Apr 19

Additional Notes on Donald Hiss

Hiss Case Evidence, Hiss Case Figures, Uncategorized No Comments »

A few days ago, I posted that I had written an article for the  Web site on Donald Hiss, reporting that the FBI had essentially exonerated him. Here’s the thing about researching this case (and probably about historical research in general). You always find something new to add to the picture. Donald Hiss’s story is a perfect example. Tonight, I was doing some research on my own book when I found two bits of information from Donald that help exonerate  his brother. A few weeks ago, I found a third. I suppose I should add them to the original story, and I will, but I thought I’d share them here first.

Two of them come via John Lowenthal, who interviewed Donald and his wife for his 1980 documentary, “The Trials of Alger Hiss.” If I recall correctly, that interview ended up on the cutting room floor, but the transcript is sitting here in my office, and I opened it tonight to check something. That’s when I came across these two fascinating comments by  Donald that I hadn’t seen reported before. (Of course, it’s very possible that they had been, but that I’ve simply forgotten.)

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers also claimed that Donald Hiss had been a friend of his. To support that allegation (Donald Hiss said he had never met Chambers), he offered a few nuggets of information about Donald – the kinds of insidey tidbits that only friends would know. Chambers had a habit of doing this, and usually this was when he would put his foot in his mouth. For example, he claimed to have visited the home of his alleged first underground contact, Max Bedacht, and nearly got run over by his eight kids. It turned out Bedacht only had two kids, and they were grown. The story that he had eight originated with a piece of doggeral that a fellow party member had jokingly written about Bedacht – a fact that Chambers would have been aware of had he actually known Bedacht.

Anyway, Chambers made similar errors about Donald Hiss. One, which has been reported before, concerned his statement that Donald was married to the daughter of a  State Department official named  Cotton. This was completely false. Hiss’s wife Catherine was friendly with Cotton’s family. Her last name was Jones. That Chambers also referred to Cotton as  “a Mr. Cotton in the State Department,” also revealed his lack of  real knowledge, as Cotton was one of the best known members of the Hoover administration.

But there was another indication that Chambers was lying about his relationship with Donald Hiss (and thus, by extension, Alger). Alger Hiss had sued Chambers for libel in 1948. Later that fall, depositions were taken in the suit, and in those depositions Chambers voluntarily served up another detail about Donald Hiss’s wife, describing in detail her “lovely, long, golden hair” in the 1930s. The problem was that her hair was jet black at the time.

Here’s the second. After Chambers’ first appearance before HUAC in which he claimed that Alger and Donald had been secret members of the Communist Party, Hiss responded by telling the committee that he had no idea who Chambers was (It turned out that Chambers was using a pseudonym at the time, and he acknowledged that Hiss never knew him under his real name). The conservative members of the committee said Hiss was lying when he said he didn’t recognize Chambers from recent photographs of him. Years later, historian Allen Weinstein in his book “Perjury,” also said Hiss was lying. But Donald Hiss told Lowenthal a revealing story. After that first public appearance by Chambers on August 3, 1948, Alger Hiss drove down to Washington from Vermont to testify in response. The night before his appearance he stayed with Donald. Here’s what Donald told Lowenthal:

“He was to see his lawyer from Baltimore, Mr. [William] Marbury, the next morning, before he was to testify. And he had brought with him some photographs. He was going over them with me, saying, ‘Look at this photograph. Have you ever seen that face?'”

“And I said, ‘No.’

“And we went through all of them, and he mentioned one, that there was something vaguely familiar about that one. I said, ‘Well, tell Bill. But I don’t see anything that I can recognize.'”

Why would they have had such a conversation if Hiss had recognized Chambers? And if you don’t believe that they did have that conversation or that Alger was lying while saying he didn’t recognize Chambers from the photographs, then here’s the third item, the one I turned up a few weeks ago. It’s a letter to Alger from Donald written in 1963, a private note between brothers in which Donald mentions a new book by H. Montgomery Hyde (“The Quiet Canadian”) that discusses the possibility of forgery by typewriter.

dhletter

So the question is, why would Donald have sent that note if he knew that Chambers’ allegations regarding the both of them were accurate?

