CHAPTER TEN

THE HISS CASE
August–December 1948

BECAUSE OF THE complexity of the Alger Hiss case, the emotions it aroused, the personalities of the principal characters involved, and its importance, entire shelves in the stacks of large libraries are filled with books on the subject. Small details have become the subject of big books. Four decades after the case, monographs continue to appear, “proving” this case or that, about Hiss’s typewriter, or his car, or his CP involvement. It is almost the American Dreyfus affair. It stamped forever and obsessed the lives of those most directly involved—both the accused, Alger Hiss, and the accuser, Whittaker Chambers. Nixon used it more positively, as a springboard to the Senate and then the Vice-Presidency. But as the Watergate tapes indicate, there were elements of obsession even in his reaction. In the conversations the tapes recorded, President Nixon referred again and again to the Hiss case, which by then was a quarter century in the past.¹

Summer 1948. President Harry S. Truman had been renominated, reluctantly, by the Democrats; Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York was the Republican nominee. Although active campaigning would not begin until Labor Day, both parties were intent on using the last days of the congressional session—a special session, called by Truman to embarrass the Republicans (he dared them to pass the legislation they had called for in their party platform)—to create favorable campaign issues.

HUAC, for its part, wanted to raise the issue of Communist infiltration into the government. The Truman Administration let it be known that in the event of a Democratic victory in November it would abolish the committee. Thus the hearings that began on July 31 were the most crucial in HUAC’s long and controversial career, because the very existence of the committee was at stake. What HUAC knew, thanks to Nixon’s contacts with Father Cronin and to Robert Stripling’s investigations, and what the Administration wanted to downplay or ignore, was that a number of ex-Communists, including Elizabeth Bentley (dubbed the “Red Spy Queen” by the press) and Whittaker Chambers, had told the FBI and other authorities of the existence of a Communist cell inside the government, but nothing had been done about it. To Nixon this inaction proved that either the Truman Administration was criminally lax in its security procedures or was shot through with traitors. To prove that thesis, however, he first had to prove that the cell actually existed.

In that summer of 1948, Americans lived in fear. It was a fear engendered by a series of events that had begun three years earlier, when the atomic bombs were used against Japan, with repercussions that were felt all over the world and in every area of human life, but all seeming to come down to one inescapable fact—a single bomb could now destroy a city. War had therefore taken on an entirely new meaning, especially for Americans, previously immune to foreign threat. With the bomb, and with the German development of ballistic missiles, suddenly America itself was potentially vulnerable. People tried to convince themselves that their government and their scientists possessed a “secret” that insured an American monopoly of the bomb, but to any thinking person it was perfectly obvious that if Americans could build a bomb, so could others, and that if Germans could build a rocket, so could others. Anyone who wished to inform himself knew that a scientific race was on, as the United States and the Soviet Union scrambled to get German scientists into their respective laboratories, and that the future of the world depended on the outcome.

Only the most optimistic still clung to hopes of postwar cooperation between Washington and Moscow. Attempts in the United Nations to achieve international control of atomic energy had failed. Attempts in the Council of Foreign Ministers to achieve agreement over divided Germany and other European and Asian problems had failed. The Truman Doctrine, as noted, had been practically a declaration of war against the Soviet Union.

Events in 1948 had fed the fears. There was, first of all, a series of atomic tests at Eniwetok Atoll that revealed new and more powerful and more frightening bombs. There was the Soviet take-over of Czechoslovakia, almost exactly ten years after Hitler had overrun the country as his first step on the road to world conquest. There was the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, which led the National Security Council (NSC), on July 15, 1948, to send two groups of B-29s to Britain—these were the bombers that carried the atomic weapons. All this created a major war scare, more frightening even than that of 1938 because of the existence of the new weapons.

A crisis was at hand, exacerbated by the upcoming presidential elections. The two parties were badly split, as far apart in their views as they had ever been, which meant that the tendency of the politicians was to feed the fears for their own benefit, rather than allay them for the benefit of the country. There was an air of desperation about their efforts to keep the other side out of the White House. The Democrats, in this struggle, had the great advantage in that they controlled the executive branch, which gave them control of the government’s files and secrets. The Republicans’ advantage was that they controlled the legislative branch, which gave them control of congressional probes and investigations. A further Republican advantage was that they knew the Democrats had let all kinds of liberals, socialists, fellow travelers, and even Communists into the government during the New Deal and the war years, and they suspected that Communist spies had also managed to infiltrate the Manhattan Project during the war. The Republican problem was to prove it.

The process began with Elizabeth Bentley’s July 31 testimony before HUAC. It was sensational. She said she had been a courier for a Communist spy ring back in the late thirties and early forties, and she named names. But Bentley offered no supporting documents, and admitted that much of her information was hearsay, as a consequence of her having been only a courier, and because of the conspiratorial nature of the CP.

Nixon sat quietly through the hearing, raising only one question (to which he already knew the answer): Had Bentley taken her charges to the Justice Department? She certainly had, she replied, in January of 1946. “In other words,” Nixon continued, “it is quite apparent . . . that this information has been available as to these Government employees for a period of almost two years.” Nixon’s friend Mundt commented, “It is also quite apparent that we need a new Attorney General.” Nixon then praised Bentley for her courage in coming before the committee.²

HUAC needed corroboration. Nixon suggested to Stripling that he send committee investigators to question Whittaker Chambers. Nixon knew from Father Cronin that Chambers had named many of the same people Bentley had named, and that Chambers was much higher up in the CP than she had been, and therefore should know a great deal more.

Chambers told the investigators that he did indeed know more than Bentley and that he had told his story to the authorities as early as 1939. Stripling issued a subpoena on Chambers. On August 3, 1948, Chambers began his HUAC testimony. His immediate audience was the committee, composed of three Democrats (all southerners, all opposed to Truman because of his civil rights stand) and three Republicans. The former group consisted of John Rankin of Mississippi, J. Hardin Peterson of Florida, and F. Edward Hébert of Louisiana. The latter group was composed of Karl Mundt, the acting chairman, John McDowell of New Jersey, and Nixon. HUAC’s chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, was not present—he had troubles of his own, which soon led to his indictment and conviction on charges of receiving kickbacks from his employees.

Chambers’ larger audience was as broad as the nation as a whole, as the free world, as history itself. But neither his appearance nor his demeanor were appropriate to his subject. “He was short and pudgy,” Nixon later wrote. “His clothes were unpressed. His shirt collar was curled up over his jacket. He spoke in a rather bored monotone.”³ But he had prepared his opening statement with great skill.

He explained that he had defected from the CP in 1938, and that in 1939, two days after the Hitler-Stalin pact, he told authorities in the United States government what he knew about Communist infiltration. He quoted himself as saying to his wife, shortly after his defection, that it was “better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.” He said that back in the mid-thirties he had been a member of an underground cell of government employees that had included Nathan Witt, John Abt, Lee Pressman, and Alger Hiss. Reporters immediately knew that they had their headline. Witt, Abt, Pressman, and others had been named by Bentley, but they were all relatively small fry. Hiss, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was another matter. Newspapers the following day carried some variant of a headline that read, “TIME EDITOR CHARGES CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT HEAD WAS SOVIET AGENT.”⁴

Mundt and other committee members quizzed Chambers about his testimony, drawing more names out of him and exploring what he knew about Hiss’s activities. Nixon, in his first question ever to Whittaker Chambers, went to the heart of the matter: “Mr. Chambers, you indicated that nine years ago you came to Washington and reported to the Government authorities concerning the Communists who were in the Government.”

Chambers said that he had. Which authorities? Mr. A. A. Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State. Did he name Hiss? He did. “Mr. Chambers, were you informed of any action that was taken as a result of your report?” No, none.

Nixon: “It is significant, I think, that the report was made . . . at a time when we could not say by any stretch of the imagination that the Russians were our allies; and yet, apparently, no action was taken.”⁵

It was even worse than that, it turned out. Chambers said he had repeated his story to the FBI in 1943, and again in 1945, but still nothing had happened.

