Crooked Page 3

  And what was completely unforgivable was, we both knew it. Pat could see Kennedy, and she could see me, and she could tell the difference. If I had been alone at these events, I might have shrugged off the tiny slights and disappointments, watched my petty private dreams become thin and strained. I might have said to myself, Well, it doesn’t matter so much. There will be other parties.

  But I didn’t even have the solace of knowing that my petty private agonies were private. Pat saw every detail of it, and I saw her seeing it. It was like gazing into an ugly, sneering hall of mirrors. Someone who could see every vain and rotten and false detail of your life, who watched you flinch at every little slight, who saw you at your weakest and did not forgive.

  Riding home with Pat in the back of a taxi, I stared at the side of her face as she looked out the window. This is what marriage is, I thought. They’re watching you drown and you’re watching them watch you. You see them hating themselves for being trapped with you.

  And the next day I sat on the House Un-American Activities panel and tried to focus on what a bizarre, pudgy little man named Whittaker Chambers was saying.

  “In 1937 I repudiated Marx’s doctrines and Lenin’s tactics,” Chambers told us. His voice was nearly inaudible in the crowded hearing room. “I resolved to break with the Communist Party at whatever risk to my life or other tragedy to myself or my family.”

  If nothing else, it was starting to become one of our more entertaining testimonials. He clearly thought he’d been involved in something genuinely sinister.

  “Mr. Chambers,” Chief Investigator Stripling said, hiding a smile, “in your statement you stated that you yourself had served the…underground, chiefly in Washington, DC.”

  I worried that we were egging him on a little too much but Chambers rose to the bait, replying at his leaden pace, “Even in countries where the Communist Party is legal, an underground party exists side by side with the open party. The apparatus in Washington was an organization or group of that underground.”

  He’d bought a revolver to protect himself. He’d slept by day, kept vigil by night, but the Communists hadn’t come. I pictured them, assassins with goatees and berets and jazz records. Spies among us, our friends and neighbors harboring deviant beliefs regarding political economics. The filthy beatniks were inside the universities, the media, the federal government! Beware!

  But then…Chambers wasn’t just laying out for us in plain, forceful language the historic drama of our time—he was offering us a part in it. I began to see the power in the narrative. I’d implied before that certain people were Communists; I’d said it about Jerry Voorhis the way I’d said everything else I could possibly think of, but I hadn’t quite grasped the scope or the urgency of it all. If I were being honest, I didn’t entirely understand what a Communist was or what they were doing over there in Russia. None of us did. We saw the outside of it, foreign countries with unpronounceable names succumbing one after the other without warning in the dead of night. An international organization with an implacable hunger for power, for secrets, and for new recruits.

  The atmosphere in the chamber was gradually electrifying. I looked around to see who was catching it, who really understood the potential. Chambers was good with details. He and his contacts met in a violin studio. There were seven men who ran underground Communist cells under the direction of a sinister individual, a former petty officer in the Austrian army, a man who still had not been properly identified. I found myself hoping he had an eye patch or was missing an arm, but it would work however we needed it to. Chambers was offering me a lifeline; I just had to think ahead, farther and faster than the competition.

  And then the name of Alger Hiss surfaced, a man who worked in the State Department. As Chambers told the story, he’d known Hiss in the 1930s. They were friends, close friends, and Communist spies. Chambers left the party in 1937 and tried to convince Hiss to resign as well but failed. After that they parted ways, and for all he knew, Hiss was still operating, if we could just catch him. How hard could it be?

  “‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’” I read Churchill’s speech aloud while Pat listened. “‘Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.’ You see it’s got something, right? It’s powerful.”

  “It’s a good speech, I’ll give it that.”

  “We need this,” I told her. “I can’t keep trying to win elections the way I did last time. It won’t work twice, you know that.”

  “Do you believe it? The Soviet menace?” she asked. “I’m not saying it matters, but do you?”

  “You read the papers, Pat. What they’ve done in Eastern Europe isn’t a theory. They’re a pretty rough bunch. I could make my reputation on this.”

  “Okay. I can see that,” Pat said. She frowned, thinking it through. “Although—not to be a purist about it—what if this Alger Hiss is innocent?”

  “He’s not. There’s too much detail. Well enough for a hearing anyway.”

  “And you’re not going to lose?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “All right. I see it. But Dick, you see what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re trying to make people afraid. You’re using them. And I know it’s politics, and I’m not going to moralize at you, but this kind of thing can go very wrong.”

  “It’s just until I get a foothold. You know it’s not easy for us.” It was the closest I’d ever come to mentioning those long late-night taxi rides, both of us breathing the air of failure until we couldn’t even look at each other. The absolute indifference of the press, the looming deadline of the upcoming elections. Last time had been a surprise, a fluke, and we both knew it.

  “And so you’re going to say there are spies in the government.”

  “There are. You should have heard the testimony today.”

  “And our friends and neighbors?” she asked. “You’re going to tell people their friends and neighbors might be spies too. That seriously doesn’t worry you?”

  “People aren’t crazy.”

