The Hiss-Chambers case gripped the nation in 1948 and still provokes controversy. Take a deep factual dive into the story of two brilliant, fascinating men, sensational Congressional hearings, spy documents hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft and a pumpkin, the trial of the century, and the launch of Richard Nixon's career.
A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case
Claim This Podcastby John W. Berresford
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38 episodes
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Podcast Overview
The Hiss-Chambers case gripped the nation in 1948 and still provokes controversy. Take a deep factual dive into the story of two brilliant, fascinating men, sensational Congressional hearings, spy documents hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft and a pumpkin, the trial of the century, and the launch of Richard Nixon's career.
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1/4/2023
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Recent Episodes
September 20, 2023
Chapter 38: Why do people still care about this case?
<div><img src= "https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/show/352175/October_19_2020_-_2.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="215" /></div> <div> </div> <div>This is my final Podcast, and the shortest one — just my last thoughts after decades of study. The Hiss-Chambers Case will live on because it is important post-WWII American history, and also a great yarn, a feast for trial lawyers, and an example of the endless fight between totalitarianism and freedom, between shiny lies and messy reality. I hope it fascinated and educated you as much as it has me. Thank you for your interest in my words.</div>
September 13, 2023
Chapter 37: What did not come out in court?
<p><img src= "https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/show/352175/Chambers_famous_trials.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="166" /><span style= "font-size: 8pt;">Whittaker Chambers</span></p> <div>This Podcast, the second to last, is the longest one. The Hiss-Chambers Case did not die. Many new facts were discovered, the majority of them harmful to Hiss, starting in the 1970s. The Freedom of Information Act led the US government (after a lawsuit) to produce about 40,000 pages of paper, mostly from the FBI. Hiss made the files of his defense counsel available to researchers. One wonders if he knew what was in there, some of it was so damaging to him. Most damaging in these and other files is powerful evidence that Hiss and his wife knew that the office typewriter they had had in the late 1930s was a Woodstock and that they had given it to The Catlett Kids, but they both denied such knowledge to the FBI, the Grand Jury (under oath), and even to their own ‘A List’ attorneys, William Marbury and Edward McLean. Other sources of information that opened late were the papers of Alger Hiss’s brother Donald; a recollection of a fellow convict who spoke with Hiss in prison; the observations of a psychologist who testified for Hiss at the second trial (not Dr. Binger); the memoir of a document expert whom Chester Lane hired to help Hiss’s Forgery by Typewriter argument; and even the memories of a female Bucks County, Pennsylvania, novelist who bumped into Chambers and The Ware Group during a brief residence in Washington in 1934. Finally, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, several security agencies of former Communist dictatorships have briefly opened their files, all of them damaging to Hiss. No wonder this second to last Podcast is the longest one.</div> <div> </div> <div><strong>FURTHER RESEARCH </strong></div> <div> </div> <div>The FOIA Documents are best summarized in Weinstein at 300-14 (“The Woodstock Cover-Up” — a coverup by the Hisses, not the FBI), 399-435 (“Rumors and Whispers: The Pursuit of Evidence”), 625-30 (“The Motion for a New Trial”), 632-34 (“The ‘Faked’ or ‘Substituted’ Woodstock: Hover and the FBI”), and 641-45 (“The Double Agent: Horace Schmahl, Mystery Man”). Other post-trials evidence is recounted in Gary Wills’ “Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education” at 61-62 (Doubleday 1983); Elinor Langer, “Josephine Herbst” at 151-58, 268-76 (Northeastern Univ. Press 1984); and Donald B. Doud,” Witness to Forgery: Memoir of a Forensic Document Examiner” at 34-66 (Orchard Knoll Publishers 2009). The best summaries of the documents from ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ are the chapter titled “Alger Hiss:Case Closed” in <span class="il">John</span> Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, & Alexander Vassiliev, “Spies: The Rise & Fall of the KGB in America” at 1-31 (Yale University Press 2009); and Eduard Mark, “In Re Alger Hiss: A Final Verdict from the Archives of the KGB,” 1 Journal of Cold War Studies at 26 (2009).</div> <div> </div> <div>Hiss’s briefs and some supporting documents in his last run at the courts (in the 1970s, claiming prosecutorial misconduct) are reproduced in Edith Tiger (Ed.), “In Re Alger Hiss” (two volumes) (Farrar Straus Giroux 1979) (Chambers’ handwritten account of his homosexual activities, which he gave to the FBI, is in Volume I at 258-66.). For my skeptical reaction to some of Hiss’s claims, see pages 221-28 of my paper “How Alger Hiss Was Framed: The Latest Theory,” available at <a href= "https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3868165" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl= "https://www.google.com/url?q=https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id%3D3868165&source=gmail&ust=1646827265656000&usg=AOvVaw0LnQhITLWeDhq74WdkHQNB"> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/<wbr />papers.cfm?abstract_id=3868165</a><wbr />.