Over the following two days, HUAC called the men named by Bentley and Chambers before it to question them about the accusations. With one exception, to a man they were long on indignation about the charges but short on details about their pasts. They took refuge in the Fifth Amendment, refusing on the grounds of self-incrimination to answer specific questions, especially about their own CP relationship. This mass use of the Fifth Amendment made the congressmen furious. These witnesses were not under indictment, membership in the CP was no crime, and the three-year statute of limitations on espionage had long since run out. Yet they would not answer. “It is pretty clear,” Nixon commented to one, “that you are not using the defense of the Fifth Amendment because you are innocent.”⁶

One of the accused, who also claimed his innocence, offered to appear—nay, insisted on appearing—before HUAC to answer Chambers’ charges and to answer any and all questions the committee might wish to ask him. The afternoon of Chambers’ testimony, Alger Hiss sent a telegram to Stripling requesting an opportunity to come before the committee and testify under oath. It was quickly arranged, and on August 5 Hiss made his first appearance before HUAC.

Tall, thin, handsome, smartly dressed, the Carnegie Endowment president carried himself with assurance, making the sharpest possible contrast with Chambers. He might well appear confident—he had some very powerful friends. The previous evening, Dean Acheson, former Under Secretary of State, had brought him a copy of Chambers’ testimony, and just that morning Hiss had written to John Foster Dulles, Dewey’s chief adviser on foreign policy and chairman of the board of the Carnegie Endowment. Hiss told Dulles that Acheson had helped him prepare his defense.⁷ It was assumed that if Truman won in November, Acheson would be Secretary of State; if Dewey won, it would be Dulles. In addition, Hiss had highly placed friends from the Washington social community and from the State Department in the front rows of the spectator section.

Nixon remembered that Hiss read his opening statement “in a clear, well-modulated voice.” Hiss denied membership in the CP, said he had never followed the Communist line, and that he had no friends in the CP. He reviewed his government career, dropping names of men he had worked for or who had recommended him that could not fail to impress. He had served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and worked for Solicitor General Stanley F. Reed, who later also went on the Supreme Court. At the request of Assistant Secretary Francis B. Sayre, he had joined the State Department in 1936, where he remained until January 1947, when he went to the Carnegie Endowment. He had drafted the American position paper for the Yalta Conference, and then advised President Roosevelt at that meeting. “His manner,” Nixon thought, “was coldly courteous and, at times, almost condescending.” ⁸

Hiss went on to deny ever having heard the name Whittaker Chambers: “The name means absolutely nothing to me.” Stripling showed him a photograph of Chambers. “If this is a picture of Mr. Chambers,” Hiss said, “he is not particularly unusual looking. He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the Chairman of this Committee.”

Nixon noted that “Hiss’s friends from . . . the Washington social community . . . broke into a titter of delighted laughter.” After Mundt admonished both Hiss and the audience, Hiss said that he had not meant to be facetious, “but very seriously I would not want to take oath that I had never seen that man. . . . Is he here today?” And Hiss looked around the room. “Not to my knowledge,” answered Mundt. “I hoped he would be,” said Hiss with an air of disappointment.

“It was a virtuoso performance,” Nixon wrote. It was indeed. Hiss was bluffing, and the first person to catch on was that master bluffer and amateur actor himself, Richard Nixon.⁹

Nixon sensed the bluff partly because of his prior knowledge. Although Chambers’ naming of Hiss had caused a sensation in the press and came as a surprise to most reporters and congressmen, the truth was that Hiss’s association with the CP was common gossip among those in Washington whose business it was to ferret out the Reds. As Father Cronin later said, “There was no great mystery about . . . these facts.” ¹⁰ Ever since 1943, J. Edgar Hoover had pestered first FDR, then Truman, with warnings about Hiss. But no one had produced documentary evidence, and the Democrats had good reason to ignore the stories, which once broken would damage the Administration. What the State Department did do was ease Hiss out of his policy-making role, and then out of government altogether. He may have been a bright young man with an unlimited future during the New Deal and through the war years, but by early 1946 he had become a major potential embarrassment. Nixon’s contribution to the Hiss case was not so much exposing the man as insisting that something be done about him.

The other reason Nixon suspected Hiss of bluffing was his conduct at the hearing. Nixon alone noted that for all his self-assurance, Hiss never once stated categorically that he did not know Whittaker Chambers. Every one of his answers was qualified by such phrases as “to the best of my recollection.” Nixon, who had himself run a successful bluff against Voorhis and who had spent enough time in the courtroom to sense when a witness was lying, knew—in his own words—“that those who are lying or trying to cover up something generally make a common mistake—they tend to overact, to overstate their case.” Hiss had overstated his.¹¹

Nixon’s feel for the situation was far short of proof. Neither he nor anyone else had produced one shred of documentary evidence of Hiss’s guilt. Everything rested on the word of Chambers, an admitted ex-Communist, who, as will be seen, had told his fair share of lies to the committee. All Nixon really had was a hunch that Chambers had told more of the truth than Hiss had, and the courage to persist in the inquiry in the face of Hiss’s powerful denials.

That it took courage for Nixon to hold to his hunch cannot be doubted. When Hiss finished, the audience burst into applause. Rankin rushed from his seat to shake hands with Hiss. He had to push his way through a crowd of people congratulating the beaming Hiss. The press, for its part, was convinced that at long last HUAC had committed its fatal blunder. One reporter asked Nixon, “How is the Committee going to dig itself out of this hole?” Mary Spargo of the Washington Post told him, “This case is going to kill the Committee unless you can prove Chambers’ story.” Ed Lahey of the Chicago Daily News, a reporter Nixon respected, was furious. He told Nixon that HUAC “stands convicted, guilty of calumny in putting Chambers on the stand without first checking the truth of his testimony.”

At lunch that day, the news got worse. Nixon learned that Truman had held a morning press conference while the hearing was going on. There a reporter had asked the President, “Do you think that the Capitol Hill spy scare is a red herring to divert the public attention from inflation?” Truman agreed with the characterization; although he did not use the “red herring” phrase himself, he was widely quoted as having done so.¹²

WHEN HUAC RECONVENED after lunch, the scene was a madhouse. Angry members berated the staff for not having checked on Chambers before putting him on the stand. One Republican complained, “We’ve been had! We’re ruined.” Mundt said that HUAC was indeed ruined “unless the Committee was able to develop a collateral issue which would take it off the spot and take the minds of the public off the Hiss case.” Eddie Hébert said that the only way to get “off the hook” was to turn the whole affair over to the Justice Department and hold no more hearings. “Let’s wash our hands of the whole mess,” Hébert said, and leave it to Attorney General Tom Clark to decide who was lying, Chambers or Hiss.¹³

That was exactly the last thing Nixon wanted to have happen. Justice had had the accusations against Hiss, from many quarters, including the FBI, for a long time, and had done absolutely nothing to develop them. Further, at least as far as Nixon was concerned (as he showed in his questions to both Bentley and Chambers), the Justice Department itself was being investigated here. It had much to answer for, and was in fact Nixon’s real target—after all, Hiss had been eased out of government. Hiss by himself, even if proved guilty that afternoon, could not bring down the Truman Administration in the November elections, but convincing evidence that the Justice Department had ignored persuasive evidence might well contribute to a Dewey victory. That very afternoon, Truman issued an executive order instructing federal agencies (read FBI) to release no information on government employees to committees of Congress (read HUAC).

What Nixon had to prevent was a cover-up. That he did so is his great claim to fame in the Hiss case. He told his colleagues that turning the case over to Justice would not rescue the committee’s reputation, but rather destroy it for good, as it would be a public confession of incompetence and recklessness. He reminded them of how Hiss had qualified all his important answers. Then he pointed out that Hiss had given HUAC a golden opportunity. It had been virtually impossible for HUAC to prove that this or that accused man had been or was a Communist—all he had to do was deny it or take the Fifth Amendment—and it would be just as impossible with Hiss. But the committee did not have to prove that Hiss was a Red, Nixon explained. All it had to do was prove that Hiss was lying when he said he did not know Chambers. Further, having given Chambers’ charges such wide currency, the committee had an obligation to find out who was lying.