Tagged with:
Jan 11

Tanenhaus v. The Truth

Hiss Case Books, Hiss Case Figures No Comments »

In July 2007, Sam Tanenhaus (the author of “Whittaker Chambers: A Biography”) wrote a cover story for The New Republic, arguing that Chambers was a kind of new-age conservative who (like Tanenhaus) would have taken issue with some of the more extreme positions of the Bush administration.

I didn’t happen to agree with that, but what concerned me more was Tanenhaus’s misuse of two alleged quotes by Alger Hiss that made Hiss seem like he was the Communist Chambers claimed he was. What Tanenhaus didn’t say was that the source of both quotes was Whittaker Chambers! Had a New York Times reporter done something similar and had been found out, I daresay it would have been grounds for a severe reprimand, if not a suspension.

It turns out, though, that this wasn’t the first time that Tanenhaus made questionable use of his source material. What’s more, when a journalist asked him about his sources two years ago, Tanenhaus angrily demanded that the interview, which was nearly over anyway, be off the record.

In October 1992, General Dmitri A. Volkogonov issued a statement after searching the Russian files that he found no evidence that Alger Hiss had ever been a member of the Communist Party USA; and, similarly, that researchers had found no evidence that he had ever been an agent for the KGB, for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), or for any other intelligence agency of the Soviet Union.

Challenged by Richard Nixon and other American conservatives, Volkogonov modified his remarks two months later, telling a New York Times reporter “I was not properly understood. The Ministry of Defense also has an intelligence service, which is totally different, and many documents have been destroyed. I only looked through what the K.G.B. had. All I said was that I saw no evidence.”

In his Chambers biography, Tanenhaus alludes to this second Volkogonov statement and then uses it as a launching pad for a unique theory of his own: “… Volkogonov sheepishly admitted his search had been cursory and many relevant files had been destroyed. He did not offer to check again. Other Russian researchers, diligently combing intelligence files, privately reported that after Volkogonov’s blunder officials had scoured the archives and removed all files pertaining to Chambers and Hiss….”

What were Tanenhaus’s sources for this extraordinary assertion? According to a footnote: “researchers: Sergei Zhuravlev letter to Alan Cullison, n.d., c. January 1993 (in author’s possession).” And what exactly did this letter – from a single Russian researcher – say? After he completed his book, Tanenhaus donated his papers to the Hoover Institution in California, so they are now publicly available. But while there is a Cullison folder in the papers, it contains no such letter.

Was it even written at all? The Soviet historian Svetlana Chervonnaya decided to find out. In 2007, she spoke to both Zhuravlev, now a historian at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Cullison, now the Moscow correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. It turns out that in the early 1990s, Cullison was in Moscow, in part to do research for Tanenhaus, and Zhuravlev, who was himself researching KGB files from the late 1930s on behalf of the MEMORIAL Society, a Russian group working on behalf of the victims of Stalinist terror, agreed to tell Cullison if he happened across any references to either Hiss or Chambers. But he never saw any, not surprisingly, since, as he told Chervonnaya, he had no access to KGB foreign intelligence files or GRU files.

Nor did he know anything about the destruction of records: “You may quote me,” he told Chervonnaya, “as saying I did not have any information on any destruction of records, and I did not write anything like that to Alan Cullison.”

Cullison, when approached by Chervonnaya, confirmed Zhuravlev’s memory: he dimly remembered that Zhuravlev had written him a letter, but, as to its contents, he maintained that its only reference to the Hiss case was a remark that “I am getting close to Chambers and Hiss records,” and that there was nothing written about the removal of any files.

Journalist Leon Wynter asked Tanenhaus about the whereabouts of the letter in 2007. First Tannenhaus suggested that it was simply inexplicably missing from the files and then said:

I’m gonna tell you something right now, which is that you do not quote a single word I’ve told you in this conversation. Right now all this is off the record, because it is so clear to me where all of this is going. And I really insist that I’m not to be quoted: not in any background, off the record – anything. Don’t mention me in this article. It’s so clear to me what’s going on. O.K.?

