Alger looked over the photostats and said that at least three of the handwritten notes looked like his. In 1938, his job was assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis B. Sayre. The office got some two hundred telegrams a day. Sayre couldn’t possibly read them all. Alger did it for him, took notes, briefed Sayre – notes in hand if he needed them – then threw the notes out or clipped them to the material they summarized. Sayre confirmed all this at the trials. Alger didn’t remember any of these four notes, but he couldn’t see anything in them that would interest the Soviets.
He didn’t recognize the typed documents, although he thought many of them would have crossed his desk. But he couldn’t see anything in them either that would interest the Soviets.
One thing he was sure of: Chambers shouldn’t have had the material. He instructed the lawyers to turn the originals over to the Justice Department. His own lawyers didn’t like the idea. The dates scared them. Alger had sworn in his HUAC testimony that he hadn’t seen Chambers since 1936 at the latest, and the 1938 date on the documents could be presented as evidence that he’d lied: a first count of perjury. He had also sworn that he’d never given Chambers information to be passed to the Russians; Chambers could claim that the documents were evidence of precisely that: a second count of perjury. Whether the Soviets would be interested or not was beside the point.
Never mind all that. Alger trusted the Department of Justice. Turning the originals over to them was legally and morally the only thing to do. That’s how the Hiss team lost their chance to examine the papers themselves until it was way, way too late.
Justice needed time to make the examination that the Hiss team had failed to make; the department ordered a two-week embargo on media coverage of the case.
Keep a secret like that in Washington? As Stripling put it, Chambers had dropped a “bombshell”, and the marvel is that the embargo lasted a full ten days. On the first day of December, the United Press reported that Justice was going to agree with Alger. Nothing in the papers was secret. There was no proof that the material had come from Alger or been destined for the Soviet Union. There was no evidence that any law had been broken. Nor was there enough in any HUAC transcript to indict anybody for perjury or anything else.
This is important. This is the second beating back of Nixon’s hopes for a perjury charge against Alger. HUAC failed to bring one after its final hearing despite Chairman Thomas’s claim that it “surely” would. After Chambers’ deposition, Alger’s lawyers had been afraid that the documents might be used to show Alger had seen Chambers and given him documents: that could be turned into perjury. But now the Justice Department has ruled against the charge.
But that very same day, The Washington Post reported “a startling development in the libel suit”.
Stripling wrote that he was “in a frenzy” to find out what the Post meant and that he persuaded Nixon to go to Chambers’ farm with him. Nixon says he suggested the two of them go. “A hunch,” he says. Out at the farm, Chambers talked of a second “bombshell”. Stripling says Nixon wanted it at once. Now. No delay. Nixon says no, no. Nothing like that. He wasn’t even interested. It took thirty years for Stripling to embrace Nixon’s not-much-interested story. Here’s his revision. Nixon and his wife were about to board ship for that ocean cruise, and Nixon said to him, “I’m so goddamned sick and tired of this case, I’m going to Panama. And to hell with it, and you, and the whole damned business.” As for Chambers’ bombshell, “I don’t think he’s got a damned thing.”
And yet Nixon called Louis Nichols of the FBI to tell him that Chambers had a lot more new material, material the Justice Department had not seen, material they had not been given a chance to dismiss as they were dismissing the dumbwaiter shaft papers. Nixon told Nichols to keep the information to himself, discuss it only with Hoover; if Justice got wind of it, they’d bury it. Nichols discussed the plan with Hoover. Hoover agreed to it. Nixon also scheduled HUAC hearings, and he scheduled them to begin well before the cruise ship was due back. On top of all this, he issued a subpoena for Chambers and the bombshell.
And then he arranged for an amphibious plane to be on standby to pick him up from the SS Panama on an emergency basis. Coast Guard logs say so.
On his way out of the House of Representatives, the doorkeeper could see “he was so delighted with something he had to share it”. Doorkeepers don’t often write memoirs, but this one did. His name was William Miller; in his book Fishbait – that’s what Congressmen called him – he reported that Nixon was “very elated and keyed up, as if he were dancing on wires.” Nixon told him he was “going to get on a steamship”. And the excitement? “They are going to send for me. You will understand when I get back.”
The Nixons embarked from New York.
As the SS Panama was heading down along the east coast towards the canal via Cuba, Chambers was stopping in at the HUAC offices to pick up Nixon’s subpoena. Stripling and two members of staff went back to his farm with him to collect the new evidence.