Nixon’s arguments prevailed, helped by Stripling, who pointed out that a smear campaign against Chambers had begun. The whispers were that Chambers was an alcoholic, insane, and a homosexual. Such rumor campaigns, Stripling said, were typical Communist tactics. Mundt finally agreed to appoint a subcommittee to question Chambers further, in executive session. Mundt put the eager Nixon at the head of the subcommittee and instructed Stripling to subpoena Chambers to a hearing in New York on August 7, two days away.¹⁴

NIXON HAD SET himself up as a dragon slayer, in the teeth of the President, the Administration, a large majority in Congress, and almost the entire press corps. In his later account of the case, Nixon reported that he expected some criticism, “but I was not prepared for an assault on the Committee and its members which, in fury and vehemence, had never even been approached in the Committee’s past history.” Nearly everyone assumed that Chambers was lying. Nixon’s Republican colleagues in the House told him that he should call off the investigation. Particularly disturbing to Nixon was the attitude of Christian Herter, who said, “I don’t want to prejudge the case, but I’m afraid the Committee has been taken in by Chambers.”¹⁵

Nixon reread the testimony, over and over. He remained convinced that Hiss was lying and that the Justice Department was guilty of a cover-up. He remained determined to go ahead.

Eleven years later, Nixon told reporter Earl Mazo that he realized this was his “first real testing.” Nixon continued, “Very few men get in the merciless spotlight of national publicity in a case that may make or break a party. . . . The Hiss case was a very rugged experience . . . as difficult an experience as I’ve ever had. From the standpoint of responsibility . . . the resourceful enemies I was up against . . . the battle day in and day out . . . the terrible attacks from the press, nasty cartoons, editorials, mail . . . and there was always a great doubt whether you are going to win and whether you are on the right side or not. I was convinced that I was.”¹⁶

ON SATURDAY MORNING, August 7, in Room 101 of the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, New York, Nixon’s subcommittee, consisting of himself, McDowell, and Hébert, took testimony in executive session from Chambers. Nixon asked Chambers for supporting details on his relationship with Hiss, and Chambers gave them in abundance. He said he was a close friend of Hiss and his wife, had stayed in their home, borrowed money from them, given them gifts, called them by their nicknames. Asked if Hiss had any hobbies, Chambers said he and Priscilla Hiss were amateur ornithologists. “I recall once they saw, to their great excitement, a prothonotary warbler.”

Nixon asked if Hiss had a car. Chambers said yes, a Ford roadster. “It was black and it was very dilapidated . . . I remember very clearly that it had hand windshield wipers.” He added that Hiss had given it to the CP “so it could be of use to some poor organizer in the West or somewhere.”¹⁷ Chambers’ mass of detail about the Hisses was convincing. So was his confidence. “Would you be willing to submit to a lie detector test on this testimony?” Nixon asked near the end.

“Yes, if necessary,” Chambers replied.

“You have that much confidence?”

“I am telling the truth.”¹⁸

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, HUAC questioned people named by Chambers as Communists—without any breakthroughs—and once again had Bentley on the stand. These public confrontations were getting the committee nowhere. Nixon and Stripling, meanwhile, had the committee staff searching through Washington for documentary evidence that would link Hiss with Chambers—rent receipts, car transfer papers, anything.

Nixon went off on his own search for the truth. On at least three occasions that week, he drove to Westminster, Maryland, to visit Chambers on his farm. In a memo on the case that he wrote a half year later (and then used as the basis for his chapter on Hiss in his 1962 book, Six Crises), Nixon said that the visits were “mainly for the purpose of attempting to convince myself on the issue of whether or not Chambers, in speaking of Hiss, was speaking of a man he knew, or was telling a story which he had concocted.” ¹⁹

The two men sat on rocking chairs on Chambers’ front porch, overlooking the rolling hills of Maryland, and talked about Communism. Chambers was America’s leading ex-Communist (as distinguished from former Communists, who left the CP and did their best to put it out of their minds). He was as obsessed with Communism in 1948 as he had been in 1938, although now as an enemy rather than a member of the CP. He was an intellectual of high quality and great sensitivity—his translation of the German novel Bambi was an absolutely superb piece of work—who had long ago concluded that the modern world faced a life-and-death struggle between Communism and freedom.

Nixon told Chambers bluntly that many HUAC members questioned his credibility and insisted that he had to have some personal motive for doing what he was doing to Hiss. “Certainly I wouldn’t have a motive which would involve destroying my own career,” Chambers replied—he was making $25,000 per year as a senior editor at Time, which was $10,000 more than Nixon was making as a congressman. Chambers explained that he had come forward to warn his country of the scope, strength, and danger of the Communist conspiracy in the United States. He insisted that the case was much bigger than a clash of personalities, telling Nixon, “This is what you must get the country to realize.”

Nixon was convinced by the conversations that Chambers was telling the truth. The clincher came when Nixon was leaving after his last visit. “I was still tying to press him for any personal recollection which might help us in breaking the case,” Nixon wrote in his February 1949 memorandum. “The conversation came around to religion and he said that Mrs. Hiss was a Quaker and that he also was a Quaker. . . . I told him that I was a Quaker, and then suddenly Chambers snapped his fingers and said, ‘Here’s something I should have recalled before. Mrs. Hiss used to use the plain language in talking with Alger.’ As a Quaker I knew that Chambers couldn’t know such intimate matters unless he had known Hiss.”²⁰

Nixon’s parents, Frank and Hannah, had retired and moved to a farm near York, Pennsylvania, less than an hour’s drive from Westminster. Nixon called them regularly and realized that they were worried about all the newspaper uproar surrounding their son and the case. After leaving Chambers, he decided to drive over and spend the night with them, to reassure them and to do some thinking of his own.

When Hannah called him to dinner that night, he did not hear her. When he did sit down at the table, he could not eat. Hannah said that “he would go to one part of the room and stop and think. Then he would go to another part of the room and stop and think again. Then he would pace nervously and talk to himself. ‘I just feel that I should get out of it,’ he would say at one moment. But the next moment he would be saying, ‘I can’t drop it now.’ ”

Frank and Hannah were distressed by their son’s behavior. She told Frank, “If Richard doesn’t give up the case, he won’t be here to carry on.” Although she did not want to interfere, Hannah could no longer restrain herself. She told her son, “Richard, why don’t you drop the case? No one else thinks Hiss is guilty. You are a young congressman. Older congressmen and senators have warned you to stop. Why don’t you?”

“Mother,” he replied, “I think Hiss is lying. Until I know the truth, I’ve got to stick it out.”²¹

“MAKING THE DECISION to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself,” Richard Nixon wrote in Six Crises. In a famous passage, he went on to describe his method of meeting a crisis (which he generalized, but which in fact was highly personal—for example, Dwight Eisenhower never went through anything like what Nixon described when he met his crises).

Nixon wrote in an almost mystical fashion about the experience. When one is filled with doubt and soul-searching about whether to fight or flee, Nixon wrote, “almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. . . . It is this soul-searching and testing which ultimately gives a man the confidence, calmness, and toughness with which to act decisively.”

From the experience, Nixon said, “a man . . . 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 might become “physically sore and mentally depressed.” But these were all, he claimed, “natural and healthy signs that his system is keyed up for battle.”

Nixon wrote about crises the way some men write about a religious experience, others about combat, still others about sexual conquests. He said it separated “the leaders from the followers,” that “we are all tempted to stay on the sidelines, to live like vegetables, to concentrate all our efforts on living . . . longer, and leaving behind a bigger estate.” Meeting crises involved creativity. “It engages all a man’s talents.” It was the ultimate test: “Did he risk all when the stakes were such that he might win or lose all?”

