May 24, 2023
Robert
Stripling & Richard Nixon
Everyone always asks about the topic of this Podcast #21:
“What was in the secret State Department documents?” These
are the 126 pages that Chambers introduced as the last documents
that Hiss gave him. State Department men authenticated them
as copies (or summaries or excerpts) of actual State Department
documents, many marked CONFIDENTIAL and all dated between December
31, 1937, and April 1, 1938. The documents concern many
subjects, but they generally share two characteristics.
First, they had little or nothing to do with Hiss’s job, which was
trade between the US and other countries. Second, they had a
lot to do with two subjects about which the US knew a lot and about
which the Soviet Union knew little through its own efforts but was
intensely interested in at that time. Those subjects were
what was going on in Germany and Japan, two aggressively
expansionist countries bordering the Soviet Union and sworn to its
destruction. Get ready for a deep dive into what mattered to
the Soviet Union in those years; and into The Robinson-Reubens
Affair, an “international incident” between the US and the Soviets
in early 1938 that provoked what may be the “smoking gun” document
in this Case.
FURTHER RESEARCH
Episode 21: Chambers says little
about the content of the documents. I doubt he had time to
read them when he had them — they had to be photographed and
returned promptly to their sources. On his way to the
photographer, on a street car in Washington or a train to
Baltimore, Chambers wouldn’t want to be seen perusing State
Department papers marked CONFIDENTIAL. He did read some,
however. Of them he wrote (in Witness at 426): “I concluded
that political espionage was a magnificent waste of time and effort
— not because the sources were holding back; they were pathetically
eager to help — but because the secrets of foreign offices are
notoriously overrated. There was little about political
espionage, it seemed to me, that an intelligent man, who knew the
forces, factors, and general direction of history in our time,
could not arrive at by using political imagination, backed by a
careful study of the available legitimate facts.”
Hiss addresses the documents in his first book, In the Court
of Public Opinion (at 251-86). He notes (at 252) that one of
The Pumpkin Papers — a document on a roll of film Chambers
produced, all of whose pictures were taken on one day — was a
‘working’ or (I think) carbon copy. Hiss says that his office
received the original, so he cannot have been the source of that
paper or any other papers in that roll. This misses the
possibility that Hiss could have decided to pass the paper to
Chambers after the original had passed from Hiss’s control.
It would have been easy for Hiss to pilfer papers from other men’s
offices or from central files. The State Department was, by
our standards, incredibly lax in security up to our entry into
World War II in 1941. The British spy Kim Philby, after he
skipped over the Iron Curtain in the 60s, wrote “it is nonsense to
suppose that a resolute and experienced operator occupying a senior
post in the Foreign Office can have access only to the papers that
are placed on his desk in the ordinary course of duty. . .
. I gained access to the files of British agents in the
Soviet Union when I was supposed to be chivvying Germans in
Spain.” Kim Philby, My Silent War (Grove Press 1968) at
214.
Other analyses of the documents are in John Chabot Smith’s “Alger Hiss:The True Story” at
331-54 and in the 1952 edition of Alistair Cooke’s ‘Generation on
Trial’ book at 161-67. Rebecca West, in her critical review
of Cooke’s book at pages 666-67 of the 1950 University of Chicago
Law Review, makes some fun of Mr. Cooke’s analysis. The only
lengthy analysis of all the documents Chambers produced (those
introduced in the trial and those that were not) is in Professor
Weinstein’s book (2013 edition) at 255-81.
Lloyd Paul Stryker found the documents so boring that, as they
were being read word by word to the jury, he was outside in the
corridor smoking a cigar. Cooke at 164. I’m sure the
jury envied him.
Questions: If you were the Prosecution, could you have
done more to make the presentation of the documents less
narcolepsy-inducing? If you were Mr. Stryker, might you have
stayed in the courtroom, yawned and otherwise tried to make them
seem trivial? (Maybe that was his point in leaving the
courtroom.) If you were on the jury, would you have, despite being
bored, been impressed at the volume and seriousness of the
documents?
If they were not passed to Chambers by Hiss, who else could
have passed them to him?98% of them crossed Hiss’s desk in the
normal course of business. If there was a conspiracy hatched
to frame Hiss in 1948, how much work and talent would it have
taken, in that year, to find the originals of all the decade-old
documents? And how about the effort of photographing the
Pumpkin Papers with an old camera on old film and typing up copies
on a 20 year old typewriter on 20 year old paper and with a 20 year
old typewriter ribbon?