It was ten o’clock by the time they arrived, pitch dark and bitterly cold. The HUAC officers carried midnight lanterns and followed Chambers across icy fields to …a pumpkin. A pumpkin? In mid-winter? After a month of killing frosts? All they should have found was black and shrunken remains. If finding a fresh, live pumpkin isn’t miracle enough for you, there’s a pattern of squashes – equally spectacular survivors – in the shape of an arrow pointing to this pumpkin. The centre of the pumpkin had been carved out and the top plugged back in just like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern.
Inside the pumpkin, wrapped up in waxed paper, were two rolls and three canisters of film.
One of the agents pocketed them all. All top secret affairs of state, and yet the person who first notified Nixon was Bert Andrews of the Herald Tribune. “Hiss-Chambers has produced a new bombshell… Justice Department partially confirmed by saying, ‘It is too hot for comment.’” How come Andrews knows all about it? Next came a cable from Stripling. “Case clinched. Information amazing. Heat is on from press and other places. Immediate action appears necessary.” Now all the press is in on it? Then another from Andrews: “Hiss’s handwriting identified on three documents.”
Stripling called a massive press conference. As Chambers tells it in Witness: “Before I was out of bed the next morning, a news photographer was trying to decide which pumpkin to take a picture of.” He went out at once to help. He explained to reporters that he’d hidden the films like this “so Communists wouldn’t find them”. But what about their finding him? Only a couple months ago, he couldn’t tell the Committee his home address for fear of a SMERSH hit, and now he’s showing every newspaper in America where he lives. What could have happened in the interim to make him feel so much safer? There’s no explanation.
The pumpkin was an immediate sensation. It was colourful. It was eye-catching. It was fun. Newsreels showed him re-enacting his role, kneeling down, opening the pumpkin, removing film from it.
Nixon? The man had nerves of steel. He went to his meals at the Captain’s table on the SS Panama as though nothing had happened.
Nixon stayed aboard and let HUAC’s Mundt hold a press conference late that Friday night. Mundt announced that the Committee was keeping a twenty-four hour armed watch on the pumpkin’s contents. This pumpkin contained, he said, “microfilmed copies of documents of tremendous importance which were removed from the State Department for the purposes of transmittal to Russian Communist agents.”
Investigator Stripling said that when they were developed they’d make a pile more than three feet high.
This word “microfilm” caught the imagination almost as much as the pumpkin itself. It smacked of wars and armies and serious secrets; it dates all the way back to the Siege of Paris in 1870 when homing pigeons carried microfilmed dispatches from Tours to the besieged capital. Archives use it to this very day because it reduces paper storage space by something like 95%. There were two rolls and three canisters of film: that much microfilm could easily make a pile of paper three feet high.
Chambers said both rolls and canisters had been in the manila envelope from the dumbwaiter shaft along with the typewritten and handwritten pages he’d turned over at his November deposition for the libel suit. He hadn’t mentioned them then because he was terrified that the Russians and the “Hiss forces” would get them; he’d hidden them on his farm instead. Why in a pumpkin? The Communists wouldn’t look for them there, even though he’d taken the idea from a Soviet spy movie called Transport of Fire. It says so on his own website. These rolls and canisters of film were bulky. No way they could have fitted in that envelope; he’d have split it trying to force them into it along with all those pages. Not that anybody noticed such a discrepancy. How could they? All the FBI had seen were manila folders of documents. Nobody outside HUAC and the Justice Department knew anything about envelopes – big enough or not big enough – to hold film as well as documents. Nobody beyond them had the faintest idea what either of the two bombshells consisted of. Except Bert Andrews of the Herald Tribune of course. And not even the Justice Department knew the secrets he did.
Nixon issued a press release from shipboard. “Will reopen hearings if necessary to prevent Justice Department cover-up.” Odd. He arranged these hearings before he left. Anyhow, The New York Times reported that members of HUAC were rushing to Washington “to bring into the open the new documentary evidence” and that the Justice Department “meanwhile arranged for presentation of enlargements of the microfilm to a grand jury in New York City on Monday.”
It was not until Sunday that Nixon made his entrance. A Coast Guard amphibious seaplane scooped him up from the cruise ship and set him down in Miami, cameras catching every moment. Photographs of the young Congressman eclipsed even the pumpkin, and to a modern eye he still cuts an impressive figure: lithe, athletic, young, handsome, concerned, important, emerging over the seaplane’s wing – for all the world as impressive as Alger Hiss emerging from his jet with the UN Charter in hand. Despite the fact that Nixon had orchestrated all this himself, he told the howling pack of reporters and photographers that the Secretary of Defence had ordered it. He announced to them that the new evidence – not that there’d actually been time for him to see it in this scenario, much less examine it – showed that the Hiss Case “is no longer one man’s word against another’s”. This new evidence, he said, would “prove once and for all that where you have a Communist you have an espionage agent.”