Nixon asserted that “a man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life’s mountaintop experiences. . . . Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had. . . . ”

“Crisis can indeed be agony,” Nixon insisted. “But it is the exquisite agony. . . . ”²²

AFTER RETURNING to Washington, Nixon had a series of consultations. First he went to William Rogers, counsel for the Senate Investigating Committee, which had also heard Bentley but not Chambers. He wanted Rogers’ advice as to whether to proceed or not. Nixon told Rogers what he knew and showed him the still-secret August 7 Chambers testimony before his subcommittee. Rogers read it and urged him to press on.²³

Nixon next met with Bert Andrews, the chief Washington correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, the leading Republican paper in the nation. Andrews was a Pulitzer Prize winner for a series of articles critical of State Department security procedures, later published in book form as Washington Witch Hunt. Along with James Reston of The New York Times, Andrews had recommended Hiss to John Foster Dulles for the post at the Carnegie Endowment. Andrews was widely respected, and his credentials for objectivity could not have been better.

Nixon gave Andrews the August 7 Chambers testimony to read. When Andrews finished, he said, “I wouldn’t have believed it, after hearing Hiss the other day. But there’s no doubt about it. Chambers knew Hiss.”²⁴

That evening, at dinner, Nixon showed the no-longer-very-secret Chambers testimony to Congressman Kersten, who was also convinced by it. But he warned Nixon that he had heard a rumor (which was quite correct) that Hiss was trying to get Dulles to make a statement in his behalf. Kersten suggested that Nixon should take the Chambers testimony to Dulles to read, and to do so as soon as possible.

The following morning, August 11, Nixon called Dulles, who agreed to a meeting that evening at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. It would be a critical meeting for Nixon. As Dewey’s chief foreign-policy adviser, Dulles was at the epicenter of power in the Republican Party. The Republicans had discussed making Communist infiltration into government a major issue, but now it appeared likely to backfire on them. Not only had Hiss been utterly convincing in his appearance before HUAC, but even worse, Dulles, as chairman of the board of the Carnegie Endowment, was Hiss’s employer and benefactor. The potential for damage to the Dewey campaign from the Hiss case was very high, giving Dulles strong motivation to tell Nixon to back off.

When Nixon got to the Roosevelt, he found not only John Foster Dulles there, but also his brother, Allen, New York banker C. Douglas Dillon (later Under Secretary of State), and Christian Herter. This was, in effect, the senior brain trust of the Republican Party, and had this group decided to withhold its approval, Nixon would have had to drop the case.

Nixon approached the group with appropriate humility. Dulles later recalled, “Hiss had a reputation at the time that was very high indeed. Dick had gotten a lot of evidence, but it was clear he did not want to proceed with Hiss until people like myself had agreed that he really had got a case to justify going ahead.”²⁵

Nixon passed around copies of the August 7 Chambers testimony. When he finished reading, Dulles began pacing the floor, hands behind his back. “There’s no question about it,” he finally said. “It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.” Allen Dulles and the others agreed.

Nixon asked if he should go ahead with the investigation. “In view of the facts Chambers has testified to,” Dulles replied, “you’d be derelict in your duty as a Congressman if you did not see the case through to a conclusion.”²⁶

WITH THAT STAMP of approval, Nixon plunged ahead. He returned to Westminster to get more details from Chambers. He brought his parents down from York to the Chambers farm, so that they could see for themselves that Chambers was no crackpot. He developed a close and warm relationship with Chambers’ family, best described by Chambers himself in his 1952 book, Witness: “Throughout the most trying phases of the Case, Nixon and his family, and sometimes his parents, were at our farm, encouraging me and comforting my family. My children have caught him lovingly in a nickname. To them, he is always ‘Nixie,’ the kind and the good, about whom they will tolerate no nonsense. His somewhat martial Quakerism sometimes amused and always heartened me. I have a vivid picture of him . . . standing by the barn and saying in his quietly savage way (he is the kindest of men): ‘If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil.’ ”²⁷

Convinced Nixon may have been that Chambers was telling the truth and that Hiss ought to be boiled in oil, but he still wanted reassurance. He asked Bert Andrews to drive up to Westminster with him, to ask Chambers tough, reporter-type questions, not to test Chambers’ veracity so much as to test his ability to convince others.

Andrews asked Chambers if he was a drunk. No. Had he been in an insane asylum? No, never. After further blunt questions, Andrews had an insight: “Chambers was a man who would answer all questions but volunteer nothing.” And that leads to one of the great puzzlements of the Hiss case. As Andrews put it in his book, A Tragedy of History, “Looking back, I wonder why in the world Nixon and I never asked him if he had any documentary evidence. I truly believe he would have produced it.”²⁸

Why not indeed? This was Nixon’s biggest single mistake, not only at this stage but again later in the case. But he was hardly alone. Beginning with Chambers’ original confession and accusations to Berle in 1939, continuing through Chambers’ testimony to the FBI in 1943 and again in 1945, on to the HUAC hearings in 1948, literally dozens of people had an opportunity to ask Chambers the simpliest, yet most crucial of questions: “Do you have any documentary evidence to support these charges?” No one asked the question. Why not, to repeat, is a puzzlement.

The day after the visit with Andrews, Nixon drove up to the farm again, this time with Stripling. Again, Chambers overwhelmed the two men with details about Hiss, reinforcing their conviction that he had indeed known the man. But as they drove back to Washington, Stripling made the comment, “I don’t think Chambers has yet told us the whole story. He is holding something back. He is trying to protect somebody.”²⁹

ON MONDAY, AUGUST 16, in Washington, Nixon’s subcommittee again met in executive session, this time to hear Hiss. Nixon pretended to objectivity—“I will say that both you and Mr. Chambers are as convincing witnesses as I have ever seen”—but he bombarded Hiss with questions about his personal life. Before he got well started, however, Hiss interrupted to say that he wanted to see Chambers’ August 7 testimony. He added, “I have seen newspaper accounts, Mr. Nixon, that you spent the weekend . . . at Mr. Chambers’ farm in New Jersey.”

NIXON: That is quite incorrect.

HISS: It is incorrect?

NIXON: Yes, sir. I can say, as you did a moment ago, that I have never spent the night with Mr. Chambers.³⁰

Although Hiss had misplaced the location of Chambers’ farm, Nixon was equivocating in his answer (not to mention the innuendo in that “spent the night” phrase). But Nixon was a paragon of truthfulness compared to Hiss. As the details emerged, it became obvious that Hiss was in deep trouble, not at all the self-assured witness of a week and a half ago. In Nixon’s words, “Now he was twisting, turning, evading, and changing his story to fit the evidence he knew we had.”³¹

Hiss’s evasions bothered Eddie Hébert. At one point he interrupted to give “a man-to-man impression. . . . Either you or Mr. Chambers is lying.”

HISS: That is certainly true.

HÉBERT: And whichever one of you is lying is the greatest actor that America has ever produced.³²

Nixon pressed Hiss on the names of his maids, the makes and years of the cars he had ever owned, where he had lived. Finally, dramatically, Hiss declared that he had perhaps known Chambers after all, but under a different name. It was possible, Hiss asserted, that “the name of the man I brought in—and he may have no relation to this whole nightmare—is a man named George Crosley. I met him when I was working for the Nye committee. He was a writer. He hoped to sell articles to magazines about the munitions industry.”³³

This fantastic story became even more fantastic as Nixon went after Hiss. Hiss claimed that he hardly knew “Mr. Crosley,” but under questioning said that he had let Crosley stay in his home, and loaned him his old car, a Model A Ford, “slightly collegiate,” Hiss said, with “a sassy little trunk on the back.” He had given Crosley free use of his apartment. Yet he hardly knew the man.³⁴

The questioning returned to Hiss’s personal habits. Nixon asked him if he had a hobby. Hiss mentioned bird watching. Congressman McDowell asked, “Did you ever see a prothonotary warbler?”

HISS: I have, right here on the Potomac. Do you know that place?

MUNDT: What is that?

