A hung jury was not what Nixon wanted. As his friend Victor Lasky had said, he’d had “a heck of a stake” in this trial. He had the next election to think about – he was preparing his campaign for the Senate – and he started at once making sure the second trial would deliver. Here are front-page headlines on the very day after the verdict.
KAUFMAN ACCUSED OF HISS CASE BIAS
Capitol Hill Demands Probe Into Hiss Trial; Judge’s “Prejudice” Hit
“Congressman Nixon said” – many papers ran this Associated Press quote – “‘I believe a full investigation should immediately be made of Judge Kaufman’s fitness to serve on the bench in view of his conduct during this trial.’” He said that when the “full facts of this trial are laid before the nation, the people will be shocked.” In a radio interview he attacked the Moscow-tainted Democrats for covering up their dirty linen: “I think the entire Truman administration was extremely anxious that nothing happen to Mr. Hiss.”
Several of Nixon’s cronies from HUAC echoed him. One of them said Kaufman showed “bias bordering on judicial misconduct”. Another called for a “minute examination” of Kaufman’s record. A third said, “The matter should be turned over to the Judiciary Committee for impeachment.” The barrage went on for weeks.
Attacks on Judge Kaufman were the most dramatic, but they were by no means the extent of the harassment.
The two Supreme Court Justices Frankfurter and Reed, who’d testified for the defence, were setting a “degrading precedent”; they’d “dragged down the high position of the Supreme Court”. The four dissenting jurors really got it in the neck; the details of their vote – along with their addresses – appeared in newspaper after newspaper:
For acquittal – Louis Hill, a business secretary; Arthur L. Pawliger, an advertising company employee; James and Mrs Torian.
Nobody bothered with Mrs Torian’s first name or her profession because she was only a woman, but the car salesman James was a different matter. Hubert Edgar James had served as foreman, and he “was sympathetic to Hiss”. An FBI agent said so. The agent’s source? “An informant” visiting a patient at a resort in New Jersey “had a conversation with a woman who said she was” James’s wife. Just in case an outraged American wanted to take a pot shot at the foreman but wasn’t sure what he looked like, full-length pictures of him were part of the coverage. Nixon wanted him prosecuted.
All four dissenters signed affidavits detailing middle-of-the night calls – phone ringing and ringing until they woke and answered, caller hangs up at once, only to ring again a few minutes later. If the caller spoke, it was to say “Go back to Russia” or to make threats of terrible ends. All four received hate mail. They faced local press accusations of communism and whisper campaigns about “Communist sympathies”. Nixon pressed to have them subpoenaed – all four of them – before HUAC.
Back in 1945, Roy Day, advertising salesman for the Pomona Progress Bulletin, first spotted Richard Milhous Nixon at the dinner held by the Republican candidate selection board; Mickey Cohen’s lawyer Chotiner had spotted him there too. They’d both been very impressed. Chotiner saw somebody smart and tough as hell who just might win big. Day saw “saleable merchandise”.
The merchandise needed a little working over though. Nixon had worn his Lieutenant Commander’s uniform that night. Dump it, said Day: too many veterans hated their superior officers during the war and resent them now. Nixon dumped it, bought an ill-fitting grey suit, dumped that as soon as he could find a navy blue one that fitted him. But his taste in clothes was as bad as it had been when the Eastern establishment turned up its nose at him. Get rid of the loud ties, Day said. Nixon got rid of them. His stumbling, tongue-tied manner with women marked him out too. Look them in the eye, Day told him; smile graciously. Nixon worked on it. He mastered it. Almost, anyhow.
Day is the man who backed him to the hilt with the ads that squashed a powerful Democratic incumbent: “A vote for Nixon is a vote against Communistic principles and [the incumbent’s] gigantic slush fund!” And in the summer of 1949, with Alger’s trials and the excitement of treason filling the headlines, Day told him, “When your star is up, that’s when you have to move.”
Nixon moved. His star wasn’t just up, it was soaring. Here’s The New York Times headline that ran shortly before Alger’s second trial was due to begin:
3-Way G. O. P. Senate Race in California
Forecast as Nixon Announces Candidacy
Nixon was one of those rare people who really was born to lead; where he went, others followed. The pumpkin’s revelations proved to Republican after Republican that Red-baiting could win when nothing else had a chance. The Democrats had held the presidency for sixteen years – Roosevelt, Truman, the New Deal – and because of them millions of people around the world “had been delivered into Soviet slavery”.
But the greatest peril was right at home. A New England electrical union had 300 Communists in control. In the Midwest, the hunt was on for a mysterious “Scientist X” who was giving away bomb secrets to the Soviets. In the South, singer Paul Robeson was a “black Stalin”, and the Soviets were carting “poor coloured boys” off to Russia to teach them bomb-making and turn them into urban terrorists. Key Communists in Washington, driven underground, were infiltrating every level of government. The FBI revealed that there were 12,000 dangerous Communists at large in US, half of them citizens. Hoover said that when Russia went Red, there was one Communist per 2,277 head of population; the US contamination was much more serious: “one per every 1,814 persons in the country,” exactly 6,977 of them in California, many in the movies. The Congress of American Women was full of hard-core Reds. Teachers all over the country were distributing Communist propaganda in their classrooms.
Alger and his trial-to-come brought all this into sharp focus for the public, and HUAC wasn’t going to let them forget it. The publication of Robert Stripling’s The Red Plot Against America – following its syndication across the country in spring – was poised to coincide with the opening of Alger’s second trial in October. HUAC member John Rankin read the dumbwaiter-shaft papers into the Congressional Record and gave interviews about “the American boys who were killed, who lost their lives as a result of this treason.” If Alger had been caught in time, Rankin said, “we might not have had a Pearl Harbor”.
A fair trial in New York? Forget it.
The Sixth Amendment ensures the right to an impartial jury, and high profile cases like Alger’s get moved all the time. His legal team entered a motion for a change of venue from New York to Vermont, where he’d spent summers for the past decade, much longer, all in all, than he’d spent in New York. Vermonters have a reputation for independent thinking; New York hysteria rarely takes them in.
This time Alger was going to win. He knew it. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind. Never mind the brilliant Stryker’s warning that nobody – nobody – could win this case in any state in the union. Alger knew he could, and he was going to do it his way. He was going to argue the evidence. He was going to concentrate on the detail. He was going to burrow his way into Nixon’s confabulation. He didn’t approve of Stryker’s “florid” courtroom style anyway, booted him out, hired a gentle Bostonian called Claude Cross, a short, stocky Harvard Law School graduate with a “solid background in corporate cases involving complex documents.”
The man had no criminal experience. None. He’d never faced a jury, not in New York, not anywhere.
A court delay from October to November did get agreed; Stripling moved his book launch to coincide. But a change of venue? The government prosecutor Murphy opposed it on the grounds that if jurors said they had no prejudice, the law was satisfied. The case went to one Judge Alfred Coxe. Judge Coxe had spent a holiday in Vermont; he’d seen New York newspapers in his hotel. Surely that was proof that Vermont couldn’t be any more impartial than New York.
He denied the motion.