RN

by Richard Nixon

  THE HISS CASE

  Just before the House’s summer recess in 1948, the Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, had heard testimony from Elizabeth Bentley, a courier for a Communist spy ring in Washington during the war. Looking for witnesses to corroborate her testimony, Robert Stripling, the committee’s highly intelligent and dynamic young chief investigator, suggested that we subpoena a man who had been identified as a Communist functionary in the 1930s but who had left the party and was now a professionally well-respected and well-paid senior editor of Time magazine. That man was Whittaker Chambers.

  When I first saw Chambers on the morning of August 3, just before he testified in public session, I could hardly believe this man was our witness. Whittaker Chambers was one of the most disheveled-looking persons I had ever seen. Everything about him seemed wrinkled and un-pressed.

  He began his testimony with the story of how, as a disaffected intellectual, he became a Communist in 1924. He told of his growing disillusion with Stalinism, and of his eventual break with the party in the late 1930s. Like many former Communists, Chambers had undergone a religious conversion. Now he feared and hated Communism with an almost mystical fervor. He said that he had been part of a Communist group whose primary aim was to infiltrate the government. Among the members of this group, he said, was Alger Hiss. He described their last meeting, in 1938, when Hiss had tearfully refused to join Chambers in leaving the Communist Party.

  A ripple of surprise went through the room, because Hiss, who had not been mentioned in Miss Bentley’s testimony, was a well-known and highly respected figure in New York and Washington. He had made a brilliant record at Harvard Law School and then served as a secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. After a few years with private law firms in Boston and New York, Hiss had returned to Washington in 1933; like so many others he was drawn by the excitement and opportunities of the New Deal. He occupied a number of important government posts, ultimately becoming assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State and serving as one of President Roosevelt’s advisers at the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill. Hiss was acknowledged as one of the primary architects of the United Nations; he served as Secretary-General of the San Francisco Conference, at which the UN charter was drafted, and was then an adviser to the American delegation at the first General Assembly meeting in London. In 1947 he left the State Department to become president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. John Foster Dulles, chairman of the Endowment’s board of directors, was among those who had recommended and endorsed his selection.

  Now here was Whittaker Chambers testifying that he had known Alger Hiss as a member of the Communist Party underground.

  It may seem surprising in light of later events that Chambers’s testimony that morning did not cause more of a stir. This was partly because his story was totally unexpected. Also, Chambers was such an unprepossessing figure that his story was not taken as seriously as it would have been had he been more forceful and impressive.

  The next morning we received a telegram from Hiss asking to appear before us in order to deny Chambers’s charge. We invited him to appear the next day.

  As Alger Hiss stood to be sworn in on the morning of August 5, the difference between him and Chambers could not have been more striking. Hiss was tall, elegant, handsome, and perfectly poised as he categorically denied Chambers’s charge. In a firm voice he said, “I am here at my own request to deny unqualifiedly various statements about me which were made before this committee by one Whittaker Chambers the day before yesterday.” He lowered his voice for dramatic emphasis when he stated: “I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party. I do not and never have adhered to the tenets of the Communist Party. I am not and never have been a member of any Communist front organization. I have never followed the Communist Party line, directly or indirectly.”

  He denied everything Chambers had said and added that he did not even know anyone named Chambers and, as far as he could remember, never had. When Mundt, as acting chairman, pointed out that Chambers had testified under oath when he said that he knew him, Hiss boldly rejoined, “I do know that he said that. I also know that I am testifying under those same laws to the contrary.”

  When Hiss finished his testimony people surged around him, to shake his hand and congratulate him on his performance, and to commiserate with him on the damage the committee had done him.

  That same morning, President Truman held an informal press conference in the Oval Office. One of the reporters asked about our hearings. “Mr. President,” he said, “do you think that the Capitol Hill spy scare is a ‘red herring’ to divert public attention from inflation?” After agreeing with the reporter’s “red herring” characterization, Truman read a prepared statement that the hearings were doing “irreparable harm to certain people, seriously impairing the morale of federal employees, and undermining public confidence in the government.”

  While Truman’s contemptuous dismissal of our hearings as a “red herring” had the effect of throwing his political weight against the investigation, he wielded still more effective powers. In his statement he reaffirmed his earlier order that all administrative agencies of the government refuse to turn over to a congressional committee information relating to the loyalty of any government employee.

  Truman had honed his political skills in the rough and scandal-tainted Kansas City Democratic machine, and he never shied away from using any weapon available. Without question his goal throughout the Hiss case was to obstruct our efforts to uncover the facts.

