The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Nixon’s role in the Hiss case raises many issues, but one question is rarely addressed: Why, so soon after becoming a congressman, did he focus almost exclusively on matters involving espionage and intelligence? Just possibly, the answer lies in his distant past.

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  A decade earlier, when Nixon was about to graduate from law school, he had gone job hunting in New York. Of the several prestigious law firms he visited, two had partners who were to reach the pinnacle of U.S. intelligence. William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, the founding partner of Donovan, Leisure, Newton, and Lombard,* was a leading Republican who in the coming war headed the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), forerunner of the CIA. Donovan favored recruiting individuals like bankers, industrialists, and lawyers for intelligence work. He met with Nixon personally when he applied for a job and later asked him back for a second interview. According to Nixon, he declined the opportunity.

  Nixon’s “highest hope” on that New York trip, he later said, was to win a position at another Wall Street firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. The panel that interviewed him there included John Foster Dulles, a senior partner and future secretary of state in the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. It is not clear if Dulles’s younger brother, Allen, was present. Allen Dulles, also a Republican stalwart, was a former Foreign Service officer who had for years provided what his biographer describes as “very particular services” at Sullivan and Cromwell. He became a top operative for the OSS during the war and the director of Central Intelligence under Eisenhower.

  David Wise, a veteran writer on intelligence, has raised a question about Nixon’s next sojourn in the New York area, when as a navy officer home from the Pacific in 1945 he was transferred to the East Coast. According to Nixon, he spent that time winding up naval contracts, and his wife recalled his going to work at the “Bureau of Aeronautics.” Wise, noting that there were no references to the period in Nixon’s official biographical sketches, thought there was “something of a mystery.”

  If there is indeed such a mystery, another writer on intelligence believes he has solved it. John Loftus, a former prosecutor with the Justice Department unit investigating Nazi war crimes, claims that one of Nixon’s assignments at the time involved the review of captured Nazi documents. Citing interviews with retired intelligence officers, at least one of whom worked in the same area as Nixon, Loftus makes a startling suggestion. “Allen Dulles,” he writes, “. . . told [Nixon] to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return, arranged to finance the young man’s first congressional campaign, against Jerry Voorhis.”2

  What could Dulles have wanted Nixon to keep quiet about? According to some chroniclers, the Dulles brothers had links to the Nazis dating back to prewar business contacts. Loftus, who had access to contemporary records, claims Allen Dulles maintained such contacts even during the war and that proof of the ties lies in captured German documents, still classified to this day.3

  Dulles had returned to the United States, his war service over, in the late fall of 1945, the same period that Nixon accepted the invitation to run for Congress against Voorhis. At the time Voorhis said he discovered that a mysterious “representative of a large New York financial house” had traveled to California to urge that he be ousted. The reader will recall the firsthand account by an executive of Gladding McBean, the Californian company that levied money from its staff to pay Nixon the money he demanded, over and above his congressional salary, if he was to serve as representative.* One of the company’s directors, Herman Phleger, was to serve Allen Dulles as legal adviser at the CIA.

  Whatever the genesis of their relationship with Nixon, the Dulles brothers were to be his long-term political allies. Although they were Ivy League products of the elite Nixon professed to deplore, they shared the same worldview and became his friends and regular dinner companions. Allen had befriended Nixon in 1947, when both were in Europe on a postwar fact-finding mission, one of several trips Dulles used to nurture his contacts and to do some “quiet recruiting.” Nixon met with the brothers early in his drive, the following year, to expose Alger Hiss as a traitor.4

  The connection to the Hiss case of the OSS and its successor, the CIA, reportedly involving both William Donovan and Allen Dulles, has been little probed. As it happened, the OSS had had reason for an early interest in Hiss: At one stage he had been, ironically, at the top of a list of candidates for the post of its general counsel.5 In 1945, though, when it seemed possible that Hiss might become the first secretary-general of the United Nations, Donovan warned the State Department that Hiss had been charged by OSS sources with being a traitor.

