Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  All of this information, I realized, he might have obtained by studying Hiss’s life without actually knowing him. But some of the answers had a personal ring of truth about them, beyond the bare facts themselves.3

  For instance, when I asked him how the Hiss family lived and about the kind of meals they served, he replied, “I think you get here into something else. Hiss is a man of great simplicity and a great gentleness and sweetness of character, and they lived with extreme simplicity. I had the impression that the furniture in that house [on Twenty-eighth Street in Washington] was kind of pulled together from here or there. Maybe they got it from their mother or something like that, nothing lavish about it whatsoever, quite simple. Their food was in the same pattern, and they cared nothing about food. It was not a primary interest in their lives.”

  I got a similar impression when I asked him, “Did he have any hobbies?”

  “Yes, he did. They both had the same hobby—amateur ornithologists, bird observers. They used to get up early in the morning and go to Glen Echo out the canal, to observe birds. I recall once they saw, to their great excitement, a prothonotary warbler.”

  John McDowell, a bird fancier himself, interrupted to comment, “A very rare specimen.” And Chambers said, “I never saw one. I am also fond of birds.”

  But while testimony like this was very convincing, some of the things Chambers told us that day were so close to unbelievable that they raised a doubt in our minds about all the rest.

  For example, I asked him, “Did they have a car?”

  “Yes, they did,” Chambers replied. He described a 1929 Ford roadster, black and dilapidated, which had windshield wipers that had to be worked by hand. Then he told what seemed to be an unlikely story of how Alger Hiss bought another car in 1936 and wanted to give the old Ford to the Communist Party. “It was against all the rules of the underground organization—and I think this investigation has proved how right the Communists are in such matters. But Hiss insisted. Much against Peters’ [J. Peters was at that time the head of the Communist underground in the United States] better judgment, he finally got us to permit him to do this thing,” Chambers said.

  Hiss turned the car over to a Communist in a Washington service station and it was later transferred to another Party member. “I should think the records of that transfer would be traceable,” Chambers concluded.

  As he came to the end of his testimony, I asked, “Would you be willing to submit to a lie detector on this testimony?”

  “Yes, if necessary,” he answered, without hesitation.

  “You have that much confidence?”

  “I am telling the truth,” he said quietly.

  While listening to Chambers testify that Saturday afternoon, I felt sure that he was telling the truth. But on the train ride back to Washington, some of my doubts began to return.

  Could Chambers, by making a careful study of Hiss’s life, have concocted the whole story for the purpose of destroying Hiss—for some motive we did not know?

  It was difficult back in 1948, before the scope of the Communist underground movement had become generally known, to believe a man like Chambers over a man like Hiss. Consider Chambers’ background. He had been a City Editor of the Daily Worker, written for the New Masses, and served as a paid functionary of the Communist Party underground, then had repudiated the Party, and for months had slept with a gun under his pillow for fear of assassination. Could such a man be believed? Wasn’t it more plausible to conclude that he was bent on destroying an innocent man?

  Hiss, on the other hand, had come from a fine family, had made an outstanding record at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, had been honored by being selected for the staff of a great justice of the Supreme Court, had served as Executive Secretary to the big international monetary conference at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944, had accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta, and had held a key post at the conference establishing the United Nations at San Francisco. Was it possible that a man with this background could have been a Communist whose allegiance was to the Soviet Union, even during the period when the Communists and Nazis had been allies, in 1939–41?

  The Committee could not go off half-cocked again, particularly with such great stakes involved. We had a grave responsibility to be sure of our facts before any more charges were aired in public.

  In the next nine days, from August 8 to August 16, the Committee staff under Stripling’s direction worked round the clock in a search for documentary or other proof, if it existed, of Chambers’ story. They questioned real estate agents for leases pertaining to the three houses in which Chambers said Hiss lived from 1935 to 1937. They found the dog kennel in Georgetown where the Hisses had left their cocker spaniel when they went on vacation. They searched for anyone who might possibly have seen the two men together in the neighborhoods where Hiss had lived. And in detail after detail, where the Chambers story could be checked with third parties, it proved to be true. But they were unsuccessful in their search for one vitally important piece of documentation: they could not find the Motor Vehicle records to substantiate Chambers’ strange story about Hiss’s giving his car to a Communist Party functionary.

  In this same period, I tried to resolve some of my own doubts by reading and rereading Chambers’ testimony and by seeking counsel from men of varying views whose opinions I respected. The question I asked over and over again was whether Chambers’ testimony constituted a prima facie case against Hiss, justifying a further pursuit of the investigation. Or should I agree with the Committee’s original inclination after hearing Hiss testify that we turn the case over to the Justice Department?

  I was to learn during this period a lesson about the nature of crisis which would serve me for years to come.

