The Pumpkin Papers

More than a quarter-century after the glaring headlines, former State Department Official Alger Hiss finally found the answer last week to a much disputed mystery in one of the most celebrated spy cases of the cold war era. On being denounced in 1948 as a Communist, Hiss filed a libel suit against his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who thereupon dug out some evidence that a relative had hidden for him in an abandoned dumbwaiter in New York City. As he later told it in his book Witness, he had saved an envelope full of documents he had received from Hiss --typewritten summaries of State Department papers, some memos handwritten by Hiss, and five pieces of what turned out to be 35-mm. film (two developed strips, three undeveloped rolls).

Chambers, then a TIME senior editor, gave the papers to the pretrial investigators in the libel case, but he held back the film, partly because he wanted to learn what was on it. Word of Chambers' sensational new revelations quickly reached the House Un-American Activities Committee, before which he had originally accused Hiss. When Committee Member Richard M. Nixon issued a subpoena for any further evidence, Chambers led agents to his Maryland farm and pointed to a hollowed-out pumpkin. Fearful of prowling Hiss investigators, he said, he had put the films in the pumpkin while he was gone for the day. Thus were baptized the famous "pumpkin papers."*

Precious Secrets. Congressman Nixon made much of the films. He was photographed peering at them through a magnifying glass. When the Justice Department asked for them, he declared that he could not turn over such precious "State and Navy Department" secrets unless the House approved, but he soon released them. When Hiss was tried for perjury, only two of the films (the two already developed) were introduced; prints from them showed State Department documents relating to U.S.German relations in the late '30s. Despite their fame, however, a prominent evidence expert, Professor Irving Younger of Cornell Law School, writes in the current issue of Commentary that these films were not conclusive evidence against Hiss since someone else could have passed them to Chambers. Far more decisive, says Younger, were such items as the summaries of State Department secrets typed on a typewriter shown to have belonged to Hiss.

What of the three rolls of film never produced at the trial? There were hints at the time that they contained some mysterious, unrevealed secrets. Hiss, on the other hand, has thought that they could help vindicate him. But not until last week, under the Freedom of Information Act, did he finally win his battle to obtain the secret films. One roll was entirely blank (as Chambers himself indicated in his book). The two others showed only the dimmest images, barely discernible but obviously of innocuous material on how to use a chest parachute, how to use a fire extinguisher, drawings of microphones--all found in standard Army and Navy manuals of the period. Now 70, Hiss said that the three films should help exonerate him because they "certainly are useless for espionage purposes." Almost any espionage haul, however, nets useless along with critical information; the films showed mainly that Hiss's prosecutors were selective in their evidence, as prosecutors generally are. They also showed that Nixon may have made more of a brouhaha than justified by the films. In any case, the films do nothing to change the jury's verdict.

* In Witness, Chambers explained that he was influenced in his choice of hiding place by the memory of a Soviet film featuring pumpkin-like papier-mache figures in which revolutionaries hid weapons. Lionel Trilling, however, in a new introduction to his Chambers-era roman `a clef, The Middle of the Journey, suggests a more bizarre psychological reason: shortly after Chambers quit the Communist Party and emerged from the underground, friends who feared for his life asked him to a Halloween party to establish his public identity and so forestall murder. The memory of this experience may have led Chambers to use a pumpkin in another effort to save himself.

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