  In July 1948, days before HUAC started its Hiss probe, the fledgling CIA reportedly ensured that Nixon, the committee’s youngest member, would be given inside information. Its intelligence, passed to him through Thomas Dewey, Republican candidate in that year’s presidential election, was that Hiss was indeed a Communist.

  The following month, as HUAC faltered in the face of Hiss’s denials, Nixon received confirmation that Hiss had indeed known Chambers. It came, according to CIA sources, from Allen Dulles.6 Dulles, who had a run-in with Hiss years earlier,7 was at this time in close touch with his former chief, Donovan, and was entirely likely to be privy to whatever the OSS had learned about Hiss.

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  Nixon also had assistance in the Hiss case from the domestic guardian of U.S. security, the FBI. The genesis of this connection is, again, something of a puzzle.

  In 1937, within weeks of looking for a job as a lawyer in New York, Nixon had applied to join the FBI. He filled out the forms and supplied a list of references—including Whittier Police Chief Guy Welch, father of his former sweetheart Ola—and his application was supported by a personal letter to Hoover by the dean of Duke Law School. The surviving FBI file indicates that Nixon did well in the initial interview process and was recommended for employment but was then dropped.

  A handwritten notation in the Nixon file reads, “Not Qualified,” and the appointment, which had already been passed to the Justice Department for approval, was canceled by Hoover’s closest aide, Clyde Tolson. Years later, embarrassed at having turned down a future leader of the United States, Hoover and his aides concocted various explanations for the rejection: that Nixon was unsuitable because he was already practicing law (he was not) and that budgetary factors were involved.

  Two FBI assistant directors, one of them future domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan, said Nixon’s application was ultimately set aside because he was judged “lacking in aggression,” a characterization that runs counter to remarks in the FBI file. By another account, the problem was a report prepared by John Vincent, agent in charge in Charlotte, North Carolina, the FBI office responsible for the area that included Duke Law School. It was there that a year earlier Nixon had broken into the dean’s offices. Hoover’s fact checkers may also have turned up the fact that Nixon had once been briefly under arrest following a student prank at Whittier College, despite his assertion on his application form that he had never been arrested.8 The FBI investigated as well Nixon’s claim to have worked during vacations as Richfield Oil’s “manager” of the service station next to his father’s store. A Richfield representative said Nixon had only “done odd jobs for him from time to time.” Not for the last time Nixon had been caught bending the truth.9

  In 1947, when Nixon arrived in Washington, Hoover had access to all file material concerning the incoming representative, for his staff routinely provided him with detailed briefs on all new congressmen. Apparently nothing Hoover learned then about Nixon, however, troubled him. During Hoover’s appearance before HUAC that year, when Nixon asked the director several questions, an attorney accompanying Hoover leaned across to offer him a piece of information: Nixon, he said, had used dirty tricks to beat Voorhis in the recent election. “I know all about that,” Hoover replied, “but it looks to me as if he’s going to be a good man for us.”

  Nixon met with Hoover that year, and—after some initi
al misunderstandings10—a long collaborative relationship began. Five years later, when Nixon ran for vice president, the supposedly apolitical Hoover hosted a fund-raiser for him. They were seen together at the races and at baseball games. Hoover also secretly supplied Nixon with negative intelligence about other politicians. After the 1960 election had swept Nixon into the wilderness, Hoover was a sympathetic houseguest.

  Like many others, Nixon feared what compromising information the director might have about him—so much so that when he was president and Hoover had become senile, he did not dare fire him. On balance, though, the FBI connection was a huge long-term asset. “Hoover,” Nixon said ruefully after the director had died and Watergate was dragging him down to disgrace, “was my crony.”

  In 1948 that crony had a motive to encourage the congressman’s pursuit of Alger Hiss. Hoover was frustrated by what he saw as the Truman administration’s failure to fight domestic communism, and he wanted vindication for the FBI’s work against subversives. Like Dulles, he was committed to seeing President Truman defeated in the presidential election.

