The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss by Fred J. Cook

Author:Fred J. Cook [Cook, Fred J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839745577
Google: iX93AAAAMAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 11988333
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 1958-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6. The “Immutable” Witnesses

There can be no question that, without the documents, there would have been no case against Alger Hiss. The fact that Whittaker Chambers was able to produce documents seemed, to the newspapers and the public, conclusive proof, of the charges he had made. The circumlocutions of Chambers’ testimony could be forgotten. He may have lied before the House committee, he may have lied before the grand jury. His reasons for doing so were unfathomable and, anyway, they didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he eventually told the truth. Obviously he did. He had the documents, didn’t he?

Such thinking influenced the entire course of the case. It is patently obvious in many official actions. The grand jury, without the documents, refused to indict Hiss; the grand jury, after the documents were produced, indicted Hiss. Murphy in the first trial concluded his opening statement to the jury with an admission that doubtless sounded more bald than he intended. “When you have heard all the testimony,” he told the jurors, “if you don’t believe Chambers, we have no case under the federal perjury rule.” Stryker hopped on the admission and made it his battle cry. In the second trial, Murphy carefully avoided a repetition of the blunder; he underplayed Chambers and cast in the starring role the documents and the typewriter—the “immutable witnesses,” he called them, to the crime that he said had been committed by Alger Hiss.

It’s important, therefore, to see just how “immutable” were these witnesses—and just how credible was Chambers’ testimony regarding the passing of documents by Hiss.

If one is to get any rational view of the document issue, it is necessary first to divest the Pumpkin Papers (actually the five rolls of microfilm) of some of the hysterical hyperbole with which they were described by the House committee and Chambers himself. Stripling, immediately after Chambers uncorked his pumpkin, disclosed the new sensation to the press, and according to the New York Times said “that he had a stack of papers, developed from the film, about three feet high.” Even this statement was not quite impressive enough for Chambers, who writes in Witness that “the enlargements made a pile almost four feet high.”

Now, actually, as testimony in the Hiss trials showed, the three rolls of undeveloped microfilm were either so old or so light-struck that whatever documents they had contained could not be reproduced clearly enough for use as evidence. This left just the two strips of developed film. These contained reproductions of just seven documents, containing only fifty-eight typewritten pages.

Anyone who realizes that five hundred sheets of the best bond paper, in a cardboard box, measure slightly less than two inches in height gets some idea of the fantasy involved in Stripling’s and Chambers’ solemn pronouncements. Clay tablets roughly eight-tenths of an inch thick would have had to be used to balloon the fifty-eight pages into a stack of evidence four feet high. Since the world has progressed somewhat beyond the age of clay tablets

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