  Making the decision to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself. One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or to fly from it. It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers. A leader is one who has the emotional, mental, and physical strength to withstand the pressures and tensions created by necessary doubts and then, at the critical moment, to make a choice and to act decisively. The men who fail are those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee to avoid meeting the problem at all.

  On the other hand, if one is to act and to lead responsibly he must necessarily go through this period of soul-searching and testing of alternate courses of action. Otherwise he shoots from the hip, misses the target, and loses the battle through sheer recklessness.

  Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between Communism and freedom, there are gray areas. But there are intrinsic principles which must be adhered to. Anyone who shirks this inner debate in waging this struggle acts irresponsibly. It is this soul-searching and testing which ultimately gives a man the confidence, calmness, and toughness with which to act decisively.

  • • •

  In the period between August 7 and August 16, when Hiss was to testify again, I not only insisted that the Committee staff, by the most intensive possible investigation, try to establish the truth or falsity of Chambers’ testimony by corroborative evidence but, in addition, I tried to check the objectivity of my own judgment against the opinions of men whom I respected.

  I asked Bert Andrews, chief Washington correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, to come to my office. I felt he would be predisposed to believe Hiss rather than Chambers. He had recently won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles attacking the fairness of the State Department’s loyalty program. Along with James Reston of the New York Times, he had recommended Hiss to Dulles for the Carnegie post. From my brief acquaintance with Andrews and from his reputation among his colleagues in the press corps, I was convinced he would be objective. He had the
rare quality which distinguishes a great reporter from just a good one—he never allowed his prejudices or emotions to get in the way in his search for and reporting of the truth. He once told me, “An editor has the right to write from his heart. But a reporter must never allow his heart to override what his head tells him are the facts. The trouble with too many reporters who cover the State Department, for example, is that they forget that their job is to write about the Secretary of State and they proceed to write as if they were the Secretary of State.”

  I asked Andrews to read the testimony, with the understanding that he could write nothing about it until it was released for publication to all papers. When he finished his reading, he turned to me and said, “I wouldn’t have believed it, after hearing Hiss the other day. But there’s no doubt about it. Chambers knew Hiss.”

  The next day I asked William P. Rogers, who was then chief counsel for the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee investigating the Bentley charges, to read the testimony. Rogers, who was later to become Attorney General, had made a brilliant record as one of Tom Dewey’s young prosecutors in New York, and I felt that he would be a good judge of Chambers’ credibility. He reached the same conclusion as Andrews.

  That night I had dinner with Congressman Charles J. Kersten, Republican of Wisconsin, with whom I served as a member of the Labor Committee and who was a keen analyst of Communist tactics and strategy. After Kersten read the testimony he made a suggestion which was not only to have a great bearing on my own conduct of this case but on the course of my career in the years ahead. He told me he had heard that Hiss was trying to get John Foster Dulles and other members of the Carnegie board to make statements in his behalf. He suggested that I should give Dulles the opportunity to read the testimony.

  The following morning, August 11, I telephoned Dulles and he said he would be willing to see me that night at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where he was working on the Dewey presidential campaign. Kersten and I took the train to New York that afternoon and met Dulles in his hotel suite. His brother Allen, who later was to become head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was also there. Both men read the testimony. When they had finished, Foster Dulles paced the floor, his hands crossed behind him. It was a characteristic I was to see many times in the years ahead when we discussed important issues. He stopped finally and said, “There’s no question about it. It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.” Allen Dulles reached the same conclusion.

  I asked Foster Dulles whether he thought I was justified in going ahead with the investigation. He replied without hesitation, “In view of the facts Chambers has testified to, you’d be derelict in your duty as a Congressman if you did not see the case through to a conclusion.”

  I was so wrapped up with the problems of making my own decision that I did not fully realize at the time the political courage and integrity Dulles demonstrated by this statement. He was Dewey’s chief foreign policy adviser in the campaign. If and when Dewey was elected President, which most people thought was pretty certain at that time, it was generally assumed that Foster Dulles would be named Secretary of State. As Chairman of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment he had approved the appointment of Hiss to his present position. It would be acutely embarrassing to him if Hiss should be discredited—or worse, proved to be a Communist. He could have suggested that I delay the proceedings until after the election. But both Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, in this instance and in every case in which I was to work with either of them during my years as Vice President, put the cause of justice and the national interest above any personal or political considerations.