  Truman of course surprised everyone by beating Thomas Dewey in November. Years later Truman would insist he knew what the Hiss case had really been about. “What they were trying to do, all those birds,” he said, “they were trying to get the Democrats. They were trying to get me out of the White House, and they were willing to go to any lengths to do it. . . . They did do just about anything they could think of, all that witch-hunting. . . . The Constitution has never been in such danger. . . .”

  Hoover’s assistance to Nixon on the Hiss case proved crucial. Although rumors about Hiss had been circulating since 1939,11 the FBI had taken action only in 1941, when his name appeared on a list of alleged Communists. The bureau began intercepting his mail that year. A few months later Chambers named Hiss as a Communist during an interview with FBI agents.

  By 1945 the flow of allegations had increased. A Soviet defector in Canada, a code clerk, described a spy within the State Department in terms that pointed directly to Hiss. Hiss was also implicated by a former Communist courier, Elizabeth Bentley, and Chambers told a State Department security officer that Hiss had been one of the “top leaders of the underground.” Hiss had been a junior figure in the department when the rumors started, but by war’s end he had risen to become a close aide to the secretary of state, an adviser to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill, and secretary-general of the founding convention of the United Nations. Claims that such a highly placed figure was a Communist had to be taken seriously.

  In late 1945 the FBI had begun tailing Hiss wherever he went, as well as tapping his phone and resuming interception of his mail. Hiss was ultimately eased out of the State Department, but not fast enough for Hoover. In late 1946 the FBI director began orchestrating a series of leaks to friends of the FBI, key press contacts, and members of Congress—among them Richard Nixon.

  Nixon was to claim later that the first he heard of Hiss was in August 1948, when Whittaker Chambers testified before the Un-American Activities Committee. “The FBI,” he insisted, “played no role whatever in the Hiss case. . . .”

  The facts suggest otherwise. Within a month of taking office, Nixon had accompanied a fellow congressman to a meeting with Father John Cronin, a Catholic priest who had informed on Communists while working with labor unions during the war. The bureau now used him as a conduit for deliberate leaks. In a report prepared for the Catholic hierarchy, drawing on what the FBI had told him, Cronin had named Hiss as the most influential Communist in the State Department. He later recalled having shown Nixon that report and having discussed Hiss with him. “Nixon,” Cronin claimed, “was playing with a stacked deck in the Hiss case.”12

  Once the HUAC probe of Hiss got under way, Cronin said, “the really hard-core material was given to me—uh, informally . . . by my friends of the FBI.” One such friend, Agent Ed Hummer, supplied daily reports of progress in the ongoing bureau investigation. Hummer, Cronin said, would “tell me what they had turned up. . . . I told Dick, who then knew just where to look for things and what he would find.” By the time the HUAC probe became serious, Nixon was on the phone late at night with one of Hoover’s top aides, Louis Nichols, and meeting in his hotel room with former FBI agents.

  One of HUAC’s key investigators on the Hiss case was a former FBI agent, Lou Russell, who by one account had been the initial investigator of the committee’s interest in Whittaker Chambers. Russell spent an enormous amount of time with Nixon, traveled with him, and stayed in touch by telephone outside working hours; he reported Nixon’s thinking back to Hoover. Russell was a Democrat, but one said to have used the word “liberal” as though it were synonymous with “radical.” First and foremost, though, he was an operator, one who would crop up again in the unfolding story of Nixon’s life. Two decades later, he would be a mystery figure at the scene of the Watergate burglary.

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  They’re trying to prove . . . my entire career was built on a fraud.

  —Richard Nixon in 1992, on a report that Soviet archives showed Alger Hiss to have been innocent

  “I am a graduate of Harvard Law School,” said the debonair witness. Then, after a pause, he asked, “And I believe yours is Whittier?” Thus did Alger Hiss, at their first Un-American Activities Committee encounter, slyly trigger Richard Nixon’s neurosis about the East Coast elite. “It absolutely ripped Nixon apart,” remembered HUAC’s chief investigator Robert Stripling. “I realized from that moment on that he could not stand Hiss.”

  Hiss himself took a dispassionate view of the man who effectively destroyed his career and put him in jail. “Nixon,” he said years later, “I always regarded as an opportunistic politician. . . . And I knew enough about politicians to know what political ambitions sometimes lead people to do.”

