Gods of Deception, page 39
“Is that so …”
“I’m just trying to help you understand your unconscious motivations.”
“And that has something do with Alger Hiss?”
“Why you never talk about your mother.”
“She died when I was eight. I barely remember her. It does make me sad, though, I must confess.”
“With psychoanalysis, maybe just a year or two, you’d start to remember what she did to you. Mother, too, of course, would benefit, but I’ve long ago given up on her. When was the last time you two even spoke to each other?”
“Did to me? She died, poor woman, of breast cancer. Leaving her husband, the greatest specialist on gynecological cancers in America, feeling moribund and helpless. I think it almost broke him.”
“You see, you never told me that. Clearly your grief, if not for Teddy, or the mother you barely knew, played a part in your taking pity on Priscilla Hiss and screwing up your defense of Alger Hiss.”
“Who told you such a thing?”
“That’s the opinion of half my patients: They all think Priscilla is a stinker—especially now.”
“Now?”
“Since he got out of jail ten years ago, she refuses to enlist in his crusade to clear himself.”
“Poor Priscilla. It never ends.”
“And let me tell you it interferes in my professional capacity to remain both aloof and empathetic. I’ve even had journalists pretend to be patients to see if they couldn’t get something out of me—about you—the Hisses!”
“Perish the thought.”
“Don’t be so sarcastic. I’m a healer. I just want everyone to be, well, happier.”
“Well, Jefferson would certainly approve.”
“Not so rigid, more empathetic, more forgiving of others. You and Mother, for instance.”
“Perhaps we should reenlist Dr. Binger for Annie? Is he still around, that charlatan who almost destroyed my career—the man you, darling, once considered the cat’s meow? But all the Bingers in the world, and all the happiness on the planet won’t bring back Teddy, Martha. Nothing will. I know Theodore can be taxing, but aren’t your children some consolation? He’d be their uncle. When I have Karen and Erich with me at Hermitage, I bring up Teddy all the time; I encourage them to walk in his shoes, to get to know all the things he loved. I give them his childhood books to read. That’s all we can do.”
—
It is an oddity that the only two men who consistently stood up to Martha were her brother and her Polish husband, Theodore, whom she first met after receiving a Guggenheim grant to study postwar trauma on children in Poland. Theo—as she decided to call him, so as not to remind her of her brother—was a Polish Jew and had barely survived the war, during which he had fought the Nazis as a member of the partisan resistance. He was a Communist intellectual and up-and-coming sociologist. For every one of Martha’s convoluted ideas or pitiful explanations of the human condition, Theo could come up with a dozen counterexamples based on Durkheim, Max Weber, or Marx, whom he quoted, not without a sneer and pained grimace, to her with complete textual authority—the patriarchal spirit incarnate! It made for a talkative, if fraught, marriage. How she married the one man who could so devastate her intellectually is beyond me. Unless he provided some haunting echo of her lost brother.
Theo, older by about ten years, clearly married her as a way to escape the Iron Curtain. But he did manage to get her pregnant, twice, before tending his harem of mistresses full-time, first at Hunter College and then at Columbia, where he taught sociology and rose to full professor. As far as I could ever make out, they always slept in separate bedrooms. Theo’s “airheads,” as Martha referred to them, were mostly pretty and impressionable grad students who found their professor’s European accent and old-world charm irresistible. Martha even admitted to me—her lack of inhibition in personal matters as she grew older is simply staggering—that the only way Theo finally got her pregnant was by using a pornographic magazine for the first conception, and having one of his mistresses on hand, so to speak, for the second. Of course, she acknowledged, and excused, all Theo’s infidelities and his deficiencies as both husband and father as being due to the trauma of the war years, along with the loss of his parents—his father, a doctor, his mother, a nurse, both shipped off to Auschwitz. And, I believe, though he rarely mentioned it, a brother, an officer in the Polish army killed by the Soviets in 1939.
For the most part, Martha and I got along pretty well during her childhood and adolescence. Her animus was largely directed at Annie, who pushed her piano studies to the limit of the poor child’s endurance. The Hiss trial changed all that. I made the cardinal error of agreeing to bring in two psychiatrists—Carl A. Binger and James Murray—to testify for the defense against Chambers. I should have held my ground; I should have threatened to resign; I should have walked away from the biggest mistake of my life. But Alger and Priscilla (I’m haunted by her pleas) were dead set on having them as expert witnesses, and so I bowed to their foolhardy judgment.
26
A Life in the Law and Out:
No More Where He Came From
THREE THINGS CLARIFIED for me when I joined Hiss’s defense team: Alger was fully in charge, his lawyers were close to despair, and there seemed to be what I can only describe as a bizarre division of labor: an insider group of legal gunslingers fed by a shady coven of investigators, and a more public group of esteemed trial attorneys. The two groups rarely met or discussed matters. The insiders moved in the shadows and shared only what they thought we needed to know, we who faced the judge and jury and the public. Alger set this guarded tone; he gave the marching orders.
At first, I was pleased to be colleagues with so many top Harvard Law men, and not a little amazed at the level of financial resources available for investigation and research. Where the money for Alger’s defense fund came from, I never knew. The first trial had been a near-run thing, a hung jury, though lead counsel, Lloyd Stryker, had managed brilliantly in many respects to mislead and distract the jury from the critical facts that wouldn’t go away—namely, the top-secret State Department papers copied on the Hisses’ Woodstock typewriter, which Whittaker Chambers had hidden away and then sprung on the Hiss defense team. Stryker, with all his bluff and theatrical flourish, had clearly been playing for a hung jury from the first because he felt that was the best he was likely to get. But such a defense by misdirection could hardly be replicated in the second trial. The world had changed: Stalin’s minions were on the march.
The amiable southerner out of Boston, Claude Cross, our lead counsel for Hiss in the second trial, had only one good option: stress the truthfulness and upstanding trustworthiness of Alger, and the bad character of the ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers. This was a formidable challenge by any stretch. By late 1949, China had gone Communist, the Soviets had the atom bomb, Eastern Europe was firmly under the thumb of vicious Communist regimes—all satellites of Moscow—and more American Communists or KGB spies, so it seemed almost every day, were either admitting their guilt or exposing others.
Pressure from HUAC investigators and the FBI, and growing paranoia in certain circles, had seemingly resulted in a rash of mysterious disappearances and deaths of potential witnesses for the prosecution, notably those of Laurence Duggan, Harry Dexter White, and Marvin Smith, the first of many more to come as the fifties unfolded. As the trial date approached in November of 1949, we had no idea how many more Communists might be dug out from their holes by Hoover’s myrmidons, while McCarthy waited in the wings to start slinging even more mud. No matter how well we groomed the jury pool, the growing fear of Soviet infiltration of American institutions would be staring at us every day from the jury box. But our real problem was Whittaker Chambers and the secret documents he had produced out of nowhere, a pumpkin patch no less. In the voir dire, only one out of sixty potential jurors expressed concern about believing the testimony of an ex-Communist like Chambers. If Chambers were to be believed, then the secret State Department papers (copied on their Woodstock, so confirmed by FBI forensics experts) with Hiss’s name on them, which Chambers had turned over to the government, would be viewed as credible evidence— damning evidence. The Woodstock was irrefutable: We had to discredit Chambers. Alger made that absolutely clear, and he was right.
To complicate our task, we had a senior and very experienced judge, Henry Goddard, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and stickler for the rules of evidence. I knew well from previous experience that Goddard would give great latitude to both sides for the introduction of witnesses. Good news/bad news: We would get to present our friendly psychiatrists to opine on Chambers’s history of deceit and malice; while the prosecution would, in contrast to the first trial, most likely be allowed to have Hede Massing testify, along with other Communists, ex-agents, and assorted fellow travelers—all potentially prejudicial to our case. Infamously known as the “Redhead,” Massing was an admitted KGB agent, who claimed Alger had been a spy connected to the so-called Ware Group, run by Chambers for Soviet military intelligence. Of course, it was solely her word against Alger’s. And, as we would soon find, to our dismay, the prosecution, with all the resources of the FBI at its disposal, would turn up even more damning evidence to convince a jury that Chambers and Hiss, as well as their wives, had had a fouryear long, quite intimate friendship. These intimations of a friendship, as more evidence trickled in, perplexed me greatly.