  “What about me? Did you ever think of that? I fit the profile.”

  “What profile?”

  “I went to college. My people are poor, and I own jazz records. Maybe I believe capitalism really is awful. Maybe I believe people should just help each other, and this whole thing you call America is a scam for rich people, and I have a secret pact with Moscow to bring it down. What about that?”

  “Then you can tell me. Calm down,” I said. “This isn’t about you and me, it’s just politics. Okay? Just let me do this.”

  “Then be careful, that’s all. You’re a crusader now. This isn’t the kind of thing you can screw up. Not and be safe.”

  “Don’t worry. No one starts wars anymore. Not with the bomb.”

  Chapter Four

  August 1948

  “Are you Mr. Alger Hiss?” Stripling asked.

  “Yes; I am.”

  “Please stand and be sworn. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  “I do.”

  “Be seated.”

  I could see we had a very different witness in Alger Hiss. This wasn’t the doughy, mush-mouthed Chambers we were up against. Hiss was tall, thin, prim, and patrician in manner. He’d gone to Johns Hopkins and, inevitably, Harvard Law School. He was cut from the same cloth as Jerry Voorhis—a high-minded liberal reformer.

  The hearing room was more than a third full this time. The usual clerks and interns and hangers-on, but also a few reporters who could already smell blood in the water. A very tall man stood leaning against the back wall. Another lawyer? I couldn’t tell.

  Alger Hiss didn’t seem at all shaken at being called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He took the stand and faced the com
mittee with the poise of an Olympic fencer. He told us how he’d worked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and served as secretary-general at the United Nations charter conference. He told us very plainly that he had never met anyone named Whittaker Chambers, that he was not and never had been a Communist, and that the whole business was absurd and confusing.

  He played to the crowd. Here was an honest American singled out for Kafkaesque persecution by an utter stranger who claimed to have lived with him and been his close friend and who alleged that together they’d stolen U.S. government secrets and given them to the Soviet Union. Hiss was politely, firmly, innocently baffled.

  What the hell was this? I was ready for a conspirator out of a melodrama. I expected evasion, fear, bluster, righteous anger, something I could beat down and break. But this?

  I realized with a sick dread that I might really have gotten the wrong man. I’d been swept up in this grand idea that now seemed incredibly thin and, arguably, a little childish. Was I actually going to try to convince the world this guy was a Soviet secret agent? Where was my evidence? It was like accusing him of being a leprechaun. As proof, I had only the word of weird Mr. Chambers with his slurred speech and his sleepy demeanor and his foul breath, and I began to wonder why I’d staked my career on this guy’s fairy story of ultimate evil.

  I couldn’t just apologize and walk away. I had grandstanded for the press and vowed to bring a dangerous conspiracy to light. Hiss was my star attraction and there was no way out but to try to convict him. And Hiss knew it; he saw that it was him or me, that one of us was going to be ruined over this. I could tell from the way he faced up to me on the stand. He hadn’t come looking for this fight, but he obviously had every intention of destroying me.

  I thought about whether Hiss might be innocent, but I had a terrible feeling that it was too late for that. The decision had been made. At thirty-five I knew this much about myself, that if I had to choose between ruining my career and convicting Hiss, I would go ahead and convict him. And if he was innocent, maybe I would do something for him later? Of course I would. Once I was in the Senate, I would fix everything.

  The following day we brought Chambers back in to explain himself. I demanded, coaxed, begged him to give some solid evidence to support his story. He knew Hiss. He gave a detailed and intimate portrait of Hiss’s life in the 1930s in a quiet, spare little apartment on a dead-end street in a Washington suburb. He had an eye for the telling detail and he seemed to nurse some private grievance. He described Hiss’s wife, another Communist, as “a short, highly nervous, little woman with a habit of blushing red when she is excited or angry, fiery red.” Her son Timmy by an earlier partner was “a puny little boy, also rather nervous.”

  The Hisses were struggling, decent, overeducated civil servants; Chambers was a persistent lodger and hanger-on and, possibly, a friend. Chambers’s self-portrait was unsentimental, unsparing, and uncomfortably pathetic. He had been a struggling writer who couldn’t pay his bills. He received the Hisses’ car as a gift, and they forgave him his unpaid rent. Finally he told us in unambiguous language that Hiss was a Communist and a true believer. Hiss and Chambers stole United States government secrets together until Chambers had a change of heart. He’d seen something that changed his mind, something disturbing he refused to divulge. He pleaded with Hiss to leave the Communist Party, and when Hiss wouldn’t, Chambers ended their friendship forever.

  When Hiss returned eight days later, he corroborated the domestic details with cool exactness. He was candid and quietly dignified as we rummaged through his personal history. He and his wife were still together. Timmy had grown up, served in the navy; he’d run off somewhere but was in touch through a psychiatrist. Hiss didn’t know a Whittaker Chambers or anyone of this description. The hearing room was shifting uncomfortably—people had come for a story, a drama, and they were getting something a little more human and disappointing. Someone here was acting in bad faith—someone besides myself, that is—but who?

