Alger had just a week to prepare for the HUAC circus on August 25th. Odd to have to find proof of details of your life over a decade ago: tax records thrown away, house moves, job changes and circles of friends and colleagues with them.
He needed to show that George Crosley wasn’t a figment of his imagination. He needed documentation of his cars and his apartment leases. His many friends were willing and eager to help, but there was so little time, not much money, not one of them experienced in detective work. They did manage to track down one record – the title transfer of the old Ford – only to find the FBI had already impounded it. Alger, being Alger, ignored this warning signal and decided such details were “unimportant”; he’d rely on his memory as before but be careful not to let the Committee tie him down to specifics.
Most of his time went on preparing a statement.
As for Nixon, he was spending eighteen to twenty hours a day on those “unimportant” details. He had lots of help. The FBI had all those years of coverage to start with – details of daily life – and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had started leaking directly to Nixon as soon as he got into Congress. One FBI agent said, talking of HUAC’s Chairman, “Let’s put it this way. He had access to see information that was in the files Mr. Hoover had. This was a personal relationship”; the courtesy extended to Nixon. Then there was HUAC’s own investigative team and the FBI’s active help in the field. That’s not all. Professor Stephen Salant of the University of Michigan tracks the helpful hand of the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps as well. Scores of agents and investigators combed records for car sales, rentals, schools; everything they found, they impounded. As a close friend of Nixon’s said, the information “was handed to him”.
Father Cronin went into more detail. He had an FBI source called Ed Hummer who called him “every day” and told him what was going on, “and I told Dick. He knew just where to look for things.” Cronin summed it up: “Nixon was playing with a stacked deck in the Hiss case.”
While all this was going on, the Committee subpoenaed as many of Alger’s colleagues and acquaintances as they could; they subpoenaed his brother, Donald. All but Donald took the Fifth to escape dragging friends, family, colleagues into the mess with them. All at once they became Fifth Amendment Communists who’d implicated themselves rather than admit to knowing Alger Hiss.
As for Donald, “I deny them categorically,” he said about Chambers’ charges. “If I am lying,” he added, “I should go to jail.”
HUAC forgot him.
But every day the press had a revelation.
The New York Times: “Representative Nixon” told the reporter by telephone that Chambers had described “furniture, paintings on the walls and other objects of the Hiss home.”
And yet two weeks ago, the only item he could remember was a cigarette box.
International News Service: “Nixon predicted that, after “the tardy identification, Chambers, confessed Red courier, will reiterate that any money he received from Hiss was in payment of Communist Party dues.” But he said he’d never collected Alger’s dues. No, he’d collected them every month for years. They came to ten per cent of Alger’s wages. Which would show up on his bank statements. No, they came in irregular cash payments of $5 or £10. Which wouldn’t show on his bank statements. But they’d show up on Party records. Nobody suggests looking.
Associated Press: “Representative Nixon, Republican of California, said today that Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers were introduced to each other by J.V. Peters, alleged ‘brain’ of the entire Communist underground.”
Anybody ask Peters himself? If anybody did, there’s no record of it. He kept a low profile, and not long after, he was allowed to leave the country – nobody knows why – and secrete himself in deepest Hungary, out of everybody’s reach.
The Hearst papers: Nixon said Chambers “had not changed perceptibly” in a dozen years. What happened to the fifty pounds? The jowls? The devastation of a mouth? The shaved-off moustache? “Nixon’s one-man subcommittee” reporting from “a closed-door session” told reporters that “Alger Hiss was linked to the Communist movement as late as 1944 or 1945, according to Louis Budenz, former editor of the Communist Daily Worker.” The testimony itself didn’t become public until many months later; all Budenz said was that he’d heard the standard rumours that Chambers had started.
Weren’t the odds high that this time Alger would at last come to his senses and take the Fifth? Less than a month since he’d demanded the right to appear, and his public life was history; but if he took the Fifth as so many of his friends had before him, he could go back to private practice. HUAC couldn’t charge him with anything beyond contempt of Congress, and they couldn’t even do that if he took the Fifth.
What good is Father Cronin’s stacked deck if Alger won’t play? Even so, here’s the unbelievably gutsy Nixon gambling that the game will go on.