NIXON: Have you ever seen one?

HISS: Did you see it in the same place?

MCDOWELL: I saw one in Arlington.

HISS: They come back and nest in those swamps. Beautiful yellow head, a gorgeous bird.³⁵

That warbler would soon become the most famous bird in America. Meanwhile, the subcommittee agreed to arrange a face-to-face public meeting between Chambers and Hiss in Washington on August 25.

THAT EVENING, mulling over the situation, Nixon decided that “we would be playing into his [Hiss’s] hands by delaying the public confrontation,” because that would give Hiss time to make his story fit the facts. So at 2 A.M. on August 17, Nixon called Stripling and told him to summon both Chambers and Hiss before the subcommittee in New York City that very afternoon, in a suite in the Commodore Hotel.

Nixon and McDowell were there from the committee, along with Stripling and four staff members. After some preliminary skirmishing with Hiss, who sat across from the two congressmen, Nixon ordered Chambers brought into the room, then told the two men to face each other. “Mr. Hiss,” he said, “the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before.”

Instead of replying, Hiss asked to have Chambers say something. Chambers did. Not satisfied with that, Hiss asked that Chambers read a passage from a magazine, so that he could further test his voice.

“Just one moment,” Nixon interjected. “Since some repartee goes on between these two people, I think Mr. Chambers should be sworn.”

HISS: That is a good idea. [Chambers was then sworn in by McDowell.]

NIXON: Mr. Hiss, may I say something? I suggested that he be sworn, and when I say something like that I want no interruptions from you.

HISS: Mr. Nixon, in view of what happened yesterday, I think there is no occasion for you to use that tone of voice in speaking to me, and I hope the record will show what I have just said.

NIXON: The record shows everything that is being said here today.

Hiss then went through an elaborate examination of Chambers’ teeth, asking if they had been fixed some time since 1935 and then demanding to know the name of the dentist. Nixon said, “Before we leave the teeth, Mr. Hiss, do you feel that you would have to have the dentist tell you just what he did to the teeth before you could tell anything about this man?”³⁶

Hiss said that he did. This charade went on for some minutes, until Nixon suggested that Hiss ask Chambers some questions. Hiss asked if Chambers had ever sublet an apartment from him. No, Chambers replied. Had he ever spent time with his wife and children in Hiss’s apartment?

CHAMBERS: I most certainly did.

HISS: You did or did not?

CHAMBERS: I did.

HISS: Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?

CHAMBERS: Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.

Hiss decided at this point to drop the charade, or at least part of it. He said, “I will . . . positively identify him without further questioning as George Crosley.” Stripling wanted to know if he could produce three people who would testify that they had known Chambers as Crosley. “I will if it is possible,” Hiss replied. “Why is that a question to ask me?”³⁷ The obvious answer—because Hiss was the one who had invented Crosley—hung in the air. (In the event, Hiss could produce only one person who had ever heard of Crosley—his wife, Priscilla.)

Hiss, who had only a few moments past insisted that he would have to examine Chambers’ dental records before identifying him as Crosley, now went to the other extreme. “The ass under the lion’s skin is Crosley,” he proclaimed. “I have no further question at all. If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off, I would be sure.”

That point established, Nixon turned to Chambers to ask if the man facing him was Alger Hiss, a member of the CP and a man at whose house he had stayed. “Positive identification,” Chambers replied.

Hiss walked toward Chambers. “May I say for the record at this point, that I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee without their being privileged for suit for libel. I challenge you to do it, and I hope you will do it damned quickly.”³⁸

When Hiss walked toward Chambers to dare him to make his charges in public, Nixon wrote in his 1949 memorandum (material he chose not to include in Six Crises), “he actually shook his fist and gave the appearance of one who was about to attack. But I was convinced it was purely a bluff. A staff member walked up behind him and actually touched only his clothes and asked him to sit down. Hiss wheeled on him as if he had stuck him with a hot needle in a sensitive spot, and shouted to take his hands off.”³⁹

For the next hour, Nixon hammered away at Hiss’s story. Hiss said he had known Crosley for only a short time, yet had sublet his apartment to the man (and according to Hiss, Crosley never paid the rent) and thrown in free use of his car to boot. He had driven Crosley to New York, had him as a guest in his home for a week at a time, yet never read a word he had written, had never checked on him, and anyway had not seen him since 1935.

Through this fog of deception one fact showed clearly—that Hiss had deliberately deceived the press, the public, and HUAC in his initial appearance when he insisted that he had no idea who that man was when shown a photograph of Chambers. If Hiss had been half as good a bluffer as he thought he was, he would have recognized that the moment had come to call off the bluff, fold his hand, and leave the game. Instead, he tried to carry it off—as he still was trying forty years later.

Hiss insisted that the subcommittee question his wife; Nixon agreed to do so the next day. McDowell asked if Nixon had any further questions.

NIXON: I have nothing.

MCDOWELL: That is all. [To Hiss] Thank you very much.

HISS: I don’t reciprocate.

MCDOWELL: Italicize that in the record.

HISS: I wish you would.⁴⁰

When Hiss left the room, Stripling turned to Chambers. In his slow Texas drawl, he deadpanned, “How are you, Mr. Crosley?” The ensuing laughter broke the tension. Nixon was jubilant. He had proved the essential point, that whatever the relationship and under whatever name, Hiss knew Chambers. Nixon got on the phone to reporters. The New York Times carried a headline the next day that read, “ALGER HISS ADMITS KNOWING CHAMBERS,” and a story that contained a summary of the confrontation, all provided by Nixon.⁴¹

STILL NIXON could not rest. He was hardly sleeping now, as Donald Appell, a member of the HUAC staff, discovered when Nixon asked him to spend the night because he did not wish to be alone in the Commodore Hotel suite. Late that evening Nixon called Bert Andrews on the telephone. Appell went to sleep. When he woke three hours later, at 2 A.M., he heard Nixon still talking to Andrews on the phone.⁴²

The following morning, Hiss brought his wife to the suite in the Commodore to corroborate his story about Crosley. Nixon was almost somnolent. His questions to Priscilla were perfunctory at best. It lasted only ten minutes. She said she had a vague recollection of this man Crosley, and that was about all.⁴³

Later, Nixon said he learned a fundamental lesson from this experience. He could have pressed Priscilla and broken her story, he felt, had he known the lesson in advance. It was that “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. . . . The individual is spent physically, emotionally, and mentally. He lets down . . . he is prone to drop his guard and to err in his judgment.” What he really needed was some sleep.⁴⁴

HUAC HAD ARRANGED for a public confrontation between Chambers and Hiss in Washington on August 25. In the week preceding, Nixon “put in longer hours and worked harder than I had at any time in my life.” He was at it eighteen to twenty hours a day. He was directing a search for anyone who might have known Chambers as Crosley, and for any evidence supporting Chambers’ story about his relationship with Hiss. The tension was such that he noticed that he was “mean” with his family and friends, quicktempered with his staff. “I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. Getting to sleep became more and more difficult.”

Two days before the hearing, the HUAC staff hit the jackpot. It discovered a Motor Vehicle transfer certificate that proved that Hiss had given the old Ford with the sassy little trunk to a CP member. One day before the hearing, Bert Andrews dropped by Nixon’s office. “You look like hell,” Andrews said. “You need some sleep.” At Andrews’ insistence, Nixon went home, took a sleeping pill, and slept twelve hours.⁴⁵

The session the next day, August 25, was long, bitter, and disastrous to Hiss. Nixon and Hiss jabbed and sparred, about when Hiss had known Crosley, under what circumstances, what happened to the car, and so on. Nixon showed him the title transfer for the car, with his signature on it, and asked him to identify his signature. Hiss hedged, said he wanted to see the original.

MUNDT: Could you be sure if you saw the original?

HISS: I could be surer.