  Still I was not satisfied. I decided to see Chambers again, this time alone and informally, not so much to get more information from him as to gain a more intimate impression of what kind of man he really was. I thought that if I could talk to him alone, I would be better able to sense whether or not he was telling the truth. To avoid any publicity, I made the two-hour trip from Washington to his farm by car. We sat on some dilapidated rocking chairs on his front porch overlooking the rolling Maryland countryside. It was the first of many long and rewarding conversations I was to have with him during the period of the Hiss case, and through the years until his death in 1961. Like most men of quality, he made a deeper impression personally than he did in public. Within minutes, the caricature drawn by the rumormongers of the drunkard, the unstable and unsavory character, faded away. Here was a man of extraordinary intelligence, speaking from great depth of understanding; a sensitive, shy man who had turned from complete dedication to Communism to a new religious faith and a kind of fatalism about the future. One thing that especially impressed me was his almost absolute passion for personal privacy. He seemed particularly to want to spare his children any embarrassment from what he had hoped was a closed chapter in his life. His wife, Esther, was exactly like him in this respect.

  Why then was he willing to sacrifice this privacy and risk his own financial security by testifying against Hiss and by testifying as he had before our Committee? I told him bluntly that many of those who questioned his credibility believed he must have some personal motive for doing what he had to Hiss.

  Chambers replied, “Certainly I wouldn’t have a motive which would involve destroying my own career.” He had come forward out of necessity, he said, as a kind of duty to warn his country of the scope, strength, and danger of the Communist conspiracy in the United States. It would be a great pity if the nation continued to look upon this case as simply a clash of personalities between Hiss and himself. Much more was at stake than what happened to either of them as individuals. Turning to me, he said with great feeling, “This is what you must get the country to realize.”

  The visit was not too productive in obtaining any additional information about his relationship with Hiss. But one incident occurred to confirm my conviction that when he spoke of Hiss, he was talking about someone he knew rather than someone whose life he had studied. I happened to mention the fact that I was a member of the Society of Friends. He said that he and his family attended the Friends’ meeting in Westminster. He recalled that Mrs. Hiss, at the time he knew her, also had been a Friend.

  Then his eyes lit up, he snapped his fingers, and he said, “That reminds me of something. Priscilla often used the plain speech in talking to Alger at home.”

  I knew from personal experience that my mother never used the plain speech in public but did use it in talking with her sisters and her mother in the privacy of our home. Again I recognized that someone else who knew Priscilla Hiss could have informed Chambers of this habit of hers. But the way he told me about it, rather than what he said, again gave me an intuitive feeling that he was speaking from firsthand rather than second-hand knowledge.

  Two days later I asked Bert Andrews to drive with me to Chambers’ farm so that I could get his impression as well. Andrews grilled him as only a Washington newspaperman can, and Chambers met the test to Andrews’ complete satisfaction. On this visit another small but somewhat significant item came up which seemed to corroborate Chambers’ story. I asked him if he had anything in the house which Hiss might have given him during the time that he knew him. Chambers brought out a volume of Audubon prints which he said Hiss had given him one Christmas. As we thumbed through it, he pointed to a drawing of a hooded warbler and said, “As I recall, the Hisses had this in the dining room of one of the houses they lived in.”

  As a final test, two days before Hiss was to appear on August 16, I asked Bob Stripling to drive to Westminster with me. Stripling had almost a sixth sense in being able to distinguish the professional “Redbaiters” from those who were honestly trying to help the Committee in its work of exposing the Communist conspiracy. He, too, had been convinced by this time that Chambers knew Hiss. But as we drove back to Washington, he made a most perceptive observation: “I don’t think Chambers has yet told us the whole story. He is holding something back. He is trying to protect somebody.”

  • • �
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  When our Sub-committee met again in executive session in Washington on August 16, we found a very different Alger Hiss from the confident, poised witness who had appeared before us in public session just ten days before. Then he had succeeded in giving the impression of being completely honest and forthright—trying his best to enlighten some clumsy Congressmen who had either been taken in by a vicious maniac or who were fooled in a terrible case of mistaken identity.

  Now he was twisting, turning, evading, and changing his story to fit the evidence he knew we had. Despite our efforts to keep Chambers’ testimony of August 7 secret, Hiss had learned that Chambers had been able to give us intimate details of their association together.

  After a few preliminary questions, I had the Committee clerk show Hiss two pictures of Chambers. Then I asked him: “After looking at those pictures, I ask you if you can remember that person, either as Whittaker Chambers or as Carl or as any other individual you have met.”

  Ten days before, he had given everyone at the public hearing the distinct impression that the face was completely unfamiliar to him. Now Hiss was to make the first of several subtle but significent changes in his story. He said: “In the public session when I was shown another photograph of Mr. Whittaker Chambers, I testified that I could not swear that I had never seen the man whose picture was shown me. Actually the face has a certain familiarity—I cannot recall any person with distinctness and definiteness whose picture this is, but it is not completely unfamiliar.”

  I continued to question him, trying to widen this first tiny crack in his claim that he did not know Chambers. He fought stubbornly and skillfully every inch of the way and his answers became increasingly lengthy and evasive.

  He finally began to argue with the Committee. “I have been angered and hurt,” he said to me, “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.”