Why is this important now? For one thing, Tanenhaus’s statement stands unchallenged in a book that was nominated for the National Book Award, but for another, as I write my own book on the case and continue to look into the Hiss literature of the past thirty years, I am fed up with the misuse of source material that is the hallmark of the books that claim Hiss lied. Victor Navasky caught Allen Weinstein at it back in 1978 when he found that Weinstein misquoted a number of his key sources in “Perjury.” More recently John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr made some highly questionable editorial choices in the chapter on Alger Hiss in their book “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America” (for details see my 2009 review of their book on the Hiss Web site).

Tanenhaus’s convenient explanation about unseen Soviet evidence (that files that might incriminate Hiss can’t be found only because they have been removed from the shelves) is another tried-and-true technique of the kind regularly employed against Hiss, and yet seldom noticed.

Here’s an earlier example: In 2007, some 29 years after Weinstein promised to open his files to researchers, the Hoover Institution finally made them available. I went out there to go through them and see if they supported some of Weinstein’s more sensational claims about Chambers’ story being essentially true.

What I found led me to believe that perhaps there was a reason why the files stayed under wraps for such a long time. In “Perjury,” Weinstein claimed that the so-called head of the Communist underground, J. Peters, offered corroboration of Chambers’ story not in his words, but in the way he smiled mysteriously.

Weinstein had traveled all the way to Hungary to see Peters (Peters left the US in 1949 but was not deported, as Weinstein erroneously reports). But while apparently a genial host, Peters failed to give Weinstein what he had come all that way for, and in fact refuted Chambers’ story. Like Tanenhaus, Weinstein found a way of turning the absence of evidence to his advantage. Here’s how he puts it in the notes that I found at Hoover: “I think it was assumed throughout our conversation that he wasn’t telling me the real story, and that I knew this, and that it didn’t matter.”

It does matter, though. A lot.

There’s also this statement in his notes of the interview: “I also pointed out that ‘I couldn’t give a shit about Hiss’s guilt or innocence’ in terms of my own book. I would simply follow the evidence where it led me.’ ”

The fact that I have to spend so much of my time tracking down the errors and distortions in his book — all designed to build an argument against Hiss — that one made me laugh out loud.

Tagged with:
Nov 09

A 1973 Film on the Hiss Case

Hiss Case Evidence, Hiss Case Figures, Uncategorized No Comments »

ishot-21

A search on YouTube just happened to turn up this two-part film from 1973 when Watergate was making national headlines. The source is unknown, but the interviews with investigative reporter Fred J. Cook (The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss) and reporter James G. Crowley of the Boston Globe are well done. Here’s the link.

Nov 02

Inside Nathaniel Weyl’s Brain

From the Defense Files, Hiss Case Evidence, Hiss Case Figures No Comments »

For years, Alger Hisss detractors have cited the testimony of Nathaniel Weyl as proof of his guilt. For those who arent familiar with Weyl, he worked in Department of Agriculture while Hiss was there, and he claimed in 1952 to have been the so-called Ware Group of secret communists and that Hiss had also been a member.
But there were lots of problems with Weyls testimony. For example, although he had many opportunities to do so, he never said anything about Hisss involvement until long after Hiss was convicted. Also, no one else, even those who had admitted being part of the group, remembered Weyls association with it. In fact, even Whittaker Chambers never mentioned him. There are other problems with his testimony, but still, historians such as Allen Weinstein, G. Edward White and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, lean on his tenuous story.
The other day, I was sorting through some files when I came across this fascinating document. Its a two page memo by Elinor Ferry, a journalist and investigator who helped piece together Hisss motion for a new trial in the 1950s and then began  but never finished  a book on the case. In the course of her research, Ferry spoke to a Washington D.C.-based psychiatrist named Benjamin Weininger. Weininger, it seemed, had half the members of the Washington area Communist Party as patients, and one of them was Nathaniel Weyl. If these notes are correct, Weyls testimony was the result of a phony recovered memory ploy.
The notes also mentioned the story of Katherine Wills Perlo, another account cited by  Weinstein as proof of Chambers story. Perlo, who had once been married to Victor Perlo, wrote a letter to president in 1944, claiming that her husband was part of an underground group. Weinstein also relies on her letter to support Chambers, but Weininger also saw her and his own thoughts on her credibility.
I should mention that when I first saw this interview, I mentioned it to Bill Reuben, who didnt believe it for a second, saying that the Party forbade its members from undergoing psychotherapy, Maybe, but this account seems credible.
Here is the document, in Ferrys handwriting. The source is Harvard Law School Library.