  The attack by the President, the impact of his executive directive, and Hiss’s highly effective testimony combined to throw the committee into a panic by the time we met again in executive session that afternoon. The audience in the hearing room and the press seemed to have been completely convinced by Hiss, and we knew that we were in for a rough time for allowing Chambers to testify without having first verified his story. No one on the committee wanted to undergo such an assault from the President and the press right before the election. One of the members summed up the general opinion when he said, “We’re ruined.” I was the only member of the committee who argued in favor of holding our ground and pursuing the case further. Stripling, whose judgment was highly respected by all the members, strongly supported my position.

  My reasoning was pragmatic. I felt that as far as the reputation of the committee was concerned, Chambers’s testimony had already done its damage. Our critics would not be silenced just because we decided to drop the case, and I argued that we had more to gain than we had left to lose by seeing it through. I pointed out that the formulation of Chambers’s charges and Hiss’s response provided us with a unique angle to pursue. In most cases we were in the almost impossible position of having to prove whether or not an individual had actually been a Communist. This time, however, because of Hiss’s categorical denials, we did not have to establish anything more complicated than whether the two men had known each other. I suggested that we examine Chambers again to see if he could substantiate his story. If he could, the committee would be vindicated; if he could not, we might then find out what bizarre or sinister motives had led him to lie about Hiss and thus at least be able to make a better defense for our mistake.

  I already had some doubts about Hiss because for all the vehemence of his denials, he never actually said unequivocally that he did not know Chambers. There was always some qualifier. When Mundt described Chambers as a man “whom you say you have never seen,” Hiss had interrupted and said, “As far as I know, I have never seen him.”

  The British sometimes say that someone is “too clever by half.” That was my impression of Hiss: he was too suave, too smooth, and too self-confident to be an entirely trustworthy witness.

  Stripling and I were finally able to convince the committee of the uncomfortable truth that we had indeed little left to lose, and it was decided that John McDowell, a thoughtfu
l Republican from Pennsylvania, Eddie Hébert, a Louisiana Democrat who had been a newspaper reporter before entering politics, and I would take a crack at testing Chambers’s story. We questioned him on August 7, a quiet Saturday morning, in a room in the deserted Federal Court House on Foley Square in lower Manhattan. I had made a long list of the kinds of things that a man would be likely to know and remember about a friend.

  I began by giving him a chance to pull back, gently asking if we had correctly understood him to say that Hiss was a Communist.

  “Could this have possibly been an intellectual study group?” I asked.

  “It was in no wise an intellectual study group,” Chambers firmly replied. “Its primary function was to infiltrate the government in the interest of the Communist Party.”

  Chambers had a wealth of detailed and intimate information about Hiss; virtually all of it turned out to be correct. He told us that in private Hiss called his wife Dilly or Pross and she called him Hilly; he told us about the cocker spaniel they had boarded in a kennel on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington when they took their summer holidays on the Eastern Shore in Maryland; he mentioned Hiss’s simple tastes in food. He described Mrs. Hiss as a short, highly nervous woman who had a habit of blushing a fiery red when she became excited. He told us about the location and layout of the three houses and apartments Hiss had lived in during the years that he had known him, and described the several occasions on which he had stayed overnight in them.

  Chambers told us that one of Hiss’s hobbies was ornithology, and that he could still remember Hiss’s excitement when he came home one morning after having seen a prothonotary warbler, a rare species.

  After over two hours of exhaustive examination, I asked Chambers if he would be willing to take a lie detector test. Without hesitation, he said that he would. “You have that much confidence?” I asked. “I am telling the truth,” he calmly replied.

  If there turned out to be substance to Chambers’s charges, Truman would be terribly embarrassed, and ordinarily this possibility alone might have spurred the Republicans on in an election year. But special factors in the Hiss case favored a cautious approach. Governor Thomas Dewey of New York was the Republican nominee for President. John Foster Dulles, one of those who had recommended Hiss for his job as president of the Carnegie Endowment, was Dewey’s chief foreign policy adviser and was expected to be Secretary of State in a Dewey administration. The Hiss case, with its disturbing questions about “softness on communism,” might become a two-edged sword that could hurt Dewey as much as Truman. I was aware that the Dewey campaign organization would undoubtedly be grateful if I decided to go along with the rest of the committee and let the case pass into a pre-election limbo.

  On the basis of the testimony, I felt strongly that Hiss was lying. But before the case went any further, I wanted to follow up on a number of points that I did not think had been fully covered even in our marathon session. So I decided to visit Chambers at his farm in Westminster, Maryland, where I met Esther Chambers for the first time. She was a strikingly dark woman, who said very little but looked deeply sad and worried.

  Once again, the richness and fullness of the detail of Chambers’s memory were overwhelming. I told him point-blank that many people were charging that he had some hidden grudge or motive for what he was doing to Hiss. He was silent for a long time and then said: “Certainly I wouldn’t have a motive which would involve destroying my own career.” He said that privacy was almost an obsession with him and that appearing in public was one of the most painful things he had ever done in his life.

