Man & Wife

Hadn't Whittaker Chambers once said that his disclosure of the Communist conspiracy was like an act of war, like shooting an enemy? "You were comparing yourself to a soldier in combat?" asked Defense Attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker, in a mocking tone.

"I was," said Chambers.

"But," bellowed Stryker, "You had left the flag, the Stars and Stripes--the flag there between you and His Honor?"

"Yes ... I was any soldier fighting Communism." Didn't this imply a good estimate of himself?

"That wasn't implied."

"It wasn't laudatory of yourself?"

"Not particularly." '

All week, under questions, Chambers sat in the witness chair while Stryker tried to destroy his credibility, tried to rattle him, taunted him. Through it all Chambers, ex-Communist and former espionage agent, sat with a kind of melancholy serenity, hands folded in his lap, occasionally stroking one cheek. Stryker, in savage crossexamination, had already raked over Chambers' moral character as a young man (TIME, June 13). Last week, like a leopard on the prowl, Stryker hunted through Chambers' spoken and already recorded words for inconsistencies. Sometimes Stryker had help in the hunt from no less a person than Federal Judge Samuel Kaufman, onetime trial lawyer, conducting his first big case.

U.S. Assistant Attorney Thomas Murphy now got into the fight. He objected when Stryker, bobbing around the court, kept getting between him and the witness. He bristled when Stryker gave his arm a jovial pat. Once he spoiled Stryker's melodramatic reading of some evidence by pleading in his heavy voice, "Oh, please, Mr. Stryker, read it straight." His thick, brown mustache worked, he sighed with rage when little Judge Kaufman time & again overruled his objections, sustained many of Stryker's.

Inside the bar, gaunt-faced and intent, with his wife beside him, Defendant Alger Hiss, charged with perjury, watched the conflict between his spectacular lawyer and the witness who would not be shaken.

Seven-in-One. Chambers was taken back & forth over the old story of espionage. He confirmed previous testimony as it was read back to him--how in 1939, two days after the Hitler-Stalin pact, he had gone to see Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr., and as a repentant man had urged that some action be taken to get Communists out of key places in the Government. He had named names then, among them Alger Hiss's. He had said nothing about the stolen documents in his possession. "Nevertheless, I gave him [Berle] to understand that there was an apparatus working in the Government." Nothing came of Chambers' charges.

Under constant hammering from Stryker, Chambers admitted perjuring himself seven times before the grand jury in October. Actually the perjury was the same one seven times repeated: his early denial that he and any of the people whom he had named were actually in an espionage plot. They were merely infiltrating to places of importance, he had said.

If his subsequent story of espionage was true, why had he suppressed it so long, waiting until November to come forth with the stolen Government documents? The explanation that Stryker tried to pin on him was that he was reluctant to disclose his own old and dark complicity, that he had produced the documents only when that appeared to be necessary in order to save himself from Alger Hiss's $75,000 suit for libel. Whittaker Chambers had another explanation.

"My Christian Duty." He had had two purposes, he said, in telling only part of the truth. "One purpose was to disclose in part and to paralyze the Communist conspiracy. The other purpose was to preserve from injury insofar as I could all individuals involved in the past in that conspiracy. I was particularly anxious not to injure Mr. Hiss any more than necessary out of grounds of past friendship and because he is, by widespread consent, a very able man. Therefore, I chose to jeopardize myself rather than reveal the full extent of his activities and those of others."

"You felt it right to suppress such parts of the truth as you thought expedient?" Stryker shouted. "I thought it was my Christian duty," Chambers said quietly.

"You didn't think it was your Christian duty to comply with the oath you had registered in Heaven to tell the truth?"

Said Chambers soberly: "I felt one outweighed the other."

After seven days, the ordeal of Chambers, which began almost a year ago before a congressional committee, quietly ended. A grey, tired man in a grey suit, he stepped down from the witness stand and vanished from the view of judge, jury, attorneys, and the man he said had once been his close friend and accomplice, Alger Hiss. His story against Hiss, in major outline, was still unshaken.

Stryker had cautiously skirted questioning the witness on many points which bore directly on the accusation against his client, Hiss: that Hiss had lied when he said he never fed secret documents to Chambers, lied again when he said he had had no contact with Chambers after 1936.

A Lady Recalls. U.S. Attorney Murphy diligently set to nailing Chambers' story down with corroborative evidence. He paraded a group of witnesses in an effort to show that the typewriter used in copying the documents belonged to Hiss; that Priscilla Hiss was a competent typist; that Hiss had lent Chambers $400 to buy a car; that Alger and Priscilla Hiss and Chambers were still good friends as late as the summer of 1937, when they took a trip together to Peterboro, N.H.

At week's end, a small, thin-faced woman, with dark eyes peering anxiously through spectacles, walked to the witness stand. She was Chambers' wife, Esther. "I milk 18 cows a day out of a herd of 40 dairy cows, take care of six beef cattle plus some chickens," she said. She also cared for their two children on the Chambers' farm in Westminster, Md. She formally identified Alger and Priscilla Hiss in the courtroom.

She was not very good on dates. But Esther Chambers remembered the Hiss house on P Street in Georgetown--"the long, green-painted sitting room," the third floor where, she said, she and her husband and their baby daughter had lived for a while; the rug Hiss gave them with a patch in the middle of it.

"It had been cleaned and repaired at the Monument Cleaning Co. He gave it to us because we had little furniture. They also gave us a dining-room table . . . They had gotten it when they were first married up in Vermont. They had finished the bottom. We later finished the top.

"There was a table that Timmy (Hiss's stepson) had used and a chest of drawers for toys . . . two bird books and a number of educational toys for the baby." Once Mrs. Hiss had come to Baltimore and "we met and had a soda at the soda fountain at Hutzler's. Mrs. Hiss, by the way, doesn't like ice cream." Once when the Chamberses visited the Hisses on 30th Street, "my youngest wet the floor and Priscilla gave me a lovely linen towel as a diaper."

She remembered the Hiss house on Volta Place with its "purple or plum" drapes and the flowered chintz bedspread which "Mrs. Hiss bought at a sale." It was there, she decided, that she and her husband spent a New Year's Eve with the Hisses on Dec. 31, 1937. "We ate sandwiches left over from a cocktail party." That was the last time she had seen the Hisses "until this morning."

Stryker went after the witness hammer & tongs. "Look at me when you answer," he shouted once. Roared Murphy: "She can look wherever she wants to." Stryker badgered her as he had her husband. Once she said angrily: "You are insulting, sir."

She was never a member of the Communist Party but she had shared her husband's Communist views, she said. She had met him first during a strike in Passaic, N.J., where she calmly testified she was working as a labor agitator. She had been a more or less silent participant in her husband's inner struggle which had ended in his quitting the party.

Goaded by Stryker's repeated derogatory references to Chambers, she finally burst out: "I resent that. My husband is a decent citizen and a great man."

"Was he a great, decent citizen in October, 1937?" Stryker asked.

Said Esther Chambers in indignation: "Yes and always."

Was a man conspiring by any means to overthrow his country a decent citizen? Stryker persisted.

"If he believed that is the right thing to do at the moment. . . that is a great man who lives up to his belief. His beliefs may change, as they did."

Finally, she stepped down from the witness stand. There stood the testimony of her loyalty to her husband, and beyond that, her story of a long and intimate relationship between the Chamberses and the

Hisses--a recital of formidable trivialities. Against this explicit story of two friendly couples stood another record: Hiss last August peering into Chambers' mouth to see whether, by looking at Chambers' teeth, he might just possibly recall him as someone he had once casually known.

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