From Witness, Whittaker Chambers, 1952
One of the books I translated at that time was Franz Werfel's novel, Class Reunion. It was less a novel than an elongated short story. It related how an Austrian attorney supposed that he saw in a prisoner coming up for examination a classmate who, out of jealousy, he had managed to ruin in their youth. Most of the book was a flashback which described the trivial stages of that ruin (one of them, if I remember rightly, consisted in the bad boy's leading on the good boy to stuff himself with tarts). At the time, the novel seemed to me tiresome and overcontrived. It was one of what I call "unnecessary books"—books, that, for any bearing they have on man's mind, man's fate, or even his entertainment, might as well never have been written. Apparently, readers thought so, too, for Class Reunion was not a great success. I soon forgot the details of its story, with which, in any case, I had nothing to do but the tiresome labor of translation. I should probably never have remembered them, but for the Hiss Case.For in Class Reunion, Dr. Carl Binger, the psychologist in the Hiss trials, undertook to discover the psychological clue to Chambers' "mysterious motives" in charging that Alger Hiss had once been a Communist. Chambers was the bad boy and Hiss was the good boy of Class Reunion, and the novel, unread by me for some twenty years, had put the idea of ruining Hiss in my mind—why I never quite understood, since it always seemed to me that if I had been bent on ruining Alger Hiss from base motives, the idea might well have occurred to me without benefit of Franz Werfel. But to many enlightened minds Class Reunion became a book of revelation.
I have always held that anyone who takes the trouble to read Class Reunion without having made up his mind in advance, can scarcely fail to see that, if there are any similarities at all between the characters, it is Hiss who superficially resembles the bad boy and Chambers who superficially resembles his victim.
New York : Random House, 1952, pages 260 - 261.
Comment : Alger Hiss was one among about a dozen persons named as Soviet agents by W. Chambers during his talks with Adolf Berle in September 1939." . . . On September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war in Europe, Whittaker Chambers had told much of what he knew about Soviet espionage in the United States to Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State and President Roosevelt�s adviser on internal security. Immediately afterwards, Berle drew up a memorandum for the President which listed Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and the other leading Soviet agents for whom Chambers had acted as courier. One of those on the list was a leading presidential aide, Lauchlin Currie (mistranscribed by Berle as Lockwood Curry). Roosevelt, however, was not interested. He seems to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd. Equally remarkable, Berle simply pigeon-holed his own report. He did not even send a copy to the FBI until the Bureau requested it in 1943. "
(C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, New York : Basic Books, 1999, p. 107)On that non-response, Chambers had lost interest in pursuing the matter and took to professional writing. Nine years later, in 1948, corroboration needing of the testimony by Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers was subpoenaed (that is, requested under legal penalties should he not comply) to testify before the U.S. Congress committee. He had then named self-same dozen persons, including A. Hiss and his brother Donald Hiss.
Hiss was in no way singled out by Chambers in the latter's testimony, except perhaps by a short remark on his (Hiss's) relative importance within the State Department which was factual. The real controversy began when, not Chambers but Alger Hiss (seconded by his brother Donald) had made a loud show, of indignation over the charges. After many turns of events, Alger was finally convicted of perjury and had served several years in the federal penitentiary.
There can be no doubts whatever as to this man's guilt, in some general sense of seriously endangering and injuring the security of the U.S.A. The (legally) treasonable acts by Hiss were the matter beyond any doubt established in the process which lead to his eventual conviction for perjury, said treasonable acts having by then fallen outside the (surprisingly brief) period under the statute of limitation.
Any speculations about some personal 'mysterious motives' at play had no basis whatever in the known facts and are decisively contradicted by the chronology of the events on record.
It should strain anyone's credulity beyond any imaginable limits to suppose that Dr. Binger was ignorant of the general circumstances of the case. — (WPT).
(1) An attempt by Dr. Carl Binger, psychiatrist, to defraud the U.S. Court and the US people with false expertise (in what had later become the US vs. Hiss case).(2) A conspiracy between Mr. Alger Hiss and Dr. Carl Binger to defraud the U.S. Court and the US public with Dr. Binger's false expertise.
WPT
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/hisstrialtranscripts.html#Dr.%20Carl%20A
"Assistant District Attorney Thomas Murphy raised serious questions about Binger's credibility."
Murphy, Thomas. Title Thomas Murphy's cross-examination of Dr. Carl A. Binger in U.S. v. Alger Hiss (Hiss II) Publisher Minnetonka, Minn. : Professional Education Group, [1987] Description 348 p. ; 22 cm Series Classics of the courtroom ;v. 5 Language English Note "With foreword by Irving Younger"