In my latest reading of Nixon: The Education of a Politician, Stephen Ambrose talked about the Alger Hiss case. I did not finish Ambrose's discussion of it, but I'll comment on what I did read.
Let me start this post by giving you a rough summary of the Alger Hiss case. In the 1940's, ex-Communist
(and senior editor of Time)
Whittaker Chambers accused distinguished former government official
Alger Hiss of being a Communist, and Chambers alleged that Hiss had
given him documents to relay to the Soviet Union. Richard Nixon, a
Republican Congressman who was serving on the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (HUAC), believed that Hiss was lying when Hiss
equivocated about knowing Chambers. In the course of the case, many
came to believe that Hiss indeed did know Chambers, since Chambers was
aware of certain details about Hiss' life, plus Hiss eventually admitted
that he knew Chambers under a different name. Another significant
detail in the case was a Woodstock typewriter, which, according to
Chambers, Hiss' wife had used in copying government documents that were
given to Chambers. Chambers eventually hid those documents (or, I
think, microfilms of the documents) in a pumpkin on his farm. The
typewriter was significant because typewriters were believed to be like
fingerprints, and so there was optimism that finding Hiss' Woodstock
typewriter that supposedly copied the documents in Chambers' possession
would demonstrate that Hiss engaged in espionage. Hiss was found guilty
of perjury, but not for espionage due to the statute of limitations
running out.
I liked how Ambrose opened his chapter on the Hiss
case. Ambrose states on page 166: "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' typewriter, or his car, or his [Communist Party] involvement." In
my January 15, 2013 post about the Hiss case when I was blogging
through Irwin Gellman's The Contender, I mentioned how some of Hiss' defenders have sought to explain the typewriter.
Since I wrote that post, I read pieces of the script for Oliver Stone's Nixon,
and the script puts the following narration of the Hiss case in the
mouth of a reporter: "Nixon became one of the leading lights of the
notorious House Un American Activities Committee, questioning labor
leaders, Spanish Civil War veterans, Hollywood celebrities...but it was
the Alger Hiss case that made Nixon a household name[.] One of the
architects of the United Nations, intimate with FDR and Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Alger Hiss was a darling of the liberals[.] But Whittaker
Chambers, a former freelance journalist, said he was a Communist[.] Hiss
claimed he was being set up by Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to discredit
the New Deal's policies. The case came down to an Underwood typewriter,
and a roll of film hidden in a pumpkin patch[.] Years later the Freedom
of Information Act revealed that the film showed a report on business
conditions in Manchuria, and fire extinguishers on a U.S. destroyer.
None of these documents were classified. Were they planted by Chambers,
who seemed to have a strange, almost psychotic fixation with Alger
Hiss?[.] After two confusing trials, Hiss went to jail for perjury. To
the right wing, Nixon was a hero and a patriot. To the liberals, he was a
shameless self-promoter who had vengefully destroyed a fine man.
Eleanor Roosevelt angrily condemned him. It was to become a pattern: you
either loved Richard Nixon or hated him." That's one narrative
that's out there: Hiss was being set up, and Chambers was using
declassified documents in an attempt to smear Hiss!
(UPDATE: Regarding whether the pumpkin papers were declassified or not,
Ambrose states on page 192 that they contained "top-secret material",
and on page 194 Ambrose says: "Former State Department officials
testified [before HUAC] 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." Regarding their content, this site states: "The
Pumpkin Papers consist of sixty-five pages of retyped secret State
Department documents, four pages in Hiss's own handwriting of copied
State Department cables, and five rolls of developed and undeveloped 35
mm film. The film included fifty-eight frames, mostly photos of State
and Navy Department documents. The State Department documents dealt
with a wide variety of subjects, including U. S. intentions with respect
to the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and Germany's takeover of
Austria. Other frames dealt with subjects that hardly seem the stuff of
spy novels, such as diagrams of fire extinguishers and life rafts. All
of the documents that bore dates came from the period from January 5
through April 1, 1938.")
Irwin Gellman in The Contender
argues that Nixon was fair and committed to finding the facts in his
investigation of Hiss, and Gellman disputes a charge that, even before
Chambers and Hiss' initial HUAC appearances, Nixon was already aware that Hiss was a
Communist due to FBI reports and was prolonging the proceedings for his
own political advancement. Gellman accepts that Nixon first became
interested in Hiss at Hiss' initial appearance before HUAC. What is
Ambrose's take on this? Well, overall, Ambrose differs from Gellman on
some aspects of Nixon's HUAC career, for, while Gellman's portrayal of
Nixon is largely positive, Ambrose argues that Nixon tended to put words
into people's mouth and sometimes even to bend the truth in his
questioning of witnesses. But Ambrose appears to accept Nixon's version
of how he became interested in Hiss: Nixon became skeptical when he
first heard Hiss' testimony to HUAC because Hiss used a lot of
qualifiers and equivocations when discussing whether or not he knew
Chambers, and, even though many on HUAC believed in Hiss' innocence,
Nixon spent a lot of hours trying to uncover the truth. At the
same time, Ambrose on pages 171-172 notes that there was long concern in
Washington that Hiss had Communist associations. Ambrose says that
this was "common gossip among those in Washington whose business it was
to ferret out the Reds", that J. Edgar Hoover since 1943 raised his
concerns about Hiss to FDR and Harry Truman (yet failed to show any
documentary evidence), and that the State Department responded to the
concern by easing Hiss out of policy-making and eventually government.
That makes me wonder why HUAC was investigating Hiss, even though he was
no longer in government. Was there concern that he could be subversive
where he was serving at the time----in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace?
(UPDATE: On page 686, however, Ambrose says: "For reasons that escape
this author, Nixon never admitted in public his prior knowledge about
Chambers that came from Father John Cronin." Ambrose speculates that
perhaps Nixon was the one who suggested bringing Chambers before HUAC to
corroborate the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, another ex-Communist. I
don't know much about this issue, but people have argued that Nixon
knew about Hiss' Communist connections prior to Hiss' initial appearance
before HUAC by appealing to interviews with Father Cronin from 1958
through the 1980's. But, according to Gellman, Cronin in 1990 retracted
his claim that Nixon learned about Hiss from him and said that Nixon
first learned about Hiss when Chambers mentioned Hiss before HUAC on
August 3, 1948. See here. Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician was published in 1987, which was before Cronin retracted his earlier claim.)
Notwithstanding
the Hiss case, Harry Truman won re-election as President, and he
"brought a Democratic Congress in with him" (page 187). According to
Ambrose, this happened because many voters could not bring themselves to
buy into the notion that Truman was soft on Communism: "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."
Interestingly, even though many Republicans made Hiss into a campaign
issue, Truman's Republican opponent in 1948, Thomas Dewey, and John
Foster Dulles (who would later become Dwight Eisenhower's anti-Communist
Secretary of State), refused to do so, for a variety of reasons:
Dulles associated with Hiss within the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace; Dulles anticipated becoming Secretary of
State were Dewey to be elected President, and Dulles did not want European
allies to see him as a Red-baiter; Dewey regretted trying to link FDR with Communist Party leader Earl Browder when Dewey ran against FDR in 1944; and Dewey did not want to think that Truman personally was soft on Communism. I
should also note that Dewey was a critic of the Mundt-Nixon bill, which
Dewey thought would outlaw the Communist Party (which was false,
according to Nixon), for Dewey believed that it promoted totalitarianism
and thought-control.