The Daily Alaska empire., 1949-11-28
THESE DAYS.
GEORGE E. SOKOLSKY SECOND HISS TRIAL
R Y

1 The beginning of the second Hiss
 Trial is naturally recapitulation l. of the first trial. The pattern so ! far is the same:
 l. Whitaker Chambers says that 1, he and Alger Hiss were servants of
 Soviet Russia engaged in the theft of American State papers;
 l 2. Hiss's lawyer seeks to prove
 that Whitaker Chambers has been
 and is liar, thief and traitor;
 he also will try to prove that Whit , taker Chambers is psychiatric
 case; .. 3. Whitaker Chambers admits
 the charges, except the psychiatry.
 even providing proof of them, add ing self lf-denunciatory data as he goes along;
 4. Hiss's lawyer fails to break through Whitaker Chambers calm,
 because Chambers has totally ex- posed himself
 In the second trial the Hiss law yer, Claude B. Cross, has added
 new element of importance. Real izing that until it is proved that someone other than Alger Hiss gave the documents to Whitaker
 Chambers, it will be unconvincing that Alger Hiss did not give them to him, Cross introduces Henry
 Julian Wadleigh as the guilty one. In a word, someone gave the papers to Chambers. He had them. They were taken from him. They exist. That is the corpus delecti. And they are available for the jury to see. Chambers says that Alger Hiss gave them to him. No amount of evidence to show that Chambers is a liar and mad will disprove the fact that Chambers had the papers in his possession and that they were taken from him. Also, establishing that Chambers gave false data in a passport matter will not disprove that those papers were the prop erty of the government of the Unit led States, that they should have bsen in the secret files of the State Department, that they should never have been in the possf -5n of Whit taker Chambers. and that as he did have them, someone gave them to him.
 Here, however, we are faced by curious fact. Francis B. Sayre, AL
 ger Hisss chief at the time of the theft of these documents, has al-
 ready testified that certain of them could only he in the possession of himself, Sayre, Alger Hiss and two
 women secretaries. It is to be infer red then, that if MT. Cross's con- tention that Wadleigh stole the doc
 uments is correct, only Sayre, Hiss or. the two young ladies. As ssthese were very sensitive documents, the possession of which by foreign power would imperil the United
 States, such a theft should have been noted and reported immediat- ely and an alarm sprung Instead, Wadleigh continued to be employed by the government of the United States, to wit, by the State Depart
 ment. fN a@
 ,, Therefore, on the testimony so far available, the Wadleigh story does not hold water Wadleigh is a
 self-confessed spy and upon him
 much opprobrium can be heaped.
 But it has to be established that
 he and not Alger Hiss gave the
 documents to Whitaker Chambers.
 If it is established by showing that
 both Chambers and Wadleigh were
 spies and liars, that does not ab-
 solve Hiss, who, even if declared not
 guilty by jury, has to continue to
 live in world of reasonable doubts.
 MT. Cross needs to be sure that he
 saves his client from that as much
 as from a verdict of guilty.
 He cannot establish Hiss's inno-