  Stripling too questioned Nixon’s motives. “Nixon had his hat set for Hiss,” he said. “. . . It was a personal thing. He was no more concerned about whether Hiss was [a Communist] than a billy goat.” Having at first had the impression Nixon was even tempered, Stripling soon saw an immoderate side. “I was surprised one day, sitting in his office. . . . He said to me, ‘Hiss, that son of a bitch is lying . . . lying, lying, lying!” Recalling how Nixon pounded the table during this outburst, Stripling said it was “more than, you know, just somebody saying, ‘I don’t believe this guy.’ He was just outraged. Of course, I knew nothing about him being briefed. . . .”

  Nixon assiduously cultivated Whittaker Chambers early in the investigation, making repeated trips to Chambers’s home in the Maryland countryside. Hiss, concerned by a news story describing one of the visits, questioned Nixon about it at a HUAC executive session. When he made a minor error, asking Nixon if it was true that he had just spent the weekend at Chambers’s farm in New Jersey—as distinct from Maryland—Nixon denied it.

  Suspicious, he explained, of Hiss’s initial denials that he even knew Chambers, Nixon turned detective, searching for compelling evidence that the two men had indeed been associates. Chambers knew myriad details about Hiss and his family life—more, surely, one might add today, than could have been proved to him by FBI agents armed with the fruits of the bureau’s surveillance of Hiss. Eventually, at a confrontation with Chambers orchestrated by Nixon and Lou Russell, Hiss conceded that he had known Chambers, albeit under another name.1

  Hiss claimed that he had been friendly with Chambers for only a brief period in 1935. Yet he had provided Chambers and his wife with accommodations—first in his own home and then in a furnished apartment—and had given him a used car as a present. Evidence in a real estate agent’s files also indicated that in 1936 and 1937 both men had negotiated to buy the same remote farmhouse, a fact that seemed beyond coincidence.

  Most reasonable people would conclude from the accumulated evidence2 that Hiss did know Chambers, and for longer than he admitted, and that he did associate with leftists and Communists before the
war. There was no crime in that. What, then, was Hiss hiding? That his relationship with Chambers was one of spy working with fellow spy? Or was it something less serious, some embarrassing personal secret?

  Twenty-five years after the Hiss affair, in a converation with a senior congressman aboard the presidential yacht, Nixon would reveal what he called “the true story of the Hiss case”—namely, that Chambers and Hiss had been “queers.” He repeated the allegation to others.

  Chambers, who was married with children, admitted to numerous homosexual encounters. Once, according to the other man involved, he tried to force himself on a colleague in their rooming house. His homosexuality, Chambers told the FBI, was his darkest secret, and his active homosexual phase had corresponded precisely with the period in which he knew the Hisses. According to one report received by the FBI, he had had relations with Hiss’s stepson, Timothy, then in early adolescence.3 The last time he had seen Hiss, Chambers told Nixon, was an evening when Timothy “wanted him to stay overnight.” Mrs. Hiss objected, and he had left.

  Chambers denied having had any sexual involvement with Alger Hiss but told Nixon that Hiss had been his “closest friend.” He revealed an attachment to things linked to Hiss that bordered on fetishism, keeping—years after their association ended—numerous items that once belonged to the Hisses, including a wing chair, a table, and a broken love seat. More than a decade later he produced a carefully folded piece of cloth, explaining that it was the fabric that once had covered the wing chair. He had removed it, had it dry-cleaned, then carefully preserved it.

  Hiss suggested that Chambers had framed him because of unrequited sexual passion. His accuser had never made any homosexual advances, he said, but “His attitude to me, and his relations, were strange . . . he had a hostility to the point of jealousy about my wife. . . . My guess is that he had some obscure kind of love attachment . . . about me.” Perhaps there was an emotional foundation to Chambers’s attitude toward Hiss, and perhaps it did turn to hatred; but if so, it does nothing to explain the hard evidence that put Hiss in jail: Chambers’s hoard of documents and microfilm.