Aug 16, 2023
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 I have read in an unpublished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?