Six Crises Read Online Free Page B

pleaded with you to divert yourself from Communist activities, and that when he left you, you had tears in your eyes and said, ‘I simply can’t make the sacrifice.’”
    â€œI do know that he said that,” replied Hiss. “I also know that I am testifying under those same laws to the contrary.”
    And so it went through the balance of the hearing. He so dominated the proceedings that by the end of his testimony he had several members of the Committee trying to defend the right of a congressional committee to look into charges of Communism in government.
    But looking over my notes on his testimony, I saw that he had never once said flatly, “I don’t know Whittaker Chambers.” He had always qualified it carefully to say, “I have never known a man by the name of Whittaker Chambers.” Toward the end of his testimony, I called Ben Mandel, one of the members of our staff, to the rostrum and asked him to telephone Chambers in New York and find out if he might possibly have been known under another name during the period he was a Communist functionary. The answer came back too late. After the hearing was over, Chambers returned the call and said that his Party name was Carl and that Hiss and the other members of the Communist cell with which he had worked had known him by that name.
    As the hearing drew to a close, Karl Mundt, speaking for the Committee, said, “The Chair wishes to express the appreciation of the Committee for your very co-operative attitude, for your forthrightstatements, and for the fact that you were first among those whose names were mentioned by various witnesses to communicate with us, asking for an opportunity to deny the charges.”
    John Rankin of Mississippi added, “I want to congratulate the witness that he didn’t refuse to answer the questions on the ground that it might incriminate him. And he didn’t bring a lawyer here to tell him what to say.”
    When the hearing adjourned Rankin left his seat to shake hands with Hiss. He had to fight his way through a crowd for, when the gavel came down, many of the spectators and some of the press swarmed around Hiss to congratulate him. He had won the day completely. It would not be an exaggeration to say that probably 90 per cent of the reporters at the press table and most of the Committee members were convinced that a terrible mistake had been made, a case of mistaken identity, and that the Committee owed an apology to Hiss for having allowed Chambers to testify without first checking into the possibility of such a mistake. Most of the news stories the next day and the editorials during the week were to express the same opinion—blasting the Committee for its careless procedures and, for the most part, completely overlooking the possibility that Chambers rather than Hiss might have been telling the truth.
    One of the reporters who regularly covered the Committee came up to me afterwards and asked, “How is the Committee going to dig itself out of this hole?” Mary Spargo of the Washington Post, who had been covering the Committee for some time, told me bluntly, “This case is going to kill the Committee unless you can prove Chambers’ story.” I ran into another barrage of questions when I went to the House restaurant after the hearing for lunch. Ed Lahey of the Chicago Daily News, whom I respected as one of the most honest and objective reporters in Washington, walked up to me literally shaking with anger. His eyes blazed as he said, “The Committee on Un-American Activities stands convicted, guilty of calumny in putting Chambers on the stand without first checking the truth of his testimony.”
    As I was eating lunch I got the report of President Truman’s opinion of the case. At his press conference he labeled the whole spy investigation a “red herring,” cooked up by a Republican Congress to avoid taking action on price controls, inflation, and