The Reckoning

In silence, the eight women and four men filed into the jury box. From his seat, Alger Hiss looked at each one, his lips set in a tight smile. None returned his look. Priscilla Hiss fingered her handbag, stared straight ahead.

The court clerk spoke in the courtroom, hush: "Madam Foreman, have you and the members of the jury agreed on a verdict?"

"I have," said Mrs. Ada Condell selfconsciously.

"How say you?"

"I find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second count," said Mrs. Condell.

Hiss's face paled. His wife's cheek twitched. The eyes of a young defense attorney filled with sudden tears, and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Patient old Federal Judge Henry Warren Goddard told the jury: "I think you have . . . rendered a just verdict." Surrounded by swarming newsmen, the defendant walked out of the courtroom and into the cruel light of flash bulbs.

Marked for Success. Thus came Alger Hiss, 45. to the bitter day of reckoning. He had been found guilty of perjury. But implicit in the charge was Hiss's conviction for a far deeper crime that, because of the statute of limitations, justice could not reach. The verdict branded Hiss a spy.

Few men had seemed more surely marked for success, and few had found the path to it more smooth. Handsome, popular, effortlessly brilliant, Alger Hiss had been a Harvard protege of Felix Frankfurter, secretary to the late great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Among the New Deal's bright young men, he rose steadily. Soon he became a familiar figure at high councils of state, sitting just behind the men at the green-topped tables of power. As secretary general of the San Francisco Conference, he was shown in the news pictures between Russia's Molotov and the U.S.'s Stettinius; at Yalta, he sat at Franklin Roosevelt's shoulder. He inspired confidence; even in his days of exposure and trial, men of imposing station spoke for him unquestioningly -- Secretary of State Acheson, Ambassador Philip Jessup, Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter.

"This Lady, Right There." Alger Hiss's first trial had ended in a hung jury. In the second, Judge Goddard had proved more lenient than Judge Samuel Kaufman. He had permitted the defense to bring in a psychiatrist and a psychologist to testify that the Government's star witness, ex-Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers, was a "psychopathic personality," and allowed the prosecution to produce Hede Massing, ex-wife of Gerhart Eisler (she testified to meeting Hiss as a fellow Communist in Washington in 1935).

The prosecution had saved its biggest surprise for its rebuttal--a small, quiet-spoken Negro woman named Edith Murray. The FBI had been looking for months for a maid called Edith who had worked for the Chambers in Baltimore, where, the Hisses both swore, they had never visited the Chambers.

The Chambers, testified Edith Murray, had had only two visitors "that I know of"--a woman and her husband. "Stand up out of that chair and point her out," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy. The witness stood up and pointed unhesitatingly at Priscilla Hiss. "This lady, right there," said Edith. "She came and stayed overnight one time when [Mrs. Chambers] had to go to New York." She also remembered Mr. Hiss. Edith Murray was the first witness to corroborate the testimony of intimacy between the two families. The defense could not shake her story.

"They Are Immutable." In his closing summary, Defense Attorney Claude Cross was quiet and dogged; he also seemed sincerely convinced of his client's innocence. At the end of nearly five hours, he had punched a few holes in the peripheral testimony, suggested that the State Department documents had been stolen not by Hiss, but by Julian Wadleigh, or "a thief in the Far East division," and talked himself into hoarse exhaustion.

Towering Prosecutor Murphy was alternately scathing, indignant and mocking. He drove straight to the heart of the case. "I told you . . . that the facts would be proven by immutable documents," he said. He pointed to the Hiss typewriter and the copies of the State Department documents typed on it, which Chambers declared he had gotten from Alger Hiss. "There they are," said Murphy. "They don't change. No one's memory is involved here. They are immutable . . . Take them with you to the jury room. Take this machine.

"What do they prove?" he demanded. "Treason!" He pointed at Defendant Hiss: "And that is the traitor." The jury took just under 24 hours to agree. The defense promptly announced that it would appeal.

Only the narrowly vindictive greeted the verdict with a sense of jubilation. A brilliant but weak man had proved unworthy of the great trust placed in him. A fine talent had been put to doing evil. By the jury's verdict he was marked as a man who, having dedicated himself to Communism under a warped sense of idealism, had not served it openly, but covertly; a man who, having .once served an alien master, lacked the courage to recant his past, but went on making of his whole life an intricate, calculated lie.

Over the long months since August 1948, the case of Alger Hiss had been an agonizing public ordeal that left its mark on those who lived it. For a weary, tarnished man who had trodden the harsh, thankless road to Communism and back, the verdict was at least a partial expiation. Milking the cows on his Maryland farm, Whittaker Chambers said: "My work is finished."

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