For my post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, I'd like to comment on Aitken's treatment of Richard Nixon's 1946 congressional campaign and the Alger Hiss case.
1.
Aitken's biography is largely considered to be pro-Nixon, and I'd say
that is mostly true in his narration of Nixon's 1946 race for Congress.
Aitken disputes that Nixon's campaign was heavily funded by wealthy
special interests, for the Committee of 100 had a number of small
businessmen; any oil or utility company donations to Nixon's campaign
(if there were any) did not surpass $500; about a third of Nixon's
$37,500 campaign budget was from the Republican National Commitee; and
Nixon's budget amounted to "less than twenty cents per voter" in "an
electorate of 205,000" (pages 130-131). Aitken notes that Nixon's
campaign did not "spend money on radio advertising" (page 130), and he
states that, "Compared to the personally wealthy and politically
well-connected Voorhis, Nixon only had shoestring campaign finances
which grew to adequate but far from lavish levels" (page 131). Against
the possible charge that Nixon traded favors for contributions, Aitken
states that "Indeed, there are old men living around Whittier and
Alhambra who still complain about Nixon's lack of generosity to his
supporters in the form of government contracts, appointments and
political favours" (page 131).
While Aitken acknowledges that some
right-wing rogues may have behaved irresponsibly in 1946, calling
voters and telling them that Nixon's Democratic opponent, Democratic
incumbent Jerry Voorhis, was a Communist, Aitken does not believe that
Nixon was responsible for this, and Aitken states that "The evidence of
these calls is of doubtful provenance, for they were never raised by an
actual recipient, and only emerged as an issue some months after polling
day" (page 132). Aitken seems to imply that Nixon's charge that
Voorhis was being endorsed by a Communist-infiltrated union was not
particularly fair, for the hard-core leftists in the CIO opposed Voorhis
due to his anti-Communism, and its sister-organization, the NC-PAC,
which did endorse Voorhis, was "a milder coalition of non-union
progressives with noticeably less Communist influence" (page 123). But
Aitken does not appear to buy into the prominent narrative that Nixon
was exploiting fear of Communism for his political gain, for he states
that Communism in 1946 was not particularly feared. Aitken states that
at the time "there was little anti-Russian hostility in the United
States" and "Communism did not gain its connotations of treachery and
espionage until the Hiss case of 1948 and the McCarthy era of the 1950s"
(page 131).
As I compare Aitken's arguments with the narratives
of Nixon critics such as Roger Morris and Anthony Summers, it is
interesting to me that Aitken and Morris don't really disagree on how
much Nixon spent on his campaign. Morris states on page 337 of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
that "Nixon backers would finally admit that the actual tallied
contributions had been between $24,000 and $32,000"; Summers, however,
thinks it may have been more than that, for Summers refers to a person
he interviewed who claimed to have donated $10,000 to Nixon in 1946.
Contrary to Aitken's portrayal of Nixon as the financial underdog in the
race, Morris notes that files in Sacramento indicate that Voorhis spent
$1,928. On the anonymous phone calls calling Voorhis a Communist,
Morris refers to recipients of such calls who mentioned receiving them.
On whether Nixon traded favors for contributions, Morris highlights
more than once that Nixon's political ideology and the policies that he
supported were consistent with the agenda of the wealthy special
interests, whether or not he gave specific favors (and those kinds of
accusations----of special favors----would dog Nixon throughout his
political career).
On whether or not Communism was feared in 1946,
I can somewhat see Aitken's point, for America had just fought World
War II alongside its ally, the Soviet Union, plus some of the events
that would increase Americans' apprehension of Communism were yet to
occur. But I ultimately have a hard time accepting Aitken's argument,
for it seems to me----from what I have read about the the 1946 campaign,
from even Aitken's acknowledgement that there were businessmen who
disliked unions because they saw them as Communist-infiltrated, from the
existence of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and simply
from the very fact that Nixon was making Communism an issue in
1946----that Communism was indeed opposed and feared as early as 1946.
2.
Aitken's discussion of the Alger Hiss case is so-so. I was
disappointed that Aitken did not (as far as I could see) address the
argument that the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss was
manufactured after Hiss' wife had supposedly typed those
documents that Chambers was to relay to the Soviets. Roger Morris made
that argument, and Morris is in Aitken's bibliography, so Aitken should
have addressed it, rather than just assuming that the typewriter was a
slam-dunk that revealed Hiss' guilt.
Where Aitken's contribution
to the discussion about the Hiss case is salient is on the role of
Father John Cronin. Did Father Cronin feed Nixon information about Hiss
before Hiss and Chambers appeared before HUAC, or is the opposite the
case, as Nixon would claim in Six Crises? I guess why this
question is important is that, if Nixon were receiving information from
Cronin, he had reason to be confident about Hiss' guilt from the
beginning, and his story that he executed sound judgment when others
were not and placed his political career on the line is not particularly
credible. In other books, I have read that Cronin for years claimed
that he fed Nixon information prior to the initial appearance of Hiss
and Chambers, yet Cronin would retract that claim in the 1990's. My
impression is that Cronin allegedly retracted his long-standing claim to
Aitken. (Anthony Summers wonders how Cronin even could have
retracted it, for Cronin in January 1991 “was in a home for the aged,
deaf, and…unable to hold a cogent conversation”; see here).
On
page 155, Aitken quotes Cronin as saying to him in 1990: "The stacked
deck remark was unfair. Nixon might have read something about Hiss in
my reports, I don't know whether he did or not, but we didn't discuss
the case until after Hiss had made his public denial. From then on I
worked with Nixon a lot and gave him everything I had on Hiss. He
needed that help. He was very unsure of himself at the beginning."
Aitken
has other grounds for believing that Cronin and Nixon had not discussed
the case prior to Hiss' first public denial. If Nixon had information
about Hiss during Hiss' initial appearance before HUAC, why didn't Nixon
challenge Hiss on that occasion, especially when so many people----even
people on HUAC----were believing Hiss? On this, perhaps one could say
that Nixon was playing it cool: that Nixon didn't want to reveal his
cards all at once, but preferred to wait a while, to let others buy into
Hiss' act so that he (Nixon) could later step forward and be the heroic
exception.
On page 158, Aitken quotes Bill Rogers, who would later
serve as Dwight Eisenhower's Attorney General and as Nixon's Secretary
of State. Rogers was on the scene during the Hiss case, and he said
that Nixon was initially doubtful about the case against Hiss. So there
you have the eyewitness testimony of someone who does not think that
Nixon was sure from the beginning. One question that I have, however,
is whether Cronin even had intelligence information that would have made
Nixon absolutely certain about Hiss' guilt. Cronin was
working with Nixon after Hiss' initial appearance, according to what
Cronin said in 1990, yet my impression (and I'm open to correction on
this) is that Nixon even in that time was not completely certain about
Hiss' guilt. (Hiss first testified on August 5, 1948, and Rogers met
Nixon five days later, which was supposedly the time when Nixon was
unsure about the case. I guess the question is when Cronin started to
work with Nixon----was it in the five days in between?)