The hearing room broke into laughter. Even Hiss’s friends shook their heads in disbelief. Eventually, Hiss repeated his challenge to Chambers “to make statements about me with respect to Communism in public that he has made under privilege to this Committee.” He was on the stand for five full hours. At one point, when they were discussing Hiss’s apartment, Hiss protested, “The important charges are not questions of leases, but questions of whether I was a Communist.” Nixon jumped right on that one: “The issue in this hearing today is whether or not Mr. Hiss or Mr. Chambers has committed perjury before this committee, as well as whether Mr. Hiss is a Communist.”

When Hiss finished, Chambers took the stand. He repeated his charges and insisted that Hiss’s story was a complete lie.

NIXON: Mr. Chambers, can you search your memory now to see what motive you can have for accusing Mr. Hiss of being a Communist at the present time?

CHAMBERS: What motive I can have?

NIXON: Yes. I mean, do you—is there any grudge that you have against Mr. Hiss over anything he has done to you?

CHAMBERS: The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting.⁴⁶

TWO DAYS LATER, on August 27, HUAC released all the transcripts, from both secret executive sessions and from the public testimony, under the title Hearings Regarding Communist Espionage in the United States Government (actually no one had yet raised the question of espionage). Included were editorial comments from the staff, which termed Hiss’s testimony as “vague and evasive” and Chambers’ as “forthright and emphatic.” It was convincing. A Gallup poll showed that four out of five Americans approved of HUAC’s inquiry and thought it should continue. Major newspapers, normally critical of HUAC, such as the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the New York Herald Tribune, agreed editorially that the committee was onto something.⁴⁷

IN THE FIRST WEEK of September, Nixon and Pat went over to Ocean City, Maryland, for a three-day weekend. Bert Andrews had made the arrangements and practically insisted on their going. Nixon told Andrews later that it was a “wonderful vacation. The weather was perfect, except for the fact that we tried to take two weeks of sun in three days with the usual results. We both had a chance to relax completely.” Always the politician, Nixon assured Andrews that the beaches in Maryland were “as good as any we have in California, and better than most.”

When he returned to Washington, Nixon wrote a four-page letter to John Foster Dulles, with a blind copy to Andrews. He summarized the hearings, told Dulles that Hiss’s guilt was beyond doubt, and urged him to ease Hiss out of his position as president of the Carnegie Endowment.⁴⁸ Dulles would not fire Hiss, but the Endowment did grant him a leave of absence, and Dulles—partly at Andrews’ urging, partly because of Nixon’s presentation—refused to issue a statement of support for Hiss.

Nixon, Andrews, and others urged Dulles—and, through him, Dewey—to make the domestic Reds, and particularly Hiss, a major campaign issue, but neither Dulles nor Dewey would do it. For one reason, Dulles was too closely associated with Hiss. For another, Dulles did not want to upset the European allies, with whom he expected shortly to be working as Secretary of State, and who would think the Republicans were indulging in Red-baiting. But most of all, Dewey would not do it. He had been burned in 1944 when he tried to establish a link between FDR and CP leader Earl Browder, and anyway, as GOP National Chairman Hugh Scott put it, Dewey “thought it degrading to suspect Truman personally of being soft on Communism. He wasn’t going around looking under beds.” In other words, Nixon was on his own—his party would not stand behind him, but Dulles would not oppose him either.⁴⁹

CHAMBERS MEANWHILE had appeared on the radio program Meet the Press. There he took up Hiss’s challenge, saying, “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now.” When asked if he was prepared to go to court to defend the charge, he replied, “I do not think Mr. Hiss will sue me for slander or libel.”

For three weeks it appeared that Chambers was correct, for Hiss did nothing, to the consternation of his supporters. Finally the Washington Post declared, “Mr. Hiss has created a situation in which he is obliged to put up or shut up. Mr. Hiss has left himself no alternative.” At the end of September, Hiss filed a $50,000 libel suit, charging that Chambers had damaged his reputation by accusing him of having been a Communist.⁵⁰

NIXON SPENT the fall months campaigning, not for himself but for fellow Republicans. He had already been re-elected, winning both primaries in the 12th District. He was much in demand, and his usual speech was a summary of the Hiss case, followed by a denunciation of the Democrats for protecting Hiss.

After their big win in 1946, the Republicans had been supremely confident in 1948, and their confidence was backed both by common sense and the polls. Common sense told them that the Democrats could never elect Harry Truman, a two-bit machine politician from Kansas City who was President by accident and who had lost control of his party when the left wing walked out to organize the Progressive Party (under Henry Wallace) and the Solid South had simultaneously walked out to organize a fourth party, the Dixiecrats (under Strom Thurmond). The polls confirmed the obvious—Dewey was sure to sweep to victory.

The results of the election, Nixon later said in a grand understatement, were “an unpleasant surprise for me and all Republicans.” In fact, Truman’s victory was an unprecedented blow to the solar plexus of the Republican Party, and its impact on American politics went far beyond giving Truman four more years in office.

Truman, almost single-handedly, had managed to win, and, in the process, brought a Democratic Congress in with him (so long as he was willing to forgive the Dixiecrats, as he was, in return for their votes in organizing the Congress). It turned out that the American people were not ready for the counterrevolution, not ready to abandon the New Deal, not ready to believe Republican charges that the Democratic Administration was shot through with Communists and fellow travelers, and certainly not ready to accept the Republican accusations that the Democrats were unwilling to stand up to the Russians or clean house at home.

It was not that the American people were hostile to the anti-Communist crusade. In fact, by making so much of an uproar about the Communists, the Republicans probably did Truman a favor, making him the chief beneficiary of the near-hysteria that was sweeping the country. That was only fair, since the Truman Doctrine speech had been an important contributing factor to that hysteria. It was just plain dumb of Nixon and other Republicans to try to convince people that Harry was soft on the Reds after Harry had stood up to them in Greece and Turkey, called for a worldwide policy of containment, accelerated the atomic-bomb-testing program, met Stalin’s challenge in Berlin head on, instituted loyalty oaths for federal employees, and otherwise done so much to lead and even feed the anti-Communist crusade. Dewey and Dulles had been right in their instinctual judgment that they should avoid raising the Communist infiltration issue, but they were unable to keep other Republicans, including Nixon, from crying that the Truman Administration was soft on Communism. The charge backfired.

For Nixon and Chambers, the Democratic victory was a potential disaster of the first magnitude. With Truman re-elected and the Democrats once again in control of Congress, and thus of the committees, the odds were that HUAC would be dissolved and that the Justice Department would never indict Hiss. The slander suit had been filed in Baltimore—a jury there would be likely to believe native son Hiss. If Chambers lost the suit, he could then expect to be indicted himself by Justice for perjury.

Politics were closely woven into the entire fabric of the Hiss case. Nixon, Chambers, Stripling, and other HUAC members had all been jubilant up to the election, certain that they had proved their case. Chambers was completely confident about the suit. But the day after the election, they were all in a deep depression. Triumph had been turned that quickly into disaster, not by anything that had happened internally in the case, or by any new evidence, but by Truman’s unexpected victory.

Nixon decided to shake the depression, and get some needed rest, on a cruise to Panama. Pat had been after him to take a vacation—they had not had a real one in two years. Frank and Hannah could take care of the girls at their farm. Along with some other congressmen, Nixon booked passage for a December 2 departure on a ten-day cruise. “This time,” he told Pat when he brought the tickets home, “absolutely nothing is going to interfere with our vacation.” She smiled and replied, “I hope you’re right, but I still have to be shown.”⁵¹

ON DECEMBER 1, as Pat was finishing the packing, Nixon read a United Press story in the Washington Daily News reporting that unnamed senior officials at Justice said that the department was “about ready to drop its investigation” of perjury of either Hiss or Chambers “unless additional evidence is forthcoming.” That was the worst possible news, but it was directly contradicted by a story Nixon then read in the Washington Post. In his column, Jerry Kluttz announced that “some very startling information on who’s a liar is reported to have been uncovered” in the Hiss-Chambers slander action.