For years, Alger Hiss’s detractors have cited the testimony of Nathaniel Weyl as proof of his guilt. For those who aren’t familiar with Weyl, he worked in Department of Agriculture while Hiss was there, and he claimed in 1952 to have been a member of the so-called Ware Group of secret communists and that Hiss had been as well.

But there were lots of problems with Weyl’s testimony. For example, although he had many opportunities to do so, he never said anything about Hiss’s alleged involvement until long after Hiss was convicted. Also, no one else, even those who had admitted being part of the group, remembered Weyl’s association with it. Even Whittaker Chambers, who claimed to be the group’s courier, never mentioned him. There are other problems with his testimony, but nonetheless, historians such as Allen Weinstein, G. Edward White and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, continue to lean on his tenuous story.

The other day, I was sorting through some files when I came across this fascinating document. It’s a two-page memo by George Eddy (1907-1998), a former New Deal economist, who researched but never published a book on the Hiss case. In the course of his research, Eddy spoke to a Washington D.C.-based psychiatrist named Benjamin Weininger. At times it seemed that Weininger had half the members of the Washington area Communist Party as clients, and one of them was Nathaniel Weyl. If these notes are correct, there are even more reasons to suspect Weyl’s testimony.

The notes also mentioned the story of Katherine Wills Perlo, another account cited by  Weinstein as proof of Chambers story. Perlo, who had once been married to Victor Perlo, wrote a letter to FDR in 1944, claiming that her husband was part of an underground group. As it turns out, Weininger also saw her and also offered his insights into her credibility.

I should mention that when I first saw this interview, I mentioned it to Bill Reuben, who didn’t believe it for a second, saying that the Party forbade its members from undergoing psychotherapy, Maybe, but this account seems credible.

Here is the document, in Eddy’s handwriting. The source is Harvard Law School Library.

ishot-11

ishot-10

Feb 19

Two Obits, Two Degrees of Hiss Separation

Hiss Case Figures No Comments »

There were two fascinating obits in The New York Times today, both with some relation to the Hiss Case. The first was of Irving Feiner, who lost a major free-speech case before the Supreme Court in the early 1950s. The case resulted from an incident in 1949. Feiner was ranting about politics on a street corner in Syracuse, New York, when the police, fearing a riot, asked Feiner to step down. He refused and was arrested. He was eventually convicted of disorderly conduct. The verdict was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision. The dissent by Hugo Black, a powerful defense of free speech, is worth reading.

So what does this all have to do with the Hiss Case? I’m glad you asked. Feiner’s anger had boiled over after the Mayor of Syracuse had canceled a scheduled performance earlier that evening by Pete Seeger and a speech by the noted progressive attorney O. John Rogge. Rogge had been invited to Syracuse to speak about the then ongoing trial of the Trenton Six, which was also known as the North’s Scottsboro case. It involved six black youths from Newark who, based on confessions obtained by the local police, were convicted of murdering a tailor. The youths were all given the death penalty until a series of articles exposed the fraudulent confessions, which were obtained under extreme duress.

Therein lies the connection. The articles were written for The Guardian by a young reporter named William A. Reuben. Bill’s investigation saved their lives. It also engendered in him a lifelong fascination with false confessions. For more than 50 years he investigated the Hiss case and was its leading expert. He was spurred on in large part by his belief that, like the Trenton Six, Whittaker Chambers had made a false confession of guilt.

