Lawyer Lloyd Stryker's voice lifted in pride and reverence last week. "Call Mr. Justice Felix Frankfurter," he said. Dressed in an ordinary brown suit but robed in his uncommon prestige, little Justice Frankfurter stepped to the stand. He had come from the Supreme Court to Manhattan to be a character witness for Alger Hiss, his onetime Harvard law student, on trial in Federal Court for perjury. The Government had rested and Alger Hiss had begun his defense.
Few defendants in a criminal case had ever had more impressive assistance. Justice Frankfurter adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "I will rely on Your Honor to keep me within bounds," he told Federal Judge Samuel H. Kaufman. "Of course, sir," beamed Judge Kaufman.
Yes, Hiss had been a member of the Harvard Law Review, Justice Frankfurter told Lawyer Stryker. Yes, members of the Review were certainly young men of "intelligence, character and ability." In 1929, Harvard Professor Frankfurter had picked Hiss to serve as law clerk for the late great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Still robed in his prestige, little Justice Frankfurter left the stand—to be followed by egg-bald Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, under whom Hiss had served when Reed was solicitor general. Like Frankfurter—and like Illinois' Governor Adlai Stevenson and Ambassador-at-large Philip Jessup, both of whom testified by written deposition—Reed agreed that Alger Hiss was a man of "loyalty, integrity and veracity."
An Old Woodstock. Against those imposing character witnesses was the prosecution's vastly detailed case, based chiefly on the evidence of the stolen State Department documents in the possession of Whittaker Chambers, onetime Communist espionage agent. Some of those papers were admittedly in Alger Hiss's own handwriting. All but one of the rest had been typed (according to an FBI expert) on an old Woodstock typewriter which had once belonged to Hiss. The defense turned to the documentary evidence.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy watched vigilantly as Hiss's lawyers called an elderly colored woman to the witness stand. She was Mrs. Claudie ("Clytie") Catlett, onetime Hiss housemaid. The Hisses, she testified casually, had once given her children "an old typewriter."
Excited murmuring filled the courtroom. The point was obvious: if the defense could prove that the Hisses did not even have the typewriter when the documents were typed (in the early months of 1938), Hiss's case would look fairly secure. Mrs. Catlett's young son, Mike, recalled that it was an old Woodstock. From under the defense table, Defense Lawyer Edward McLean dramatically dragged a battered machine. Was this it? Mike pecked at a couple of keys and decided that it was.
On crossexamination, Prosecutor Murphy went after the Catletts relentlessly. When did the Hisses give them the machine? Mrs. Catlett's memory proved vague on the point. Her son Pat placed the time at around December 1937. Shortly after he got it he had taken the machine to a shop on K Street to be repaired. Murphy roared at Pat: "What if I told you that the shop on K Street wasn't opened for business until September 1938?" Pat said finally: "I don't know the time."