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White also knew Gregory Silvermaster. They had been friends, he said, for ten years or so. "If I thought he was a Communist I would not have associated with him," he said. "I think that Mr. Silvermaster is a very charming fellow, a good singer." He had been in the Silvermaster basement—but only to play ping-pong.
White knew many of the accused—Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, George Silverman, Victor Perlo. Committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas asked him: "Could it be possible that a friend of yours could be a member of the Communist Party and you wouldn't know it?" White's answer: "A—there are Communists. B—I have friends. C—those friends might be Communists."
"An Attractive Woman." One of the accused who admitted knowing not only Elizabeth Bentley but also her tutor in espionage, Jacob Golos, was Robert Talbot Miller, a husky, handsome Princeton graduate ('31), and onetime State Department information specialist. Miller, who also had been in Silvermaster's house, said that he had never given Miss Bentley any information and had never talked about Communism with her or Silvermaster. He is now with a Manhattan public relations firm which handles the account of the Polish government.
Another who knew Miss Bentley was Duncan Lee, a baby-faced Yaleman and Rhodes Scholar, who had risen to be a lieutenant colonel in the supersecret Office of Strategic Services. Lee testified that he and his wife had met Miss Bentley at a Washington cocktail party and had found her "an attractive, well-informed and well-educated woman." She introduced him to Jacob Golos.
He said that he had given her not one scrap of information and never knew that she was a Communist agent. "As we got to know her better," he said, "her views became extremely left wing. My wife and I felt that we must stop seeing her . . ."
Miss Bentley took the witness chair again and testified that Lee knew all along that she was a Communist, that she had been told by another member of her ring to get in touch with him, that she told Lee what information she wanted.
The Only Conclusion. Said Louisiana's Congressman F. Edward Hebert: "Either you or Mr. Lee is lying today." Said Miss Bentley: "I guess that's the only conclusion you can draw." The committee was wondering who, among the others who testified, was lying. Some just denied everything.
Donald Hiss, Alger's brother, flatly denied Chambers' accusation that he was a member of the Communist "apparatus." Said he: "If I am lying, I should go to jail. If Mr. Chambers is lying, he should go to jail."
George Silverman refused to answer whether or not he knew Miss Bentley on the constitutional ground that he might incriminate himself. That was his answer to almost every question.
High-voiced William Ullman, who shared the Silvermaster house, would not admit that he had ever been to its basement—on the ground of selfincrimination. But he did deny that he had taken or helped to take photostats of documents, or that he ever turned over any documents to Silvermaster or Miss Bentley.