  Finally, after long deliberation, Hiss gave us something. That morning, he said, a name occurred to him, a lodger from 1933. A failed writer, he said, a man with bad teeth who had neglected to pay his rent. He had disappeared from their lives in 1935. He wrote the name on a pad of paper in front of him—George Crosley. We agreed that the following day both men would appear together and meet face to face. And we would learn whether this was an international Communist conspiracy, or a dumpy, delusional middle-aged man.

  The next morning the hearing room was packed. The story had been building in the papers all week, the spy syndicate, the accusation, all hinging on the conundrum of the missing friend, and now we’d learn the truth. I could do only so much to stage-manage this. Chambers (or George Crosley, or whoever) would simply have to make the charges stick and my political career would live or die accordingly.

  Hiss arrived and pointedly did not look at Chambers. He took his time through the opening questions, speaking slowly and clearly. He coolly requested we call the Harvard Club to tell them he’d be late for an appointment. Chambers sat quietly across the room until the time came, and we called him to the front.

  “Mr. Hiss,” I said, “the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before.”

  Alerted, Hiss stood and approached by a few steps, gunslinger taut. “May I ask him to speak? Will you ask him to say something?”

  Hiss examined Chambers, who complied with a childlike docility. He answered biographical questions, read from a copy of Newsweek to demonstrate his speaking voice. Hiss had him open his mouth so he could inspect his teeth, strangely decayed. He sat down and cross-examined him until he reluctantly identified him as a man he had known casually under the name George Crosley.

  All the while, Chambers spoke to Hiss as he would to an intimate friend, gently and with a certain violence—an intimate friend whose reputation he was going to ruin.

  Hiss got out of his chair and advanced on Chambers and had to be restrained. He seemed pushed past the point of endurance. Chambers watched Hiss with a look that was both wounded and nakedly hungry, like he was gazing at a lost love.

  The terrible thing was that I thought I understood them; the story made perfect sense with or without the spying. They’d been friends back when they were also people struggling to make their mark, people like me, just as talented, just as intelligent, only a millimeter less fortunate. Moving from one slightly too shabby apartment to the next; begging favors, falling behind on rent. They had shared some secret, too shameful or fearful for their friendship to sustain.

  Hiss had made himself into a very different man than the one Chambers had known. He was a rising star now, brilliant and respected. That memory of a closeness between the vulnerable, awkward people they’d been was still with them, a delicate, embarrassing bond unwillingly shared. I was slowly, publicly dragging him out of that lie and he’d rather perjure himself before a grand jury than admit to being the man who was friends with Chambers long ago in a walk-up apartment on P Street. I was spending taxpayer money excavating the ruins of a friendship that had ended a decade ago just so I could stay alive politically, and Hiss knew it.

  Hiss made his closing remarks while glaring at me with a sad contempt. I didn’t even have the heart to glare back. Instead, I looked past him to see the tall, dark-suited man again standing at the back of the hearing room. He’d been there all day. Not watching Hiss at all. He’d been watching me.

  Chapter Five

  August 1948

  Over the next few days Hiss showed the world how he was going to beat me. He was blazingly articulate, dignified, and kept a sharp eye on the mood of the room. He knew this wasn’t a legal trial but a testing of the political waters. He didn’t need to prove anything, only stay in the ring long enough for the press to get bored. I sat with Pat every night, going over the facts, talking about the performance, looking for the angle.

  Another long afternoon ended with yet another round of yes
-you-did-no-I-didn’t, and I followed the crowd out into the Commodore’s lobby, which was full of reporters and assorted hangers-on. I was shuffling through, nodding to well-wishers, when I saw Alger Hiss in angry conversation with a small, dark-haired woman. She laughed and he turned to go, brushing right past me.

  I’d expected him to be holding forth to reporters, taking advantage of the day’s rhetorical gains, as he’d done on previous days. Instead he was almost shoving his way through the crowd, his features rigid in what looked for all the world like panic. I watched him cut through the mob, walking straight-backed and serious. On an impulse, I fell in behind him.

  “Mr. Nixon? Mr. Nixon?” a man called after me. Tall, with a long face; it was the man who’d stood at the back of the hearing room. A reporter? I quickened my pace, keeping Hiss in view. I followed him out the door, expecting to see him hail a cab, but instead he rounded the corner and turned uptown. I knew he lived in far-off downtown. Where was he going?

  There were a hundred reasonable answers—a doctor’s appointment, a drink with friends. I should have let him go but I couldn’t. I wanted to know what sort of person had been glaring at me across a room. I wanted to know, once and for all, if I was persecuting an honest man or a traitor.

  He stopped abruptly, so much so that a large woman behind him almost walked into him. He studied a window display with what seemed like unnatural attentiveness. What was he looking at? Flustered, I stopped where I was and did the same a block behind him. A women’s shoe store, as luck would have it. How did they walk in those things? I glanced ahead just as he glanced back, and our eyes seemed to meet, but his face registered no recognition. In another minute he moved on. I passed the window he’d been looking at—a florist?