December 2, 1948: The Hiss-Chambers case breaks wide open, with the release of "The Pumpkin Papers."
Born on April 1, 1901 in Philadelphia as Jay Vivian Chambers, Whittaker Chambers was a little known figure prior to 1948. He was a self-professed former member of the Communist Party. He also admitted to having served as a spy for the Soviet Union. He left the Communist Party in 1938, and offered his services to the FBI as an informant on Communist activities in the United States.
By 1948, he was serving as an editor for Time magazine, then a very conservative publication. At that time, Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee (hereafter abbreviated as "HUAC") was involved in a series of hearings investigating Communist machinations in the United States. Chambers was called as a witness, and he appeared before the Committee on August 3, 1948.
He dropped a bombshell during his testimony: Chambers accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of having been a Communist and a spy during the 1930s. Born on November 11, 1904 in Baltimore, Hiss was one of the most respected men in Washington. He had been heavily involved in America's wartime diplomacy, and attended the Yalta and Potsdam conferences as an American representative. In 1948, he was serving as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Called to testify, Hiss angrily denied the charges, and declared that he did not even know Whittaker Chambers. He later admitted that he knew Chambers, but at the time he had been using a different name: George Crosley. In the weeks that followed Chambers' appearance before HUAC, the two men exchanged charges and countercharges, and their respective stories became more and more muddled. Finally, after Chambers publicly declared that Hiss had been a Communist, "and may be one now," Hiss filed a slander suit.
During the course of that trial, Chambers produced microfilmed copies of classified State Department documents from the 1930s, which he had hidden in hollowed-out pumpkins on his farm in Westminster, Maryland. The "Pumpkin Papers" were used as evidence to support his claim that Hiss had passed the papers to him for delivery to the Soviets.
In the photo at the top of this post, the microfilm is examined by a member of HUAC, a 35-year-old 1st-term Representative from Southern California named Richard Nixon. In addition to Hiss and Chambers, the hearings made Nixon into a national figure. How he could read anything on that microfilm, even with a magnifying glass, never mind whether anything on it is believable, is debatable. Hiss insisted that "forgery by typewriter" was responsible for the text on the microfilm.
But, based on this evidence, Hiss was indicted for perjury, for lying to HUAC and to a federal grand jury about his membership in the Communist Party. The statute of limitations had run out for other charges related to his supposed activities in the 1930s.
After the first trial ended with a hung jury, Hiss was convicted on January 21, 1950, and served 3 years and 8 months in jail. Hiss always maintained his complete innocence. For his part, Chambers remained equally adamant in his accusations about Hiss.
Frankly, it didn't make sense that the general public took Chambers' side. Even his supporters admitted that Chambers was not the most sympathetic of witnesses. Of the two, only he admitted to having ever been a Communist. He wasn't exactly made for television, something that Nixon would later find out would matter. He was also an alcoholic, as were his father and his brother.
And in 1978, a book about the Hiss-Chambers case was published that revealed surviving letters in which Chambers confessed to homosexual activity, stating that he had stopped in 1938, along with leaving the Communist Party, upon his conversion to Christianity. Had that information been revealed in 1948, it would have destroyed Chambers, and, if Hiss were indeed guilty, would likely have gotten away with it.
Instead, the Pumpkin Papers resulted in Hiss' downfall. And because they were revealed a month after Election Day, they did not cost President Harry S Truman a full term, despite his having stood up for Hiss, whom he believed to be innocent. Had they been revealed a month before the election, the Republican nominee for President, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, probably would have won the 3 more States he would have needed to be elected.
Chambers returned to his farm, and wrote his best-selling memoir Witness there. When William F. Buckley Jr. founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955, among the first people he hired to write for it was Chambers.
Chambers died of long-term heart trouble at his farm, on July 9, 1961, at age 60. He was survived by his wife, artist Esther Shemitz, and their 2 children, daughter Ellen and son John. Esther lived until 1986, Ellen until 2017. As of December 2, 2022, John is still alive, and has a son, David, a college professor who is now the family's main spokesman. The Chambers farm has been designated a National Historical Landmark, although it remains in the family's ownership, and is not open to the public.
Hiss was disbarred upon his conviction. After being released in 1954, he worked as a stationery salesman, and published his own account in 1957, In the Court of Public Opinion. In 1959, he separated from his 1st wife, the former Priscilla Fansler, mother of his son Tony Hiss and a son from a previous marriage, Timothy Hobson. They never divorced, but in 1960, Hiss met a woman named Isabel Johnson, and they began living together. Priscilla died in 1984, and Hiss and Johnson subsequently married.
Unlike Chambers, both Hiss and Nixon, who rose to become the 37th President of the United States, and then a bigger criminal than Hiss was ever alleged to be, outlived most of their enemies. Nixon died in 1994, and Hiss outlived even him, as one of the last surviving figures of the early days of the Cold War, until November 15, 1996, age 92, maintaining his innocence to the end.
Hiss even lived long enough to see many Soviet Union documents declassified by its successor nation, the Russian Federation. Some of these documents "proved" that he was a Soviet agent, with the code name "ALES." Others suggested that it was incredibly unlikely that he was ALES. Former Soviet officials have come forward, saying that Hiss "never had any relationship with Soviet intelligence."
After losing the 1960 Presidential election, Nixon set about writing a book about his political experience thus far. He titled it Six Crises, and listed the Hiss case as one of them, along with what became known as the Checkers Speech, President Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, his troubled 1958 tour of South America, his 1959 "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita Khrushchev, and his defeat to Kennedy.
*
December 2, 1948 was a Thursday. Author T. Coraghessan Boyle was born.
Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. And no games were scheduled in the NHL. There were 3 games played in the Basketball Association of America, the league that would become the NBA the next season:
* The Washington Capitols beat the Providence Steam Rollers, 66-61 at the Rhode Island Arena in Providence.
* The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia Warriors, 88-87 at the Philadelphia Arena.
* And the Baltimore Bullets beat the Indianapolis Jets, 90-78 at the Baltimore Coliseum.
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