Busy people should never let their hectic schedules prevent them from applying time to far more important creative pursuits that will broaden their outlook and conceivably produce something of lasting value. But by the same token, they should not put their names on the product unless they are willing to put real effort into what goes inside.
I have also found that I produce best under intense pressure and in an environment that poses a minimum of distractions. When it was time to write the chapter on my confrontations with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, I rented a room in a Los Angeles hotel and spent six days working fourteen hours a day, reading, outlining, writing, and dictating, until the first draft was finished. I ate all my meals in the room. For the chapter on the 1960 campaign, I went up to the Apple Valley Inn, where Don Hughes got me a room in a quiet villa. For seven straight days I went through exactly the same grueling procedure. I could not do the same thing today. It was close call then.
It turned out to be the seventh major crisis of my life, and by far the most difficult from the standpoint of the mental discipline involved. My respect for those who write books, already high, has gone up a hundredfold.
But in another, this very factor may prove to be an asset. We often hear that truly “big” men are at their best in handling big affairs, and that they falter and fail when confronted with petty irritations — with crises which are, in other words, essentially personal.
From my own experience, the bigger the problem, the broader its consequences, the less does an individual think of himself. He has to devote his entire concentration to the much larger problem which confronts him. “Selflessness” is the greatest asset in an individual can have in a time of crisis. “Selfishness” (in its literal rather than its lay sense) is the greatest liability. The very fact that the crisis is bigger than the man himself takes his mind off his own problems. The natural symptoms of stress in a period of crisis do not become self-destructive as a result of his worrying about himself but, on the other hand, become positive forces for creative action.
“I could never have done what you did in Caracas.” I answered: “And I could never have done what you did in the Battle of the Bulge.” Perhaps we were both wrong. No one really knows what he is capable of until he is tested to the full by events over which he may have no control. That is why this book is an account not of great men but rather of great events — and how one man responded to them.
I do not believe, for example, that some men are just “naturally” cool, courageous, and decisive in handling crisis situations, while others are not. “He doesn’t have a nerve in his body” is a popular cliche. Of course some men may be stronger, less emotional, quicker, smarter, bolder than others. But I think these attributes are for the most part acquired and not inherited, and many times acquired suddenly under stress. The public likes to glamorize its leaders, and most leaders like to glamorize themselves. We tend to think of some men as “born leaders.” But I have found that leaders are subject to all human frailties: they lose their tempers, become depressed, experience the other symptoms of tension. Sometimes even strong men will cry.
Confidence in crisis depends in great part on adequacy of preparation — where preparation is possible.
Coolness — or perhaps the better word is “serenity” — in battle is a product of faith. And faith, apart from that which stems from religious heritage and moral training, comes to an individual after he has gone through a necessary period of indecision, of doubt and soul-searching, and resolves that his cause is right and determines that he must fight the battle to finish.
Courage — or, putting it more accurately, lack of fear — is a result of discipline. Any man who claims never to have known fear is either lying or else he is stupid. But by an act of will, he refuses to think of the reasons for fear and so concentrates entirely on winning the battle.
Experience is a vitally important factor. When a man has been through even a minor crisis, he learns not to worry when his muscles tense up, his breathing comes faster, his nerves tingle, his stomach churns, his temper becomes short, his nights are sleepless. He recognizes such symptoms as natural and healthy signs that his system is keyed up for battle. Far from worrying when this happens, he should worry when it does not. Because he knows from experience that once the battle is joined, all these symptoms will disappear — unless he insists on thinking primarily of himself rather than the problem he must confront.
A man will look forward to the end of the battle. He thinks, “Just as soon as this is over I’ll feel great.” But except for a brief period of exhilaration if the fight ended in victory, he will then begin to feel the full effects of what he has been through. He may even be physically sore and mentally depressed. What has happened, of course, is that he is just too spent emotionally, physically, and mentally to enjoy the fruits of victory he so eagerly anticipated.
The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself. The most difficult is the period of indecision — whether to fight or run away. And the most dangerous period is the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.
I find it especially difficult to answer the question, does a man “enjoy” crises? I certainly did not enjoy the ones described in this book in the sense that they were “fun.” And yet, life is surely more than simply the search for enjoyment in the popular sense. We are all tempted to stay on the sidelines, to live like vegetables, to concentrate all our efforts on living at greater leisure, living longer, and leaving behind a bigger estate. But meeting crises involves creativity. It engages all a man’s talents. When he looks back on life, he has to answer the question: did he live up to his capabilities as fully as he could? Or were only part of his abilities ever called into action?
A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life’s mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.
