In this post, I'll talk some about Richard Nixon's discussion of the Alger Hiss case in his 1962 book, Six Crises.
As I said yesterday, Nixon filled in a few of the gaps in my knowledge
about the case (although there is much that I have to learn about it).
Here are five items:
1. Ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers alleged
that Alger Hiss gave Chambers State Department documents to give to the
Soviet Union. Whittaker Chambers made copies of some of these documents
and hid them in a pumpkin that was on his farm. But why did Chambers
do that? Nixon's answer is that Chambers saw some of Hiss's
investigators snooping around his farm, and he feared that the
investigators would find the documents. Consequently, Chambers hid them
in a pumpkin, where they wouldn't think of looking.
2.
Nixon addresses the question of why the documents in Chambers' pumpkin
were so important, since there have been arguments that the papers did
not contain highly sensitive information that the Soviets could use.
For one, Nixon says that the House Committee on Un-American activities
laid such arguments to rest by offering "to make all the documents
public" (page 53), but the Truman Administration (I think) denied that
request on the grounds that it could endanger national security, "even
though ten years had passed since they were taken from government files"
(page 53)! Second, even one of those documents could have provided the
Soviets with the ability "to break the secret State Department Code
used at the time for the transmittal of messages" (page 53), plus the
documents could inform the Soviets about sources of information.
3.
Whittaker Chambers initially perjured himself by claiming that he knew
nothing about espionage rings in the U.S. Government, and Nixon says
this was because Chambers liked Alger Hiss and considered him to be a
friend (Chambers even said that Hiss had a sweet temperament) and thus
did not want to expose him. According to Nixon, Chambers hoped that
Alger Hiss would repudiate Communism and come forward voluntarily to
expose the Communist activity within the U.S. Government. The personal
aspect of this story was important to me, for it's easy to see Alger
Hiss as an evil person, especially if he engaged in espionage, but Hiss
might have been a nice guy who thought he was doing the right thing.
Another
story Nixon tells that addresses the personal level of the case
concerns the date of the microfilm in the Pumpkin Papers. When an
expert concluded (wrongly, it eventually turned out) that the microfilm
was much later than the time that Hiss supposedly gave the documents to
Chambers and Chambers copied them on microfilm, thereby casting doubt on
Chambers' story, Nixon was outraged at Chambers. Chambers felt that
God was against him, and Chambers attempted to commit suicide. Nixon
reflects that this was because Chambers was laying his career and the
reputation of himself and his family on the line, all for the cause of
exposing Communism. Now, it looked as if his cause would fail, and his
loss would be for nothing. What's more, Chambers felt that the only
public official who faithfully stood by him, Richard Nixon, was
abandoning him.
4. I said in my post here
that Nixon dismissed the argument of his opponent for Senate, Helen
Douglas, that the Justice Department rather than HUAC deserved credit
for exposing Alger Hiss. In Six Crises, Nixon gives his
perspective on the role of the Justice Department in the Alger Hiss
case. Nixon states that Chambers gave the Justice Department
information that it just sat on. While Nixon acknowledges that the
lower officials in the Justice Department were diligent and that the FBI
had uncovered important information, Nixon believes that the higher-ups
were being obstructionist. Nixon laments the role that Harry Truman
played in the Hiss case, for Nixon points out that Truman maintained an
anti-Communist foreign policy and was even upset when he accepted that
the evidence pointed to Hiss' guilt. But Truman still detested HUAC.
5.
A question that I have asked is how Nixon got so many enemies. Stephen
Ambrose argues that Nixon's attack-dog campaign speeches alienated a
number of people. Nixon himself, however, traces the hostility against
him to his involvement in the Hiss case, for Nixon was uncovering facts
that were inconvenient to certain figures in the Establishment, and they
did not forgive him for that. Ambrose speculated that Nixon felt
paranoid in 1968, and Ambrose seems to imply that Nixon was not as
paranoid in 1960. In Six Crises, however, it appears to me
that Nixon even in 1962 felt rather besieged by elements of the
Establishment, and that this siege was going on since the Hiss case.