On Monday morning, instead of taking the film to the Justice Department, Nixon and Stripling called a press conference, the first in what were to become daily press conferences for the next week and a half.
Stripling told reporters that the filmed documents were all Top Secret State War and Navy Department documents. He and Nixon posed with a stack of paper not just three feet tall, but a good four feet. There they were: Strip stretching out a strip of film while Nixon peered at it through a magnifying glass like Sherlock Holmes himself. A brilliant image. There couldn’t have been a more popular hero in 1948. The last of Basil Rathbone’s fourteen films had premiered barely two years before, and decades of radio Sherlocks had just introduced the best loved American version yet, Leigh Lovell, a Londoner living in New York. Newsreels of the day showed Nixon, this living, breathing modern-day Sherlock with his magnifying glass, alongside a fuzzy document with TOP SECRET in huge letters across it.
The New York Times reported that the microfilms were evidence that Alger had “slipped Chambers ‘restricted’ documents for delivery to a Russian agent”. Nixon went further. He said they were “conclusive proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation’s history…proof that cannot be denied.”
After the press retired for the day, Nixon met with Justice Department officials. A quarrel developed. Nixon refused to give up the pumpkin’s film.
On Tuesday, Nixon’s press conference reported on the discussions with Justice; he told journalists that even the drift of the conversation was too sensitive to reveal. Headlines screeched across the country:
SPY NETWORK IN STATE DEPARTMENT UNCOVERED
Chambers Claims He Hid Films From Alger Hiss
SAYS HISS LET OUT WAR SECRETS
At least The New York Times had the sense to complain, “The audience received no hint as to the contents of the documents.”
At Wednesday’s press conference, Nixon began a subtle shift of attention away from the documents themselves and towards the failure of the Red-infiltrated government to address the threat they represented; Republican scare-mongering had failed to elect a president only by the slimmest of margins. Congressmen must whip up voter excitement every two years, and no head start could be better than this pumpkin. Nixon said he feared that Chambers would be indicted in New York, and that it would all happen before action was taken. “This will thereby probably destroy the only opportunity to indict other individuals involved,” he warned, “because the star witness will be an indicted and convicted person.”
Nixon poses with a strip of film from the pumpkin. Robert Stripling, chief investigator for HUAC, pretends to study it with him.
Thursday showed how accurately Nixon had hit home. The Justice Department attacked his technique of “trial by headline”, stating that nobody – but nobody – outside HUAC had seen any of the evidence. How were they to know Andrews of the Tribune was in on it too? The Attorney General demanded that Nixon turn over “any and all information and documents which you may have regarding the subject matter”. Nixon ignored the demand while Chambers distributed the dumbwaiter shaft papers to journalists.
Friday’s press conference announced HUAC’s own investigation into the documents.
Saturday, and another Nixon press conference gave the first glimpse of what the pumpkin material itself might contain: “Twelve documents produced by Whittaker Chambers to substantiate his charge that Government Officials passed secret data to him,” said The New York Times. Three pages were handwritten; a government handwriting expert had “declared conclusively and without qualification that the penmanship was that of Mr. Hiss”.
Were these the earlier handwritten notes? The ones Justice had dismissed? A new set maybe? Are there now seven handwritten pages all in all?
“Hiss’s guilt,” Nixon said, “is unmistakeable.”
The US Attorney General sent a formal telegram requesting that Nixon turn over the microfilms. Nixon ignored the request.
Not even Sunday went by without a press conference. Nixon devoted this one to setting out the Republican platform for the election to come. “‘The Espionage Law is full of holes,’ Mr. Nixon said.” This is The New York Times. “Recent disclosures before the House Committee on Un-American Activities make it vital that proposals to tighten the espionage law should have” – as Rep. Richard Nixon of California put it – “‘the highest priority in the new congress.’” Papers headlined with a “Plot to Seize the Government”, and the Associated Press reported “800 Moscow-trained American Communists” being “drilled to overthrow our government”.
Monday, the Justice Department issued a subpoena directing Nixon to appear at once before a Federal grand jury investigating espionage, turn over the microfilm and justify daily press conferences about material that nobody outside HUAC and Bert Andrews had been allowed to see.
This is the moment Nixon had been driving toward.