The ability to be cool, confident, and decisive in crisis is not an inherited characteristic but is the direct result of how well the individual has prepared himself for the battle.
From that moment, I came more and more to realize that despite his unpretentious appearance, Chambers was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts and one who had inner strength and depth. He was no headline-seeker but rather a thoughtful, introspective man, careful with his words, speaking with what sounded like the ring of truth.
But even at that time I was beginning to have some doubts. From considerable experience in observing witnesses on the stand, I had learned that those who are lying or trying to cover up something generally make a common mistake — they tend to overact, to overstate their case. When Hiss had gone through the elaborate show of meticulously examining the photograph of Chambers, and then innocently but also somewhat condescendingly saying that he might even mistake him for the Chairman, he had planted in my mind the first doubt about his credibility.
I argued, first, that turning the case over to the Department of Justice, far from rescuing the Committee’s reputation, would probably destroy it for good. It would be a public confession that we were incompetent and even reckless in our procedures. We would never be able to begin another investigation without having someone say, “Why do you amateurs insist on getting into these cases? Why don’t you leave the job where it belongs — to the experts in the DoJ?”
Bob Stripling, speaking from his years of experience as an investigator of Communist activities, made one very telling argument in support of my position. He reported that before and during the hearing, a calculated whispering campaign had been initiated against Chambers. Stripling pointed out, this was a typical Communist tactic always employed to destroy any witness — and particularly any former Communist — who dared to testify against them.
But as I thought of the problems ahead of me I realized for the first time that I was up against a crisis which transcended any I had been through before.
I had put myself, a freshman Congressman, in the position of defending the reputation of the Un-American Activities Committee. And in so doing, I was opposing the POTUS and the majority of press corps opinion, which is so important to the career of anyone in elective office.
Life for anyone is a series of crises. A doctor performing a critically difficult operation involving life and death, a lawyer trying an important case, an athlete playing in a championship contest, a salesman competing for a big order, a worker applying for a job or a promotion, an actor on the first night of a new play, an author writing a book — all these situations involves crises for the individuals concerned. Crisis, by nature, is usually primarily personal. Whether an individual fails or succeeds in meeting and handling a crisis usually affects only his own future and possibly that of his family and his immediate circle of friends and associates.
Up to this time in my own life, I had been through various crises which had seemed critical at the time. In college, each examination was a minor crisis; I had to get high enough grades to qualify for a scholarship if I were to able to go on to law school. Passing the California Bar Examinations in which for three days, seven hours a day, of written tests I was in effect putting on the line everything I had learned in four years of college and three years of law school — this had been the most difficult experience of my prepolitical career. My first day in court and my first jury trial seemed to me crucial experiences at the time. But these crises had been primarily personal as far as their outcome was concerned.
But particularly in those years immediately after WW2, a congressional investigation of Communist activities was just like waving a red flag in the face of potential critics. This was not because the critics were pro-Communist — only a small minority could be accurately so designated. It was, rather, because such investigations seemed in that period to involve an attack on the free expression of ideas. The Communist Party, in most intellectual circles, was considered to be “just another political party” and Communism just “an abstract political idea” — a generally unpopular one to be sure, but one that any individual should have the right to express freely without running the risk of investigation or prosecution.
Woodrow Wilson once said that congressional investigating committees have three legitimate functions: first, to investigate for the purpose of determining what laws should be enacted; second, to serve as a watchdog on the actions of the executive branch of the government, exposing inefficiency and corruption; third, and in Wilson’s view probably most important, to inform the public on great national and international issues
What should one man know about another if he knew him as well as Chambers claimed to know Hiss? I worked into the small hours of the morning making notes on literally scores of questions that I might ask Chambers which would bear on this point.
After the experience of the last two days, I was determined never to go into another hearing of the Committee without being at least as well prepared as the witnesses themselves.
Making the decision to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself. One of the most trying experience an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or to fly from it. It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or another. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers. A leader is one who has the emotional, mental, and physical strength to withstand the pressures and tensions, created by necessary doubts and then, at the critical moment, to make a choice and to act decisively. The men who fail are those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee to avoid meeting the problem at all.
On the other hand, if one is to act and to lead responsibly he must necessarily go through this period of soul-searching and testing of alternative courses of action. Otherwise he shoots from the hip, misses the target, and loses the battle through sheer recklessness.
Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between Communism and freedom, there are gray areas. But there are intrinsic principles which must be adhered to. Anyone who shirks this inner debate in waging this struggle acts irresponsibly. It is this soul-searching and testing which ultimately gives a man the confidence, calmness, and toughness with which to act decisively.
