“What kind of information?” asked Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator.
“All sorts of information,” said Bentley. “Political, military, whatever they could lay their hands on.”
Over the course of hours, Bentley named twenty-eight government officials and employees who had served as her informants, including Lauchlin Currie of Scarsdale, New York, who had been a close assistant to the late president Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Dexter White, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. (The shock of being named in this testimony was likely the cause of a heart attack that killed White, sixteen days later.) Currie, Bentley told the committee, “furnished inside information on this Government’s attitude toward China, [and] toward other governments. He once relayed to us the information that the American Government was on the verge of breaking the Soviet [military] code.”
When the questioning was over, reporters scrambled to get their stories out. Bentley had named two well-known American government officials as members of an underground Communist conspiracy. According to her testimony, this underground conspiracy had tentacles that reached all the way inside the White House. The Capitol Hill spy scare was only getting started.
Three days later, HUAC members heard the testimony of a disheveled Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, who had been brought in to corroborate Bentley’s testimony. Chambers had joined the Communist cause in New York City in 1924, when Communism in the United States was a fresh intellectual experiment in some circles. He said that he had been part of a group that aimed to infiltrate the ranks of American government, and that, when he decided to leave the Communist Party, he feared for his safety because of “the insidious evil . . . communism secures on its disciples.” He lived for a year sleeping by day and “watching through the night with [a] gun or revolver within easy reach,” because he had “sound reason that the Communists might try to kill me.”
Chambers said, “The Communist Party exists for the specific purpose of overthrowing the Government, at the opportune time, by any and all means; and each of its members, by the fact that he is a member, is dedicated to this purpose.”
When the congressional committee’s chief investigator, Stripling, asked Chambers to name names, he offered a list including Lee Pressman and John Abt, two of the most powerful officials guiding the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. Chambers also named one Alger Hiss.
“A ripple of surprise went through the room,” remembered Richard Nixon, “because Hiss, who had not been mentioned in Miss Bentley’s testimony, was a well-known and highly-respected figure in New York and Washington.” Alger Hiss had ranked near the top of the State Department until recently, and had served as the secretary general at the San Francisco Conference, where the United Nations was founded in 1945. President Truman knew him well. According to Chambers’s testimony, not only was Hiss a Communist, his wife and his brother were, too.
When the revelation appeared in the next day’s papers, many simply refused to consider that the handsome and all-American-looking Alger Hiss could be a Communist conspirator. Hiss was esteemed by high-ranking Democrats and Republicans. For his part, Hiss vociferously denied the charge.
Powerful people came to Hiss’s defense. “Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgivable,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column. “Anyone knowing either Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who . . . I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it.”
Two days after Chambers’s testimony, the committee opened another hearing, and Alger Hiss appeared—tall, thin, and well-dressed. Hiss had contacted the committee, asking to testify to clear his name. In a voice so confident that, to some present, it came across as too confident, Hiss told the crowded committee room, “I am here at my own request to deny unqualifiedly various statements about me which were made before this committee by one Whittaker Chambers the day before yesterday.”
Hiss lowered his voice dramatically. “I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party,” he said, and went on to refute everything Chambers had said about him, denying ever having laid eyes on his accuser.
One of these two men was lying, under oath. The ensuing drama became a national obsession.
At ten thirty on the morning that Hiss testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a White House usher opened the door to the Oval Office, and the Washington press corps pushed in. It was a Thursday, and the president had a particularly busy schedule—meetings with the secretary of state, the secretary of the Treasury, the attorney general, the director of the budget, and a dinner to discuss the upcoming election with officials from the Democratic National Committee.
Truman opened his weekly press conference by calling out the Eightieth Congress for failing to pass legislation he had proposed to curb inflation, which was becoming a hot campaign issue. (“High prices are not taking time off for the election,” Truman had said.) The administration had come up with a plan that included wage and price controls and rationing, but Republicans had rejected it.
“There is still time for the Congress to fulfill its responsibilities to the American people,” Truman said. “Our people will not be satisfied with the feeble compromises that apparently are being concocted.”
When Truman opened the floor, reporters asked predictable questions about his upcoming campaign. One then asked, “Mr. President, do you think that the Capitol Hill spy scare is a ‘red herring’ to divert public attention from inflation?”
“Yes, I do,” said Truman, “and I will read you another statement on that, since you brought it up.” He picked a piece of paper up off his desk and spoke about the HUAC hearings, ending with the following: “The public hearings now under way are serving no useful purpose. On the contrary, they are doing irreparable harm to certain people, seriously impairing the morale of Federal employees, and undermining public confidence in the Government.” He ad-libbed this last sentence:
