Six Crises by Richard Nixon Page A

Washington attorney of outstanding reputation, had asked Chambers if he had any letters, documents, or any other communications from Alger Hiss which would prove their alleged relationship. It was obvious to Chambers, as he later told me, that Marbury did not have the slightest expectation that Chambers would produce anything. Hiss, a lawyer himself, had made the fatal mistake no client should ever make—he had not told his own lawyer the full truth about the facts at issue.
    In answer to the question, Chambers had said that he would check his files to see if he had any such evidence. When he returned to his home in Westminster, he went through a long period of soul-searching. He knew he had documentary proof, but he didn’t know if he should use it.
    Not long before, Chambers had been called before the New York Grand Jury investigating Communist activities and had been asked if he had any information involving Soviet espionage. He had weighed the implications of that question and had answered, “No.” This answer was untrue. In his book, Witness, Chambers explained that while he wanted to expose Communist underground activities in the United States, he did not want to destroy Hiss and others who had been his friends and associates with his evidence of espionage. He had hoped that, once he testified, they too would admit their former activities and join him in exposing Communist subversion.
    But at the pretrial proceedings, Hiss’s attorneys had been raking over every aspect of his life in an attempt to discredit and destroy him. Under the circumstances, Chambers wondered if he should not counterattack in kind. One day his wife, Esther, was cross-examined so unmercifully by Hiss’s attorneys that she broke into tears. This incident made his decision for him. If this was to be, in effect, total war, he would use the ultimate weapons available to him.
    The next Sunday, November 14, Chambers went to Brooklyn to reclaim a package he had left with his wife’s nephew, Nathan Levine, after his break with the Communist Party in 1938. Because he feared assassination, he had told his nephew to hide the package and to make its contents public only if he, Chambers, met with a violent death. Now, ten years later, he and Levine went together to the hiding place—an unused dumb-waiter in the Brooklyn apartment of Levine’s mother. There they found Chambers’ large sealed envelope, coverednow with ten years’ accumulation of dust and cobwebs. Inside the envelope were sixty-five typed pages of copies and summaries of confidential State Department documents, three memoranda in Hiss’s handwriting, two strips of developed microfilm, three cylinders of undeveloped microfilm, and an eight-page memo of confidential Treasury Department information in the handwriting of Harry Dexter White. These documents had been stolen not only from the State Department but also from the Communist Party. Rather than turning over this final haul to his Communist superiors, Chambers had kept them for “life insurance.”
    Three days later, Hiss’s attorneys again made their demand for documentary evidence, and Chambers handed over the sixty-five pages of typewritten State Department papers—many of which were later identified as having been typed on Hiss’s Woodstock machine—the memos in Hiss’s own handwriting, and the old envelope which had contained the documents. This was Chambers’ first “bombshell.” The second was the microfilm—the so-called “pumpkin papers.”
    The story of the “pumpkin papers” was typical of how a seemingly fantastic incident in the life of Whittaker Chambers could have a simple explanation. The rolls of microfilm had not been kept in a pumpkin for ten years, as many people have been led to believe. They remained hidden in the unused dumb-waiter until Chambers recovered them and then kept them in his house. Only on the last day did