Nixon, in great agitation, got on the phone to Stripling, then went to the office. There he had the first in a series of pieces of incredible good luck. Nicholas Vazzana, one of Chambers’ lawyers, had decided on his own to tell HUAC that the Post was right, that new evidence did exist. He found Nixon and Stripling in the office, and after some stalling and evasiveness, he told the story.

It was simple enough. Someone had finally thought to ask Chambers if he had any documents to support his charges. Ironically, it was Hiss’s chief lawyer, William Marbury, who did so. Chambers had then produced copies of documents, sixty-five in all, that he said had been stolen from the State Department by Alger Hiss, then given to him to be given to a Russian agent. Chambers gave photostatic copies of the documents to Marbury and to the Justice Department.

This development threw everything into turmoil. Suddenly Chambers was a confessed perjurer (he had told HUAC that he had never engaged in espionage, nor had the CP ring Hiss had belonged to in the government). But just as suddenly, the charges against Hiss escalated from perjury to treason.

When Vazzana left, Nixon and Stripling lunched together. Stripling thought Nixon appeared nervous and highly irritable, which surprised him, since he thought the escalation in the charges changed the nature of the case, to HUAC’s great advantage. Still, Nixon was shaken.

Allen Weinstein, much the closest and most careful student of the Hiss case, speculates that Nixon felt angry at Chambers. Nixon certainly had good reason. Chambers had never said a word to him about any documents, much less any spying, and now he had given the evidence to Justice, not the FBI or HUAC. When Stripling suggested that they drive to Westminster to confront Chambers, Nixon snapped back, “I’m so goddamned sick and tired of this case. I don’t want to hear any more about it and I’m going to Panama. And the hell with it, and you, and the whole damned business!”

Stripling pressed Nixon, pointing out that if he did not act, nothing would be done before January, when the Democrats would take over and the Hiss case would be quietly dropped. The furious Nixon would not budge. “Hell, I’m not going to Westminster. I’m going to Panama, and you can do what you damn want to, but I’m through with it.”

Stripling decided to go see Chambers himself. Just before leaving, he called Nixon one final time, urging him to come. “Goddamn it,” Nixon exploded. “If it’ll shut your mouth, I’ll go.”

They drove up in a stone-cold silence, hardly looking at each other. When they arrived and confronted Chambers, he explained that Marbury had asked for evidence, that he had produced the documents, and that Marbury had then decided that they were so hot he had an obligation to turn them over immediately to Alex Campbell, chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department. All that had happened two weeks ago.

Nixon was aghast. Justice had been in possession of the stolen documents for two weeks and had done nothing about them, except to leak to the press the UP story that it was dropping the case. Here was cover-up with a vengeance, and for purely political reasons, an obstruction of justice by the Justice Department itself.

Nixon berated Chambers for his stupidity in giving the documents to Campbell. Chambers replied that “I wouldn’t be that foolish. My attorney has photostatic copies, and also I didn’t turn over everything I had. I have another bombshell in case they try to suppress this one.”

“You keep that second bombshell,” Nixon said. “Don’t give it to anybody except the Committee.” Why he did not issue a subpoena then and there on Chambers for the remaining documents is another of the many mysteries in the case. In any event, he did not—he and Stripling drove back to Washington empty-handed.

“Well, what do you think he’s got?” Nixon asked Stripling. “I don’t know what he has,” Stripling replied, “but whatever he has, it’ll blow the dome off the Capitol. Certainly you’re not going to Panama now?”

“I don’t think he’s got a damned thing. I’m going right ahead with my plans.”⁵² In Six Crises Nixon explained that he could not cancel his vacation because he “didn’t have the heart to tell Pat.”

Back in Washington, Nixon phoned Bert Andrews, who rushed over to Nixon’s office, where he heard the story of the trip to Westminster. Now it was Andrews’ turn to explode. “You were too nice to Chambers,” he told Nixon. “Did you slap a subpoena on him?” Nixon said that he had not thought of that. “Look,” Andrews said, “before you leave town get hold of Bob Stripling. Tell him to serve a blanket subpoena on Chambers to produce anything and everything he still has in his possession.”⁵³

When Andrews left Nixon’s office at 12:30 A.M. on December 2, Nixon got on the telephone to Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols of the FBI. According to a memorandum on the call that Nichols prepared, Nixon “specifically urged that we not tell the Attorney General that we were told of this information [about Chambers’ bombshell] as the Attorney General undoubtedly would try to make it impossible for the Committee to get at the documents. He also asked that the Bureau not look for the documents themselves.” J. Edgar Hoover, who was no friend of Attorney General Tom Clark’s and who had been trying to get Hiss for years, kept his unbroken record of cooperation with HUAC intact. He made no search for the bombshell.⁵⁴

That morning, December 2, Nixon decided to take Andrews’ advice about the subpoena, but not Stripling’s about canceling his cruise. On his way to Union Station to catch the train to New York for the departure, he stopped off at the HUAC office and signed a subpoena duces tecum on Chambers for any and all documents in his possession relating to the Hiss Case. From the train, Nixon used the radiotelephone to call Stripling at 9 A.M. ordering him to serve the subpoena that day. Stripling did so later in the morning.⁵⁵

AND SO the Nixons went off on their long-delayed and much-needed vacation. At dinner the first night out, Nixon remarked that he and Pat had taken the cruise so that they could be sure of ten days of rest, uninterrupted by telephone calls.

Stripling, meanwhile, had sent two HUAC staffers to Westminster, where Chambers led them to a pumpkin patch. There he reached into a hollowed-out pumpkin and produced rolls of microfilm that contained copies of State Department documents from the mid-thirties, some in Hiss’s handwriting. This was indeed bombshell stuff, the biggest spy case in the history of the State Department.

Stripling wired Nixon on ship: “SECOND BOMBSHELL OBTAINED BY SUBPOENA,” and again, “CASE CLINCHED, INFORMATION AMAZING. HEAT IS ON FROM PRESS AND OTHER PLACES. IMMEDIATE ACTION APPEARS NECESSARY, CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET BACK?” Andrews also wired several times.⁵⁶

Nixon received the wires at the captain’s table the evening of December 3. He read one from Stripling aloud. Pat threw up her hands. “Here we go again,” she said. Nixon radioed Stripling to make arrangements to get him off the boat, which was then near Cuba. Stripling went to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who issued orders to the Coast Guard in Miami to fly a PBY out to the ship, pick up Nixon, and return him to Miami. When the PBY arrived, Nixon climbed into a lifeboat and the crew rowed him over to the plane. When they arrived in Miami, there was a crowd of reporters and photographers on hand to meet him—as a consequence, he got his picture on the front page of The New York Times, leaving the plane, rushing off to Washington to do his duty and save his country.

There are a number of unanswered questions about this event. Why did Forrestal, a member of the Truman Administration, cooperate with Nixon so handsomely? Who informed the press of the arrival time in Miami of the PBY? What did Nixon tell Pat? (She stayed on board and finished the cruise, alone.) Had the whole melodrama been staged? (According to William “Fishbait” Miller, doorkeeper of the House, Nixon told him the morning he left that he expected to be summoned back because of dramatic developments in the Hiss case.) Or was it all just a string of lucky coincidences? Whatever the case, the event certainly produced high drama and great publicity for Nixon.⁵⁷

BEFORE THE pumpkin papers, Nixon had said that the question in the case was, Did Hiss and Chambers know each other? Hiss said the question was, Was he a Communist? Suddenly both questions seemed terribly inconsequential. The question now was, Was Alger Hiss, trusted adviser to FDR and friend of Supreme Court justices, of two future Secretaries of State, and of nearly everyone of importance in the State Department for the past fifteen years, a Soviet spy who had betrayed his country?

But the pumpkin papers also revealed that Chambers had been a spy himself, and unlike Hiss, he was clearly guilty, because he had the top-secret material in his possession. The only “proof” that Hiss was involved was Chambers’ word that Hiss had given the documents to him—and Chambers was by now a self-confessed perjurer.

