Some of the material was too secret to release in 1948 to the public. Far East policy, Justice Department officials realized. Edgar Hoover.īut the papers included sensitive information on U.S. Supporters argued that the evidence was concocted by right-wing enemies, including FBI Director J. Hiss' defenders downplayed the documents as worthless or inconsequential trade and diplomatic papers that many government employees could have had. They would forever be known as "the Pumpkin Papers." Chambers led investigators to his farm outside Westminster, where he pulled two strips of film and three canisters of film from a hollowed-out pumpkin. Chambers produced 65 documents and four handwritten notes he said came from Mr. Chambers in federal court in Baltimore.īut during a pre-trial deposition with Mr. Richard Nixon, the committee couldn't decide who was telling the truth. Hiss could provide no one else who knew Mr.ĭespite harsh questioning from then-Rep. Hiss identified his accuser as a man named "George Crosley," a free-lance journalist he had met years earlier. When the two appeared before the committee, Mr. Chambers returned to a closed-door session of the committee and offered a near encyclopedic knowledge of Mr. "So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him."īut Mr. Hiss told a packed House hearing two days later, adding that he did not know Mr. "I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party," Mr. Adlai Stevenson and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were prepared to vouch for his character. Two Supreme Court justices, Illinois Gov. It was unthinkable that such a man could be a Communist - or even associate with someone like Mr. At Harvard Law School he became a protege of Felix Frankfurter, then clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. "He moved with a casual grace suggestive of Baltimore Cotillions or Gibson Island tennis matches, at both of which he was a familiar figure," wrote historian William Manchester. He grew up in Bolton Hill, attended City College and graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 1926, where he excelled in debating and was chosen the "best hand shaker" in his class. Hiss was every inch the patrician diplomat. Tall, elegant and impeccably tailored, Mr. Roosevelt to Yalta to discuss the postwar world with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill and served as a key American organizer of the United Nations. During his 11 years with the department, he accompanied President Franklin D. Hiss had left the State Department two years earlier to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Then he read a list of former, mid-level government officials, ending with the name Alger Hiss. Chambers told of a cell of Communists who operated in Washington. Reading from a prepared statement in a bored monotone, Mr. Chambers became a Communist underground agent, but grew disillusioned with the party and left in 1938. Whittaker Chambers was a former reporter for the Communist newspaper the New Masses and a free-lance translator. Seated before the committee was a portly, 47-year-old man in a )) wrinkled suit. 3, 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities switched to a larger hearing room in preparation for a "mystery witness." Reporters were quickly summoned. "Hiss was the very symbol for his adversaries of the New Deal and cooperation with the Russians during the Second World War," says Allen Weinstein, author of "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case." "Hiss knew everybody and everybodyįor the afternoon of Aug. "It must be there are traitors inside the gate." Chambers, repeating a common question of the time. emerged as the most powerful nation after World War II, why is it we seemed to be losing to our enemies?" asks Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of Mr. The spy charges struck a chord with an American public perplexed by an increasingly hostile postwar world: Russia had being swept under Soviet control.
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