(2 of 2)
¶ His experts also concluded that the typing of the copies produced by Chambers was identical to samples of Priscilla Hiss's typing, a conclusion likewise reached by the FBI.
¶ Defense experts also determined that documents passed on to Chambers were typed, as the FBI claimed, on a Woodstock brand typewriter owned by Hiss.
¶ Hiss was aware that the old Woodstock typewriter had been given to the son of a woman who had been the Hiss family maid. Even so, Hiss told the FBI and a federal grand jury that it had probably been sold to a secondhand dealer in Washington.
¶ Lee Pressman, a secret but active Communist who recommended Hiss for his first Government job, played a major role in defense efforts to discredit Chambers.
¶ Defense lawyers were told that Chambers and two other members of the Washington Communist underground had been in touch with Hiss in 1934, trying to recruit him for espionage. This evidence came from the wife of one of the two other members.
¶ Hiss's lawyers had corroboration for Chambers' claim that Hiss had given an automobile to the U.S. Communist Party in 1936.
"The defense's basic problem," Weinstein concludes, "was in keeping the Government and the public from learning about the conclusions of its own experts, which it successfully managed to do at the trial."
Last week Weinstein told TIME: "I wanted to believe that he was innocent. But I am a historian, not an apologist for anyone. I am not making a case for the FBI. I blasted them all along. I want every last piece of evidence I can get. I have tried to examine both sides of the matter. I can live with anything I find because I am not a partisan."
Hiss's rebuttal was immediate—and lame. He accused Weinstein of bias and called his conclusions "childish." But he did not refute most of those conclusions, including Weinstein's contentions—based on a letter that one defense lawyer had written to another in 1948—that Hiss knew that the Woodstock typewriter had been given away to the maid's son. Instead, Hiss merely reiterated an oft-leveled accusation that the typewriter produced at his perjury trial had a serial number (Woodstock N230099) that indicated it was manufactured one year later than the one he had once owned. Insisted Hiss: "I never handed Whittaker Chambers any State Department documents . . . I never engaged in espionage . . . I was never a member of the Communist Party. I was innocent then. I'm innocent now."
Chambers died on his farm in 1961, swearing that he had spoken the truth. Hiss, who is now a salesman and part-time attorney in New York City, doubtless will go to his grave still protesting his innocence. But Whittaker Chambers' story, which stood up under countless assaults during his life, has not been successfully refuted in the 15 years since his death.