In fact, they chagrined me to my toes, as I caught fascinating glimpses of Priscilla Hiss provided by Chambers and his wife—facets of Priscilla that had entirely escaped me over the years—glimpses of an invisible counterlife, one that, nevertheless, rang absolutely true in my mind. In Witness, Chambers poignantly described in detail his friendship with Priscilla. According to Chambers, Priscilla found in his wife, Lise, as she was known to the Hisses, someone she could talk to, open up to about her child from her first marriage, and all the joys and tribulations of motherhood, which the two women shared. It was, by this account, a relationship between two couples that was fun-loving, spirited, carefree, and literate. This friendship, which was unusual, if not frowned upon, in the clandestine world they inhabited, was based almost entirely on character and not mind, as Chambers described it, since Alger, so he found, was a little stuffy and not taken by ideas, except those of Lenin and Marx. These parts of Witness Annie found entirely convincing, and they only added to the grudge she held against me for my treatment of Chambers. Faced with such moving and transparent testimony by our witness, I realized that Alger was testing more than my personal loyalty to him, or the Harvard team. He was testing my fealty to Priscilla. And he was holding something back, perhaps protecting her.
In the defense’s files, I discovered affidavits that Priscilla Hiss had been a member of the Socialist Party. We assumed the prosecution had the same information. And it was also clear that she was a competent, if not expert, typist. Alger couldn’t type worth a damn—something I knew well from my time with Oliver Wendell Holmes, when I was told how often a typist had to be gotten in for my predecessor during the summer session in Beverly Farms. Since the crux of the defense’s case was that Whittaker Chambers was perpetuating a forgery by typewriter to ruin Alger Hiss—for God knows what reason—this information about Priscilla, should it become established by the prosecution, would be very damaging to our case. This was one of the crucial reasons why the defense, long before I had been brought on, had gone to such incredible lengths to run down the Hisses’ lost Woodstock typewriter before the government got their hands on it. A pyrrhic victory, so it turned out, which only strengthened the prosecution’s case when experts determined that the secret documents in question had indeed been typed on the Hisses’ Woodstock.
Clearly, the only real hope we had was to keep Priscilla out of the limelight and focus all our resources on calling into doubt the government’s case, which meant utterly destroying the credibility of Whittaker Chambers. That’s what Alger Hiss had brought me on to do—destroy Chambers by deploying our famous psychiatrists, Binger and Murray. And make sure the jury saw Chambers as a pervert and pathological liar. Not just a liar but a warped sexual deviant and crazed psychotic with an irrational hatred of Alger Hiss. When I sat down with Alger, he could not have been more clear or confident that Chambers was a nutcase. We had Chambers’s own deposition in the Baltimore libel case, and all the detailed transcripts of his testimony in the first trial, so plenty of details about his checkered life, occasional homosexual liaisons, and days in the Communist underground, as well as his years of his interactions with Alger and Priscilla! All either Alger or Priscilla would admit to was that they’d known a journalist, who called himself George Crosley, for brief periods in 1936 but not after January 1937 or anytime during 1938, when the secret State Department papers came into Whittaker Chambers’s hands. Only under enormous pressure did Alger finally admit that Chambers might indeed be this phantom George Crosley—not “Carl,” as he’d actually been known to them in the underground. Thus the government’s charges of perjury for transmitting those same secret documents after 1937.
I protested mightily to Alger that not only did I have no expertise in such psychosexual matters but, due in no small part to my daughter Martha, I was no fan of Mr. Freud, whom I considered just above a humbug. Alger only smiled.
“Edward, that is precisely why the jury will believe you, because you are not an enthusiast. Not like Pross.”
“But Alger, where do these allegations about homosexual encounters and assorted vices come from?”
“They come in every day.”
“But from where? Do we have names, dates—witnesses?”
“They come across Harold’s desk; he has his networks out there, his contacts among the kind of people Chambers spent his time with.”
“Communists?”
“Literary types, artistic types, and a few Communists slithering out of the gutter.”