</div> <div> </div> <div>Questions: Is there now reasonable doubt that Hiss was guilty of the offenses charged, and of a good deal more? Or am I missing something? Certainly, if Hiss is in fact innocent, he is one of the most wronged persons in our history! </div> <div> </div> <div>If The Prosecution in Hiss trials did not play fair, should any tears be shed for Hiss if he was still up to his neck in spying for the Soviet Union and setting the stage for Joe McCarthy? What motive would a female Bucks County novelist have to lie and place Chambers and Hiss together in The Ware Group in Washington in the mid-30s? Isn’t she as unlikely to be taking orders from J. Edgar Hoover as Chambers’ best friend Professor Meyer Schapiro, a Jewish socialist art history professor at Columbia? In light of the fact that all the typewriter experts Hiss’s counsel hired reached the same conclusion as the FBI expert Feehan, is it likely that Hiss knew he was lying all the years he was claiming Forgery by Typewriter? Or might he have forgotten and convinced himself that he was actually innocent? Have you never known anyone who had such favorable delusions about his or her bad conduct long ago?</div> <div> </div> <div>Consider all the people who have to be lying, all the experts who have to be wrong, and all the documents that have to be forged and planted in dozens of different places in different continents over several decades if Hiss is innocent. How likely is that?</div>
September 6, 2023
Chapter 36: Hiss and Chambers After the Trials
<p><img src= "https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/show/352175/download.jpg" alt="" width="252" height="200" /></p> <div>As Chambers wrote to his friend Bill Buckley, most of us think the story of Oedipus ends when he learns he married his own mother and puts his eyes out. In fact, however, Oedipus lived for years afterwards. After the trials, Chambers lived for 10 years and Hiss for 45. Neither escaped The Case, nor did their wives and children. (Add this, by the way, to all the reasons that committing treason is a bad idea.). Each man wrote a book. Chambers’ became a best-seller, a major American autobiography, and a sacred text of the post-WWII right. Hiss’s book sank like a stone, as did another he wrote in the mid-1980s. Chambers tried to stay out of the public eye. Hiss tried to stay in it, but failed to establish either his innocence or the dimensions of the shape-shifting conspiracy that had framed him. This Podcast recounts the tragic post-court life of each of our protagonists. </div> <div> </div> <div><strong>FURTHER RESEARCH</strong></div> <div> </div> <div><strong>Episode 36:</strong> Chambers’ autobiography is “Witness,” most recently published by Regnery Gateway in 2014. He was working on a huge, never finished book (working title “The Third Rome”) when he died. Associated essays of his were published by Random House in 1964 under the title “Cold Friday” — the name of a field on his farm. His articles for The National Review (amounting to less than 85 pages) were published by that magazine in “The Whittaker Chambers Reader: His Complete National Review Writings 1957-59” in 2014; these and his earlier short pieces appear in “Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Essays,” edited by Terry Teachout and published by Transaction in 1996. Two books of Chambers’ correspondence have been printed: “Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961” (Regnery Gateway 1987); and “Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters 1949-60,” published in 1997 by Regnery Gateway. Mr. de Toledano covered the trials for Newsweek Magazine and became a prominent conservative writer. If you’re interested in what Chambers did and thought in his last years, the best of the foregoing works is (in my opinion) the Chambers-Buckley correspondence.</div> <div> </div> <div>Hiss’s memoir, “In the Court of Public Opinion” (Knopf 1957), draws heavily on his Petition for a New Trial on Grounds of Newly Discovered Evidence. His late-in-life autobiography, “Recollections of a Life,” was published by Seaver in 1988. It is as dry as his first book. Hiss’s son, Anthony, maybe best known as The New Yorker’s railroad correspondent under the pseudonym E.M. Frimbo, wrote about himself and his father in “Laughing Last” (Houghton Mifflin 1977) when things were looking up for his dad. After the verdict of history had turned the other way, the young Hiss produced “The View from Alger’s Window: A Son’s Memoir” (Houghton Mifflin 1999). It concentrates on the correspondence he shared with his imprisoned father. The New York Times reviewer described the latter book as “deeply troubling,” “a painful story of the family as a factory of denial.”“Family Ties,” by Ann Douglas, <a href= "https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/27/reviews/990627.27dougl.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl= "https://www.google.com/url?q=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/27/reviews/990627.27dougl.html&source=gmail&ust=1646315040743000&usg=AOvVaw0M6Dxpd_bzLM12w3aE7fX8"> https://archive.nytimes.com/<wbr />www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/<wbr />27/reviews/990627.27dougl.html</a><wbr />. That The Times would publish such a review indicates how much, even among northeastern liberals, the verdict had solidified against Hiss and for Chambers.</div> <div> </div> <div>More about the two protagonists’ post-trial lives can be found in Professor Weinstein’s book “Perjury” at pages 550-72 (chapter titled “Alger and Whittaker: The Vigil and the Death Watch”); and at pages 444-514 of the Sam Tanenhaus biography “Whittaker Chambers.”</div> <div> </div> <div>Questions: Which protagonist suffered more after the trials — the imprisoned Hiss or the ostracized Chambers? Do you have a hunch that one or both of them overcame gloom and died with a somewhat satisfied, “something ventured, something gained” feeling? Of the wives and children, only one (Hiss’s son) capitalized on The Case. If you had been one of the others, would you have been tempted to follow Tony’s path?</div> <div> </div> <div>If Hiss was guilty, why didn’t he avoid the limelight like Chambers did? And, when his son got interested in The Case, why didn’t Hiss say to him “Son, this has taken over my life, but it doesn’t have to mess up yours. I’ve got some years to live and powerful friends on my side; you just get on with your own existence and leave this to us.” Why would he let his son take up a cause that Hiss knew was a lie and would likely someday be exposed as such, making his son look pitiful?</div>
38 total episodes available
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