Aug 30, 2023
Several people have told me that, of my 38 episodes, this is
their favorite. See if you agree.
It is all about the question Hiss could never answer:
how, if Hiss is innocent, did the 64 Typed Spy Documents get typed
on his home typewriter. You may recall that Hiss first told
The Grand Jury that Chambers broke into his house in 1938 and typed
them on it himself when no one was looking. That didn’t
work. Second, Hiss told the jury at the second trial that
Hiss gave the Typewriter to the Catlett Kids in late 1937; they put
it in the back room where they had their non-stop dance party; then
Chambers found it there and typed up The Typed Spy Documents
himself on it as the conga line snaked past. That didn’t
convince, either. Third — and this is the subject of this
Podcast — in a Motion for a New Trial on Grounds of Newly
Discovered Evidence, Hiss’ new lawyer speculated that Chambers in
1948 had made a fake typewriter, which typed just like The Hiss
Home Typewriter, and had typed up The Spy Documents on it; then
Chambers found where the real Hiss Typewriter was (in the
nightwatchman’s home, you remember), stole it and planted his fake
there, and waited for someone to find the fake and for everyone to
assume it was the real Hiss Home Typewriter. Quite a
frame-up, if true. But did that really happen? Is it
even plausible? Podcast #35 explores this theory, which Hiss
stuck to till his dying day (with numerous variations as each old
one failed).
FURTHER RESEARCH
The best dissection of The Forgery by Typewriter Theory is
Chapter 2 (titled “Chambers”) in “Ex-Communist Witnesses:Four
Studies in Fact Finding” by Professor Herbert L. Packer of Stanford
University Law School (Stanford University Press 1962) at
21-51. Others are Cornell/Georgetown/Minnesota Law School
Professor Irving Younger’s article “Was Alger Hiss Guilty?” in
Commentary Magazine’s August 1975 issue, available at
https://www.commentary.org/articles/irving-younger/was-alger-hiss-guilty-2/ ;
and the Appendix to professor Weinstein’s book, titled “‘Forgery by
Typewriter’: The Pursuit of Conspiracy, 1948-97,” at pages
624-30, 632-34, 645-47. The version of Alistair Cooke’s book
(“A Generation on Trial:U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss”) that was published
in 1952 has a few new pages at the end, 347-54, describing Hiss’s
Motion for a New Trial and the Court hearing about it. Judge
Goddard presided, and Cooke notes (at 348) that the audience
included “leisured and unidentified old ladies who appeared at all
Hiss hearings with the ritual fatalism of the annual pilgrims to
Valentino’s grave.” Cooke writes (at 348) that “several
excellent lawyers were dumbfounded by the claims that the defense
now put forward.” After describing Judge Goddard’s dismissal
of those claims, Cooke ends his book with the following
words. “Four years had passed since the names of Hiss and
Chambers shook the nation. Now there was another Presidential
campaign, and the Democrats were in full fling at their convention
in Chicago. Judge Goddard’s word, perhaps the last, about
Hiss was lucky to earn a few lines at the bottom of the inside
pages of newspapers. In most it earned none. Hiss had
passed into shame and into history.”
Here is my list of the people who, Hiss defenders have
speculated over the decades, masterminded or participated in the
framing of Hiss (in most cases involving forgery by typewriter):
Whittaker and Esther Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI,
Ambassador William C. Bullitt, Jr., Richard and Pat Nixon, the
Democratic financier and Presidential advisor Bernard Baruch,
President Truman’s Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, the Dulles
Brothers, supporters of the Chinese anti-communist dictator Chaing
Kai-Shek, a Nazi sympathizer who owned a typewriter store in New
York City, the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, and a private
detective named Horace Schmahl.
If you are interested in the broader question of why people
believe highly implausible stories, I recommend Michael Shermer’s
book “Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition,
and Other Confusions of Our Time” (St. Martin’s Griffin 2002); and
a delightful article by the Brandeis University Professor Jacob
Cohen, “Will We Never Be Free of the Kennedy Assassination?,”
published in the December 2013 issue of Commentary Magazine and
available at
https://www.commentary.org/articles/jacob-cohen/will-we-never-be-free-of-the-kennedy-assassination/ .
Questions: Here are two questions I have asked myself
for years but never answered satisfactorily. Can you help
me?
(1) In his Motion for a New Trial, Hiss claimed that Chambers
did the forgery all by himself, or with the help of Communist
friends. This seems plainly ridiculous. Chambers had
neither the time, the tools, nor the talents to forge a typewriter
and, by 1948, no Communist friends to help him. My
question: why was it only years later that Hiss claimed that
Hoover and the FBI had committed the forgery? The FBI was
obviously the only organization in the US that even arguably had
the necessary time, tools, and talents. What prevented Hiss
from aiming, from the start, at such an obvious target?
(2). Hiss publicized his Forgery by Typewriter theories for
decades, and his supporters have carried the torch in the decades
after his death. They are articulate people, they have
occasionally had generous funding, and they know lots people in the
nation’s media who would love another story of an innocent
gentleman framed as a Commie the early Cold War years. But if
you Google “Famous Conspiracy Theories” or “Top 25 Conspiracy
Theories of All Time,” you will not find Hiss’s Forgery by
Typewriter Theory. Why? Why has Hiss’s conspiracy
theory not achieved the popularity of the theories about the
assassinations of JFK and RFK, or of the alleged landings at
Roswell and the alleged non-landings on the Moon? Is his
theory too implausible or too complicated for a large audience,
and/or is Hiss too cold a fish to be sympathetic?