“This you have in all good conscience from your lawyer, Harold Rosenwald?”
“You doubt him? Harold was editor of the Law Review at Harvard. He gets to the bottom of things; he gets tips from all and sundry.”
“But in court, under cross-examination, these things—tips—will not hold up unless there is direct testimony and evidence. Otherwise, it’s hearsay. And even then, well, even with a disreputable character like Chambers, it will be hard to prove these so-called pathological disturbances, as Binger puts it: ‘pathological predispositions which are frequently found in the psychopathic personality.’”
“Binger is a brilliant practitioner …” Alger leaned across the table, as if to impart a very personal observation. “Priscilla thinks very highly of him; she’s read all his books.”
“I have to tell you, Priscilla or no, I find a lot of it, well, unintelligible, and not exactly convincing. And if I find it convoluted and lacking logic, what will the jury think? I don’t believe a jury has ever been presented with such a psychiatric defense before.”
“They’ll believe you, Edward. You’re old New York, Groton and Yale and Harvard Law, son of a famous surgeon, bedrock of society. Your work with the WPB was praised by Roosevelt and Truman. And your wife is a famous concert pianist from impeccable New England stock, DAR—yes. We’re depending on you; Priscilla is confident that you are the right man at the right time and place to make the case.” He leaned forward again, his eyes glittering. “Psychoanalysis is the future, Edward.”
“Alger, forgive me, but as a member of your team, I must ask you: Is there something about Chambers, an aspect of your relationship with the man, that you haven’t informed us about? I ask because you seem so convinced that our experts, Binger and Murray, can elicit confession of such monstrous allegations—the man was a top editor at Time magazine for nine years!—which, on the face of things, seem barely credible.”
“They are the experts; I have absolute confidence in their abilities to convince a jury.”
“Do you and Priscilla know Binger personally?”
“We’ve met him.”
“Alger, again, forgive me, but I must ask: Do you believe these things about Whittaker Chambers because he broke with the Communist underground, or because he, well, your Mr. Crosley, ended his relationship with you—what shall we say?—on bad terms?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Edward. You’ve read all the transcripts, all my depositions. I stand by every word: I only knew him as George Crosley, and it was barely a passing acquaintance.” Alger stared at me directly with all the sincerity he could muster, as if daring my doubt. “It’s the total weight of the evidence against Chambers, you see, the broad picture, that the jury needs to absorb. And then ask themselves the single question: Who is lying—me or Chambers? Look at the character witnesses lined up to support me: the finest public servants of our generation. Look at my record, Edward, you of all people.”
—
I have often thought about that “you of all people,” and the note of shame attached. Was it because Alger assumed Pross had kept me up to speed on his great successes: a man who had sat next to Roosevelt at Yalta, praised by Truman, an architect of the United Nations, not to mention fidelity to Harvard, the law, the country?
I soon realized that Alger was prepared to go for broke: no more hung juries—innocent or guilty, nothing halfway. I gently suggested to Alger that we should stop our insistent portrayal of him as the fairhaired boy, a paragon of virtue, knight in shining armor—just a little too perfect.
“Alger,” I said, “no jury can believe in such perfection; it’s a stage prop. They will be more inclined to believe you with a few flaws, with some sympathetic stories from your past of family difficulties. Perhaps you and Mr. Chambers—your George Crosley—found, well, some convivial subjects, sympathetic subjects: You, too, had a brother who died.”
Alger looked at me with the ferocity of a cornered cougar, causing me to feel that if I so much as moved a muscle in that direction, I would feel his bite on my jugular. Perhaps Pross’s babbling to me in the early days took him by surprise. I realized then that nobody else on the defense team had the foggiest idea about his troubled youth, family tragedies, nuggets dropped from Priscilla’s fingertips to me when she’d first spurned his matrimonial overtures in the late twenties. I realized then that his shining image he presented to the world was the one thing that kept him going, kept him alive: It was all of a piece. Whether out of pride or shameful habit, he’d conjured an image as the golden boy of the New Deal: We were going to march into battle with our knight in shining armor strutting the boards, all flags flying—and flags of his choosing.