From my brief acquaintance with Andrew and from his reputation among this colleagues in the press corps, I was convinced he would be objective. He had the rare quality which distinguishes a great reporter from just a good one — he never allowed his prejudices or emotions to get in the way in his search for and reporting of the truth. He once told me, “An editor has the right to write from his heart. But a reporter must never allow his heart to override what his head tells him are the facts. The trouble with too many reporters who cover the State Department, for example, is that they forget that their job is to write about the Secretary of State and they proceed to write as if they were the Secretary of State.”
Like most men of quality, he made a deeper impression personally than he did in public. Within minutes, the caricature drawn by the rumormongers of the drunkard, the unstable and unsavory character, faded away. He was a man of extraordinary intelligence, speaking from great depth of understanding; a sensitive, shy man who had turned from complete dedication to Communism to a new religious faith and a kind of fatalism about the future.
Now he was twisting, turning, evading, and changing his story to fit the evidence he knew we had.
I am trying to find out if he is reformed. Some of the greatest saints in history were pretty bad before they were saints. Are you going to take away their sainthood because of their previous lives?
From the beginning, Hiss dropped all previous pretensions of injured innocence. He was on the defensive — edgy, delaying, belligerent, fighting every inch of the way.
Any of our last lingering doubts that Hiss had known Chambers were erased by this incredible, and in some ways almost pitiful, performance. All his poise was gone now. He knew that his daring maneuver of trying to deny that he had ever known Chambers had ended in disaster — but he was not finished. With a look of cold hatred in his eyes, he fought like a caged animal as we tried to get him to make a positive identification for the record.
But with his temper no longer under control, he did not fight as skillfully as he had before.
The next morning I learned a fundamental rule of conduct in crises. The point of greatest danger is not in preparing to meet the crisis or fighting the battle; it occurs after the crisis of battle is over, regardless of whether it has resulted in victory or defeat. The individual is spent physically, emotionally, and mentally. He lets down. Then if he is confronted with another battle, even a minor skirmish, he is prone to drop his guard and to err in his judgment.
There were several reasons for that failure. I was tired. I thought that after our major break-through with Hiss the night before, Mrs. Hiss’s testimony was not too important. I felt, in other words, that the battle was won, that I could afford to relax. Undoubtedly, I subconsciously reacted to the fact that she was a woman, and that the simple rules of courtesy applied.
I was never to make that same error again. In the years ahead I would never forget that when the battle against Communism is concerned, victories are never final so long as the Communists are still able to fight. There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down. When you have won one battle is the time you should step up your effort to win another — until final victory is achieved.
From the day of the private confrontation on August 17 to the public confrontation on August 25, I put in longer hours and worked harder than I had at any time in my life. I tried to anticipate how Hiss might try to explain the mass of contradictions in his story and I sought to plug up each and every loophole with documentary proof.
As the day for the hearing approached I stepped up my activity until I was spending as much as 18 to 20 hours a day at my office. I deliberately refused to take time off for relaxation or “a break,” because my experience had been that in preparing to meet a crisis, the more I worked the sharper and quicker my mental reactions became.
But a few weeks after Chambers had accused Hiss on “Meet the Press” and there had still been no response from Hiss, even the Post changed its tune: “Mr. Hiss had created a situation in which he is obliged to put up or shut up. Mr. Hiss has left himself no alternative.” Hiss was learning what many people in politics had learned before him: those he thought were his best friends turned out to be the heaviest cross he had to bear.
But at the pretrial proceedings, Hiss’s attorneys had been raking over every aspect of his life in an attempt to discredit and destroy him. Under the circumstances, Chambers wondered if he should not counterattack in kind. One day his wife was cross-examined so unmercifully by Hiss’s attorneys that she broke into tears.
An expert from the FBI demonstrated conclusively that the typeface on the letters matched exactly the typeface on the documents produced by Chambers. Every typewriter, like a fingerprint, is different and cannot be duplicated unless the same machine is used. The evidence was unanswerable.
And we must never be put in the position of meeting the appeal of the Communists on their ground alone. A watered-down materialism of our own will be no match for the authentic article, with all its trappings, peddled by the Communists. If materialism is all we have to offer, then men like Hiss, impatient with compromise and anxious for faster progress, will turn to Communism as the simpler and swifter vehicle for the realization of purely materialistic goals.
I learned, too, some valuable lessons in crisis conduct — the necessity for thorough preparation for battle; the need for handling a crisis with coolness, confidence, and decisiveness; the importance of guarding against a letdown in that most dangerous period of a crisis, after the battle is over.