An intense struggle now began between the Justice Department, the FBI, and HUAC for control of the pumpkin papers and thus of the case. HUAC had the great advantage of physical possession; Justice had the great advantage that only it could decide who to prosecute, and for what. It was a classic struggle between the executive branch and the Congress over the immediate issue of first claim on evidence and the far more significant long-term issue over control of security procedures and national policy itself.

Justice moved fast. Alex Campbell indicated to the FBI that the department was contemplating indicting Chambers, but not Hiss. Nixon had to move fast, because a Chambers indictment by itself, not to mention the probable conviction, would undercut Chambers’ credibility—and he was the sole witness against Hiss. Hiss would walk away, Chambers would go to prison, and Nixon’s political career would be over. To prevent such catastrophies, Nixon undertook to mobilize public opinion.

NIXON GOT to Washington late on December 5. The following day he called a press conference in the HUAC offices, where he and Stripling gave the press its first glimpse of the microfilmed documents. (The press reciprocated with a photograph that became world famous, showing Nixon and Stripling examining the film with a magnifying glass—with which, incidentally, it is impossible to read microfilm.) While waiting for the conference to begin, a photographer casually asked Stripling, “What’s the emulsion figure on these films?” He explained that the numbers would show the year of manufacture. Stripling called an Eastman Kodak official who after a check told him that the film had been manufactured in 1945. Chambers claimed he had made the copies in 1938, after his break with the CP; now it appeared that he had manufactured the evidence after the war.

“The news jolted us into almost complete shock,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “This meant that Chambers was, after all, a liar.” According to Nixon, he, Stripling, and the staff “sat looking at each other without saying a word.” According to Stripling, Nixon lost his composure and began exclaiming, “Oh, my God, this is the end of my political career.” He demanded that Stripling and the staff “do something,” and cursed them in “abusive” language. He wanted to call off the press conference, but Stripling insisted that he would have to go through with it. “Tell them we were sold a bill of goods . . . that we were all wet.”

Nixon called Chambers. “Am I correct in understanding that these papers were put on microfilm in 1938?” Chambers said they were. Nixon informed him that Eastman Kodak had not made the film until 1945. “What is your answer to that?”

After a long pause, Chambers said, “I can’t understand it. God must be against me.”

Nixon snarled into the phone, “You’d better have a better answer than that. The subcommittee’s coming to New York tonight and we want to see you at the Commodore Hotel at 9:00 and you’d better be there!”

Hanging up, Nixon prepared to face the music with the press. Minutes before the scheduled beginning, however, Eastman Kodak called back. There had been a mistake—the film had been manufactured in 1937. Stripling let out a Rebel yell and leaped on Nixon’s couch, then began waltzing Nixon around the room. When things quieted down, Nixon said sadly, “Poor Chambers. Nobody ever believes him at first.” (No one present thought to call Chambers with the good news, who made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself.⁵⁸)

The press conference was a roaring success, with appropriate headlines and front-page photographs. That afternoon, Nixon and Mundt took the train to New York, where they arrived at 7:30 P.M. Justice Department officials met them at the station and accompanied them to the Commodore, arguing the whole way. It was a power play by the Truman Administration, direct, unequivocating, unashamed. The officials demanded that Nixon give them the microfilm, call off his investigation of the case altogether, and leave it to the Justice Department.

As far as Nixon was concerned, that would be turning the case over to the very people who were ultimately guilty, who were also his political enemies, and who had every reason and opportunity to cover up. He engaged in what he called a “violent verbal battle” with the Justice representatives, flatly refusing to give them anything and insisting on proceeding with the hearing.⁵⁹

At the hearing, which lasted from 9 P.M. to midnight, Chambers explained his bizarre behavior. Some of the documents had been copied by Priscilla Hiss on her typewriter, he said, while others had been microfilmed by a Communist photographer in Baltimore. In either case, Hiss would return the originals to his desk in the State Department the following morning, while Chambers would give the copies to a Soviet intelligence agent. After deciding to leave the CP, but before doing so, Chambers made copies of the copies as a life preserver—these became the pumpkin papers. If the CP threatened him, he could threaten blackmail in return.

On December 7 and 8, in Washington, HUAC held public sessions designed to keep the pressure on Justice. Former State Department officials testified that the documents were indeed valuable and that just their removal from the office was a serious breach of security. Some were still too hot to reveal.⁶⁰

After the December 8 hearing, Nixon told FBI agents, as they reported it to Hoover, that he was “extremely mad at the Attorney General and at Alex Campbell for not having more vigorously prosecuted this whole matter, but . . . [he] had nothing but praise for the Director and the Bureau.”

Hoover was unimpressed. “This fellow Nixon blows hot & cold,” he scribbled on the memo.⁶¹ Nixon had more success with Justice, where he had a number of lower-level informants who continually leaked to him inside information about the Attorney General’s plans. Thus on the morning of December 8, Nixon learned that Justice still intended to indict Chambers before a New York grand jury, for lying when he had denied under oath any knowledge of espionage. Nixon counterattacked that evening at the hearing (which was well attended by reporters). He charged that in planning to indict Chambers instead of Hiss, “the Administration is trying to silence this Committee.”⁶²

THAT WAS clearly true, and the top man in the Administration, the President himself, participated in the effort. It was the first in a long series of head-on clashes Harry Truman would have with Richard Nixon. At his weekly press conference on December 9, Truman characterized the HUAC investigation as a “red herring,” and plainly implied that his victory at the polls showed that the American people agreed with him. He promised that the Justice Department would find and prosecute the guilty, and assailed HUAC as “headline hunters not interested in prosecutions.”⁶³

Both Truman and Nixon were extremely partisan, and both were high risk takers. This confrontation was a gamble on public opinion, and Nixon won. Expressing overwhelming sentiment, the Washington Post, usually friendly to Truman, said: “The President’s attitude suggests a desire to suppress the whole business and the indictment of Mr. Chambers at this time would certainly be a step in that direction. If this is the Administration’s policy, it is incredibly shortsighted.”⁶⁴

Hoover, acting on his own, had meanwhile ordered an intensive search for Priscilla Hiss’s typewriter, and on December 13 his agents found it. Nixon, meanwhile, had made the pumpkin papers available to the FBI, but only after Justice Department officials threatened him with a contempt citation.⁶⁵ Samples from Priscilla’s old letters and from the pumpkin papers matched exactly, and now the FBI had the machine that had typed them, and it was hers.

That was the piece of evidence that the grand jury found conclusive. When Hiss was confronted with it during the proceedings, he reportedly said, “Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.” A ripple of laughter ran through the jury room.⁶⁶ That afternoon, December 15, the last day of its existence, the grand jury voted 19 to 0 to indict Hiss on two counts of perjury: that he lied when he said he had not stolen State Department documents and given them to Chambers, and that he lied when he said he had not seen Chambers after 1935. He could not be indicted for espionage, because the three-year statute of limitations had long since run out.

SO NIXON WON the first round. In the process, he learned some unsavory lessons, not only about the extent of Communist infiltration into the government and about spy rings, but also about what lengths the Administration was willing to go to in order to prevent embarrassment. He was introduced to that intricate game that is Washington politics, in which the only thing that counts is success, and where anything goes. The case was filled with leaks, lies, deceptions, the deliberate use of the Justice Department for partisan political purposes, the manipulation of the press and public opinion, and brazen attempts at cover-up.

Nixon also learned about personal crisis management. He analyzed his own actions and reactions carefully, all within the context of his discovery that he thrived on crisis, actually enjoyed it, and did his best when he was under pressure. He also learned to be alert in the postcrisis stage, because he tended to let down at that time. What he did not learn—or at least never mentioned in his extensive writings on the Hiss case and the subject of crises—was that there came a point when the tension was unbearable, and at that point he would lash out in an uncontrollable fit of temper. He did it with Stripling at least twice, and he would do it again at some stage in every future crisis of his life.

But overall, the Hiss case had been quite an educational experience, and Nixon was a quick learner. It also made him into a world figure with an unlimited future.