The Alger Hiss Trials(英)

Chambers, the Committee called it "forthright and emphatic." In response, Hiss published a fourteen-page letter attacking HUAC for "using the great powers and prestige of the United States Congress to help sworn traitors to besmirch any American they may pick upon."

　　The Pumpkin Papers

　　On October 8, Hiss filed a slander suit against Chambers, based on his accusation on Meet the Press that Hiss "was a Communist and may be now." Hiss's attorneys began a widespread investigation into the background of Chambers in hopes of destroying his credibility. The investigation included exploration of whether Chambers had ever been treated for mental illness or entered into homosexual relationships. (In fact, Chambers had engaged in a number of homosexual affairs in the mid-1930s, but defense attorneys were unable to ferret out this piece of information which might have been useful in establishing a motive for Chambers's alleged lies.)

　　In the middle of a deposition of Chambers in preparation for the slander suit, Hiss's attorney, William Marbury, requested that Chambers produce "any correspondence, either typewritten or in handwriting from any member of the Hiss family." Shortly after that request, Chambers visited the Baltimore home of his nephew's mother where, he said, he reached into a dumbwaiter shaft in the bathroom and pulled out a large, weathered envelope. The envelope contained four notes handwritten by Alger Hiss, sixty-five typewritten documents (copies of State Department documents, all dated between January and April, 1938) and five strips of 35 mm film. The documents, if genuine, were strong evidence not only that Hiss knew Chambers long after mid 1936, when Hiss claimed to have last seen "Crosley," but also that Hiss engaged in espionage.

　　Chambers turned over the documents to his lawyers, keeping the film. When Marbury resumed his deposition of Chambers, Hiss's bewildered attorney found himself presented with a packet of documents that not only blew his client's slander suit out of the water, but placed Hiss in serious danger of a crim

inal indictment.

　　The revelation of the Baltimore papers also stunned HUAC members and investigators. Chambers explained his delay in producing the incriminating documents as an effort to spare an old friend from more trouble than necessary. The investigation accompanying Hiss's slander suit, however, convinced Chambers that "Hiss was determined to destroy me——and my wife if possible," making disclosure seem the better course. Chambers also may have recognized that if he lost in the slander case, he might well have faced a Justice Department prosecution.

　　There was still one more big shoe to drop. Chambers placed the film (two strips developed and three undeveloped) taken from the Baltimore home into a hollowed-out pumpkin, then placed the pumpkin back in a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm. On the evening of December 2, 1948, Chambers accompanied two HUAC investigators to his farm, then led him to the patch holding the hollowed-out pumpkin. The film would prove later to include photographs of State and Navy Department documents. Over the ensuing months of the Hiss-Chambers controversy, the press——enjoying the alliteration——would generally refer to the entire set of documents and photographs taken from Baltimore as "the pumpkin papers." The following day, Hiss released a statement promising his "full cooperation to the Department of Justice and to the grand jury in a further investigation of this matter."

　　The debate had shifted. The question of whether Hiss knew Chambers better than he admitted, or even whether he was a Communist, now seemed relatively inconsequential. The question now was whether Alger Hiss, high State Department official, was a Soviet agent. Fortunately for Hiss, the statute of limitations for espionage was five years, and the incriminating evidence all concerned documents passed over a decade earlier. The statute of limitations was not an issue, however, on the question of whether Alger Hiss committed perjury.

　　The First Perjury Trial

　　Forty-four-year-old Alger Hiss, wearing a gray herringbone suit, blue tie, and a brimmed brown hat, entered the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan on May 31, 1949 for the first day of his trial for perjury. Hiss faced two counts, both stemming from testimony before a federal grand jury the previous December. Hiss was charged with lying when he testified that he never gave any documents to Whittaker Chambers and when he claimed never to have seen Chambers after January 1, 1937.

　　In his opening statement, Assistant U. S. Attorney Thomas Murphy told the twelve-person, middle-class jury, selected after questioning by Judge Samuel H. Kaufman, "If you don't believe Chambers, then we have no case." Murphy said the prosecution had no "photographs of the man lying," but would instead "corroborate Chambers's testimony by the typewriting and the handwriting." He predicted that after the evidence is presented the jury "will be convinced as I am that he is telling the truth."

