Sep 13, 2023
Whittaker Chambers
This Podcast, the second to last, is the longest one.
The Hiss-Chambers Case did not die. Many new facts were
discovered, the majority of them harmful to Hiss, starting in the
1970s. The Freedom of Information Act led the US government
(after a lawsuit) to produce about 40,000 pages of paper, mostly
from the FBI. Hiss made the files of his defense counsel
available to researchers. One wonders if he knew what was in
there, some of it was so damaging to him. Most damaging in
these and other files is powerful evidence that Hiss and his wife
knew that the office typewriter they had had in the late 1930s was
a Woodstock and that they had given it to The Catlett Kids, but
they both denied such knowledge to the FBI, the Grand Jury (under
oath), and even to their own ‘A List’ attorneys, William Marbury
and Edward McLean. Other sources of information that opened
late were the papers of Alger Hiss’s brother Donald; a recollection
of a fellow convict who spoke with Hiss in prison; the observations
of a psychologist who testified for Hiss at the second trial (not
Dr. Binger); the memoir of a document expert whom Chester Lane
hired to help Hiss’s Forgery by Typewriter argument; and even the
memories of a female Bucks County, Pennsylvania, novelist who
bumped into Chambers and The Ware Group during a brief residence in
Washington in 1934. Finally, since the fall of the Iron
Curtain, several security agencies of former Communist
dictatorships have briefly opened their files, all of them damaging
to Hiss. No wonder this second to last Podcast is the longest
one.
FURTHER RESEARCH
The FOIA Documents are best summarized in Weinstein at 300-14
(“The Woodstock Cover-Up” — a coverup by the Hisses, not the FBI),
399-435 (“Rumors and Whispers: The Pursuit of Evidence”),
625-30 (“The Motion for a New Trial”), 632-34 (“The ‘Faked’ or
‘Substituted’ Woodstock: Hover and the FBI”), and 641-45 (“The
Double Agent: Horace Schmahl, Mystery Man”). Other
post-trials evidence is recounted in Gary Wills’ “Lead Time:
A Journalist’s Education” at 61-62 (Doubleday 1983); Elinor Langer,
“Josephine Herbst” at 151-58, 268-76 (Northeastern Univ. Press
1984); and Donald B. Doud,” Witness to Forgery: Memoir of a
Forensic Document Examiner” at 34-66 (Orchard Knoll Publishers
2009). The best summaries of the documents from ‘behind the
Iron Curtain’ are the chapter titled “Alger Hiss:Case Closed”
in John Earl Haynes, Harvey
Klehr, & Alexander Vassiliev, “Spies: The Rise & Fall of the
KGB in America” at 1-31 (Yale University Press 2009); and Eduard
Mark, “In Re Alger Hiss: A Final Verdict from the Archives of
the KGB,” 1 Journal of Cold War Studies at 26 (2009).
Hiss’s briefs and some supporting documents in his last run at
the courts (in the 1970s, claiming prosecutorial misconduct) are
reproduced in Edith Tiger (Ed.), “In Re Alger Hiss” (two volumes)
(Farrar Straus Giroux 1979) (Chambers’ handwritten account of his
homosexual activities, which he gave to the FBI, is in Volume I at
258-66.). For my skeptical reaction to some of Hiss’s claims, see
pages 221-28 of my paper “How Alger Hiss Was Framed: The Latest
Theory,” available at
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3868165 .
Questions: Is there now reasonable doubt that Hiss was
guilty of the offenses charged, and of a good deal more? Or
am I missing something? Certainly, if Hiss is in fact
innocent, he is one of the most wronged persons in our
history!
If The Prosecution in Hiss trials did not play fair, should
any tears be shed for Hiss if he was still up to his neck in spying
for the Soviet Union and setting the stage for Joe McCarthy?
What motive would a female Bucks County novelist have to lie and
place Chambers and Hiss together in The Ware Group in Washington in
the mid-30s? Isn’t she as unlikely to be taking orders from
J. Edgar Hoover as Chambers’ best friend Professor Meyer Schapiro,
a Jewish socialist art history professor at Columbia? In
light of the fact that all the typewriter experts Hiss’s counsel
hired reached the same conclusion as the FBI expert Feehan, is it
likely that Hiss knew he was lying all the years he was claiming
Forgery by Typewriter? Or might he have forgotten and
convinced himself that he was actually innocent? Have you
never known anyone who had such favorable delusions about his or
her bad conduct long ago?
Consider all the people who have to be lying, all the experts
who have to be wrong, and all the documents that have to be
forged and planted in dozens of different places in different
continents over several decades if Hiss is innocent. How
likely is that?