The other obituary was for Stephen Zetterberg, who became a footnote to the political career of Richard Nixon. In his successful campaign against incumbent Jerry Voorhis in 1946, Nixon employed for the first time (in politics anyway) the questionable tactics that would soon earn him the sobriquet Tricky Dick. According to the obit, he was back at it in 1948 when Zetterberg became a candidate for Nixon’s House seat. Nixon, a Republican, ran against Zetterberg in the Democratic primary (this was legal in California), sending postcards to voters, addressing them as “Fellow Democrats.” The story also says that Nixon had his name listed on the ballot as “Congressman”, leading voters to assume that he was the Democratic incumbent.

Nixon went on to defeat Zetterberg handily and soon resumed his duties as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Within a month of the election that fall, he was photographed  peering at supposedly secret government documents obtained from Whittaker Chambers via a pumpkin on Chambers’ farm. Befitting the name Tricky Dick, the frames Nixon was pictured looking so intently at, were blank.

ishot-9

Tagged with: • • •
Feb 19

Harold Glasser

Hiss Case Books, Hiss Case Evidence, Hiss Case Figures, The Soviet Files No Comments »

Yesterday, I received a nice note from Linda Zises, one of Harold Glasser’s daughters. Glasser, as many of you might know, was a Treasury Department official during the New Deal who was later accused of being a Communist and an espionage agent. The National Security Agency stated in its Venona releases that Glasser was an agent codenamed “Ruble” by the Soviets. Historians such as Allen Weinstein and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have echoed those claims. But there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Some of it comes from Glasser himself, who was especially impressive in his testimony before the grand jury in 1949. I’m not going to go into all that here, because a new Web site being launched soon will be investigating these charges in detail. What I did want to pass one was Linda’s note, which I found to be both revealing and touching. Too often historians who level charges don’t bother to investigate the human aspect of those they accuse. It’s a shame, too, because not only do they leave readers with half the story, they also miss important clues that may help reveal the truth. The best example I can give you of a book that explores the subject’s personality to help reveal the truth about the charges is Tony Hiss’s “The View From Alger’s Window.”

Here’s part of what Linda had to say about her father:

“Dad was known as the little kid on the block in South Side of Chicago where he grew up.  In the violent crime ridden streets  he was protected by his five older brothers.  He grew up in the world depicted in the James Farrell novel, “Studs Lonigan.” At the age of 16, he started school at the University of Chicago. He went to the university carrying the kosher lunch packed by his mother until one day, before  class, he threw the lunch in the trash and that ended his identification with the orthodox Jewish community. He became  a lifelong  ‘non believer.’

“He graduated and then went on to do graduate work at Harvard.  He left Harvard before completing his degree to go to work for the federal government.

glasser

“He had an extraordinary sense of humor and he loved to relate stories to his children.  One of his most enjoyable one was the time John Foster Dulles saw him walking back to their hotel from an important meeting.  Dulles asked him if he would like a lift.  And HG answered “No, I prefer to walk”. That was his arrogance coming to the fore. He was arrogant, yet often humble.  He was funny and enjoyed the ironies of life.  At his fiftieth wedding anniversary he announced  “Everything I did, everything I achieved politically in my life time has been undone.”  This was not an angry an speaking, nor a depressed man.  He was amused.

“He died at the age of 88, soon to be 89.  Even in the nursing home, when he was unable to speak or to smile, when it came to his recreation time it took two strong nurses to hold him back when they loosened the restraining straps, because he would run down the hallway to recreation, a nurse on either side trying to hold him back.  He was always rebellious, always the one to set a precedent.  He was never a spy.  He would never risk doing anything that wasn’t legal.

“ ‘Ruble be damned,’ he would have said and laughed.”

Both Linda and her sister said Glasser and his wife associated with radicals and the Party, as did many people during the Depression, but that their father, aside from being arrogant, was extremely independent and would never kowtow to anyone or any one philosophy. Both also said he was never a Party member and never a spy.

Photo: Courtesy LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

preload preload preload