　　Defense attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker, in his opening statement, said his client welcomed the "quiet and fair court of justice" after "the days of the Klieg lights, the television, and all the paraphernalia, the propaganda which surrounded the beginning of this story." Stryker said that the trial would show the contrast between his client, without a "blot or blemish on him," and Chambers, "a voluntary conspirator against the land that I love and you love."

　　Whittaker Chambers was, of course, the prosecution's central witness. Chambers testified that Hiss began passing him State Department documents in early 1937. He described Soviet agent Colonel Boris Bykov's recommended espionage procedures, followed by Hiss, that included bringing files home nightly and retyping them. Chambers identified the famous documents, both the typewritten and those in Hiss's own hand, and said that they had been given to him by Hiss in his Washington home.

　　On c

ross-examination, Stryker tried to highlight defects in Chambers's character. He asked about a play, written by Chambers as a student at Columbia in 1924, that Stryker called "an offensive treatment of Christ." He asked whether he ever lived in a "dive" in New Orleans with a prostitute named "One-Eyed Annie." (Chambers denied the charge.) He demanded to know whether Chambers was "for some fourteen years an enemy and traitor of the United States of America?" Chambers answered, "That is right." Styker pressed Chambers on why he hadn't, knowing what he claimed to know, warned the President or anybody before 1948 that Hiss should not be trusted in the important positions that he held. Styker suggested that the timing of Chambers's charge was an attempt to help the Republican Party's campaign against Truman.

　　Chambers's wife, Esther, followed Whittaker to the stand. She told jurors of the close relationship that she and her husband enjoyed for several years with Alger and Priscilla Hiss——a relationship that she said extended well beyond the January 1, 1937 date that Hiss had told the grand jury was his last meeting with Chambers. She described the Hiss's visit to their Baltimore apartment in December 1937 to celebrate the Hiss's wedding anniversary. The Hiss's, Esther Chambers testified, "brought a bottle of champagne."

　　Following the testimony from the Chambers came a series of witnesses who tied Alger Hiss to the typewritten State Department documents introduced by the government. Nathan Levine described the visit of Chambers to his mother's home to retrieve the envelope bearing documents from a dumbwaiter shaft. HUAC investigator Donald Appel told the jurors of the visit to the Chambers farm to retrieve "the pumpkin papers." State Department records expert Walter Anderson explained the significance of each of the typewritten papers and handwritten notes alleged to have come from Hiss. Eunice Lincoln, a secretary in Hiss's office, testified that Hiss often took departmental documents home to work on. The most critical testimony tying Hiss to the typed copies of State Department documents came from FBI laboratory expert Ramos C. Feehan. Feehan told jurors that letters known to have been typed by the Hiss in 1936 and 1937 ("Hiss standards") were typed on the same Woodstock typewriter as the sixty-five papers found in the Baltimore dumbwaiter shaft. He based his conclusion on similarities between certain letters, such as the lowercase "g," on both sets of papers.

　　The defense, through its witnesses, tried to persuade jurors of three things: first, that Hiss's reputation was so good as to make his alleged espionage activity almost unthinkable; second, that Chambers was mentally unstable and should not be believed and, third, that Hiss's Woodstock typewriter had been given to a household employee sometime before 1938, making it impossible for either Alger or Priscilla Hiss to have typed the Baltimore documents.

　　Three members of the Catlatt family testified that the Woodstock typewriter on which the Baltimore papers were allegedly typed was in fact in their possession, not the Hiss's, in early 1938. Claudia Catlatt thought she received the machine in mid-1936. Mike Catlatt recalled that the typewriter "was broke……the keys would jam up on you," but on cross-examination could not remember getting the machine repaired or when the family got it from the Hiss's. Perry Catlatt placed the time of the gift of the typewriter as December 1937 and recalled taking it soon thereafter to a "repair shop at K Street just off Connecticut Avenue." Prosecutor Murphy effectively undermined Perry Catlatt's credibility when he asked on cross, "Supposing I tell you that the Woodstock repair shop at Connecticut and K did

┨网页设计特效库┠ http://www。z┗co⊙l。com/网页特效/