  I happened to mention that I was a Quaker, and he said that Mrs. Hiss had been a Quaker when he knew her and that since then he had become a Quaker himself. He snapped his fingers and said, “That reminds me of something. Priscilla often used the plain speech in talking to Alger at home.” From my own family, I knew how unlikely it would be for anyone but a close friend to know such an intimate detail. Of course, it was still possible that he could have learned it from someone, but the way he blurted it out convinced me that he was telling the truth.

  Charles Kersten, an expert on Communist activities, urged that I discuss my findings with John Foster Dulles. On August 11, I called the Dewey campaign headquarters at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York and told Dulles that I thought he should look at Chambers’s testimony before he made any kind of public statement on the case. That afternoon Kersten and I took the train up to New York to see him.

  Kersten and I sat on a sofa in Dulles’s suite while Foster and his brother, Allen, read through the transcripts of the three hearings. After they both had finished, Foster Dulles stood and paced back and forth across the room. “There’s no question about it,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.” Allen Dulles agreed, and both felt that the case should be brought into the open by a public confrontation between the two men as soon as possible. Foster did not for a moment flinch from the potential embarrassment to himself as one of Hiss’s sponsors for the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment. I told them I would keep them informed of any new developments.

  After visiting Chambers’s farm, I had called Bert Andrews, the Pulitzer Prize-winning head of the New York Herald Tribune’s Washington bureau. I knew that Andrews was an outspoken critic of the committee; he had recently written a book, Washington Witch Hunt, which was highly critical of the administration’s loyalty program. I told Andrews that I believed Chambers was telling the truth, but that I wanted to put his story to every possible test. He agreed to go up with me and question Chambers thoroughly.

  Andrews asked Chambers tough questions and bore down hard about the rumors that had begun to sweep Washington that he was an alcoholic and that he had a history of mental illness and institutional confinement. Chambers was unfazed and pointed out that rumors of this sort were typical of Communist smear campaigns.

  By the time we got back to Washington, Andrews was more excited than I. He was convinced that Chambers was telling the truth, and he was now worried that Hiss would get off because of the careless methods and inefficient staff work that he felt had characterized committee hearings in the past. So was I.

  Because of Truman’s executive order we were not able to get any direct help from J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI. However, we had some informal contacts with a lower-level agent that proved helpful in our investigations.

  When we called Hiss back before an executive session on August 16 he was in a very different temper than during our first encounter.

  I told him that there were substantial areas of difference between his testimony and Chambers’s, and that we wanted to give him an opportunity to explain these in executive session before we arranged a public confrontation. Hiss straightened his back and said, “I have been angered and hurt by the attitude you have been taking today that you have a conflict of testimony between two witnesses—one of whom is a confessed former Communist and the other is me—and that you simply have two witnesses saying contradictory things as between whom you find it most difficult to decide on credibility. I do not wish to make it easier for anyone who, for whatever motive I cannot understand, is apparently endeavoring to destroy me. I should not be asked to give details which somehow he may hear and then may be able to use as if he knew them before.”

  Then he introduced what was to become the main theme of his subsequent testimony: the idea that the details of the case were not important. He said, “The issue is not whether this man knew me and I don’t remember him. The issue is whether he had a particular conversation that he has said he had with me, and which I have denied, and whether I am a member of the Communist Party or ever was, which he has said and which I have denied.”

  This was a crucial point. I had persuaded the committee to continue the hearings on precisely the ground that the details of the case were important because only the details could prove whether Hiss had lied when he said he did not know Chambers. His denial of even knowing Chambers was the primary factor that had
discredited Chambers and the committee as well. If Hiss could now shift the hearings to the question of whether or not we could prove he was a Communist, we were finished.

  I said that Chambers had been told that every answer he gave would be subject to the laws of perjury. Details concerning his alleged relationship with Hiss could be confirmed by third parties. That, I said, was the purpose of these questions.

  Hiss asked if he could say something for the record. “Certainly,” I replied.

  With elaborate deliberation, he wrote something on the pad of paper in front of him. He said that he had written the name of a man he had known in the mid-1930s and who, he now remembered, had in fact done some of the things that Chambers claimed to have done. This man had spent several days in Hiss’s house, sublet his apartment, borrowed money from him, and taken his car. But, Hiss said, he was reluctant to reveal the name directly because it might be leaked back to Chambers, who could then incorporate it into his perjurious tale.

  The questioning resumed and once again Hiss quibbled about answering the questions Stripling and I asked him about the places he had lived on the grounds that his answers might get back to Chambers and be used against him. This coy reticence proved too much for the crusty Hébert. He said bluntly to Hiss, “Either you or Mr. Chambers is lying.” Hiss coolly replied, “That is certainly true.” Hébert came back, “And whichever one of you is lying is the greatest actor that America has ever produced.”