The Government Rests

The crowds which had jammed the Manhattan courtroom thinned; the jury trying Alger Hiss for perjury relaxed. After ten days of bear-pit tension, the testimony of ex-Communist-Courier Whittaker Chambers and his wife was finally complete. Hulking, flat-voiced Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy hoisted himself into a sitting position on a corner of the Government table and began a careful job of legal bricklaying--matching the "pumpkin papers" and other secret documents with the originals from which they had been copied.

While the jury stared at huge enlargements of the exhibits, Murphy read aloud, hour after hour, from State Department files. It was almost too much for theatrical, brush-browed Defense Attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker. Rolling a sympathetic eye toward the jury, he suggested that all the papers be put into evidence en masse--the defense, he said in his courtliest tones, would offer no objections at all if the Government wished to save time.

Surprise Witness. Murphy politely refused the bait--he wanted to impress the jury, through sheer boredom if necessary, of the size and the import of the material which Chambers said he had received from Hiss, the onetime State Department bright young man, for transmission to Soviet Russia. He kept at his slow task for two days, while Stryker paced the corridor outside, clutching a chewed cigar and frowning with impatience.

Then Murphy brought on Amos C. Feehan, an FBI expert who testified that the great bulk of these exhibits had been copied on Hiss's typewriter. Feehan pointed professorially to enlargements of the documents, pointed out the "upthrust terminating stroke of the lower-case V " and other peculiarities as proof of his finding. It was effective evidence and it was also dull. But as the weekend drew near Murphy called a witness who restored the electric atmosphere in which the trial had begun.

He was a thin, bushy-haired man who wore a rumpled white shirt, a badly fitting blue suit, and thick-lensed glasses. An excited whispering broke out in the courtroom as he took the stand. He was Henry Julian Wadleigh, whom Chambers had identified as a onetime member of the Communist apparatus in Washington. Though he had refused to answer questions by the House Un-American Activities Committee on the ground that he might incriminate himself, he had obviously come to court in a mood to tell all.

He spoke with a precise and confident British accent. Had he been a Communist? "I collaborated with Communists," he said, firmly, "but I was never a member of the party." Had he ever taken State Department documents and given them to "people not authorized to have them?" Briskly, the witness said he had--he had handed a briefcase full of them to one

David Carpenter once a week on a Washington street corner.

"Rich Fountain." Had he ever given documents to anyone else? "Yes," said Henry Julian Wadleigh, "on some occasions I gave them to Whittaker Chambers." The courtroom murmured at this buttressing of Chambers' testimony, and Wadleigh seemed to enjoy the sound.

His diction grew richer as he began examining documents handed him by Murphy (a move which Murphy evidently made to prevent any implication that Wadleigh, not Hiss, might have stolen the pumpkin papers from the State Department files). The witness said he had never seen them before. Of one, he said: -'. . . it is a sufficiently rich fountain . . . an unusually rich fountain that I would have been interested in had I seen it."

As Defense Attorney Stryker moved in for cross-examination the audience sat forward expectantly. But the great Thespian was surprisingly gentle. Beyond seeming to lose his temper once, and announcing twice for the jury's benefit that he, himself (unlike Wadleigh), had never gone to Oxford, he hardly seemed to warm up. He attempted unsuccessfully to get Wadleigh to say he had stolen documents from desks other than his own (including Hiss's) and turned the witness loose. At week's end the Government rested its case.

This week Alger Hiss will have his chance to sit in the witness chair.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.