Hopkins University.
Harvard Law Review
. A Supreme Court clerk, New Deal lawyer, and senior official in the U.S. Department of State. Now he was the president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and, according to some whispers, a future candidate for secretary of state.

With a studied sense of command, impeccable manners, and graceful carriage, Hiss made it clear that he had come this morning before the HUAC to rebut the allegations made by this Chambers character, a man who, he repeatedly assured his questioners, he had never known.

Karl Mundt, a forty-eight-year-old Republican congressman from South Dakota, administered the standard oath to Hiss, asking if he would tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“So help me God,” Hiss replied. Then, with a voice that had the power of a thunderclap, he said those words again.

“So help me God.”

Hiss knew how to take over a meeting, and this one would be no different. As he settled into the witness chair, behind a pair of large microphones, his voice was assured, confident, and resolute. He had worked on his opening remarks with his brother and several prominent Washington attorneys, yet the illusion was what was most important. These were meant to be the indignant words, all but spontaneously uttered, by the wrongfully accused.

Hiss was so confident in himself and his message that he appeared before the HUAC without the benefit of counsel. He sat alone to face the lions—though, he thought, if they were lions, they were toothless ones. He could not have been less intimidated by the blowhard members of the HUAC; he’d had tougher bouts with faculty members at Harvard. In fact, the committee itself had been under pressure from the media and the left for months, most recently over its clumsy investigation into Hollywood. According to reports, Truman’s White House counsel already had a bill in his desk drawer to abolish the committee if the Democrats reclaimed the House in the 1948 elections. HUAC needed a win, and they believed that Whittaker Chambers’s bombshell of testimony a few days earlier would help them get it.

But the doughy, tentative Chambers was not the sort of witness who would have carried much weight at the Carnegie Foundation, or before the Supreme Court, or at Harvard. Hiss almost felt sorry for him. His allegations would collapse so long as Hiss looked forthright and credible. He’d been impressing sharper, more important men than the ones on this committee all his life.

“I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party,” he said firmly. Nor, to the best of his knowledge, were any of his friends or his wife. “I think I would know,” he added.

In regards to Whittaker Chambers, Hiss reiterated that he’d never even
met
a man going by that name, but insisted that he would like the opportunity to do so. “The very name of Whittaker Chambers means nothing to me,” he assured Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator.