The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  For Nixon, the Washington spy spectacle demonstrated not only the moral turpitude of Alger Hiss but the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal elite. His successful pursuit of Hiss brought him national fame, Nixon later observed, but it also attracted the “unparalleled venom and irrational fury” of the liberal intelligentsia, which saw Hiss as a New Deal icon. He was convinced that he would never be forgiven by “substantial segments of the press and intellectual community” for exposing how the New Deal had been compromised by the Communist underground. Nixon brooded that it was this “hatred and hostility” that might have cost him the 1960 presidential election.

  Chambers, too, saw his decision to incriminate Hiss as part of a broader assault on New Deal–style government and its “drift toward socialism.” In his 1952 memoir Witness, Chambers conflated the Roosevelt presidency with the evils of Communist rule. The New Deal, he wrote, “was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking.” Both types of revolution, he argued, led to a triumph of the state over the individual.

  The Cold War furies that Nixon and the Dulles brothers helped to unleash scoured all nuance and charity from American politics. There were indeed a few committed Communist agents embedded here and there in Roosevelt’s bureaucracy, such as Nathan Silvermaster, a Russian-born economist with the War Production Board during World War II who was dedicated to the dream of a Soviet America. But by far the more common “traitors” were men like Hiss: well-educated, progressive idealists. They were the type who had come of age after the stock market crash of 1929 and had grown sick of a hands-off government that allowed encampments of hungry and homeless people to spring up all over the country without taking action.

  When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and Hiss received a telegram from Felix Frankfurter, his former Harvard law professor and an adviser to FDR, urging him to come work for the new administration “on the basis of national emergency,” Hiss knew that he had to sign up. For young New Dealers, “it was a call to arms, being told that the nation was in danger. I think many of us who went down [to Washington] in those first few weeks thought of ourselves as civilian militia going down for the duration of a real emergency, as if we were going to war. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address, used the sacrifices of war as an analogy.”

  In despair over the enormous human suffering of the Depression, with some fifteen million jobless—a quarter of the U.S. labor force—some of these New Dealers found themselves drawn, at least for a time, to the discipline and militancy of the Communist Party. Some were intrigued by the Soviet economic experiment, which appeared at least comparatively functional, and thought their own ailing capitalist system might learn something from it. During World War II, when the Roosevelt administration urged Americans to regard the Russians as indispensable comrades-in-arms, some of these federal officials looked for ways to strengthen these bonds by sharing information with our allies. But while some of these men and women crossed the line, most saw themselves as patriots whose dreams for the future were deeply rooted in American traditions, not European ideologies. Roosevelt was their guiding light, not Stalin.

  To this day, Alger Hiss—who was convicted of perjury, not treason—remains a conundrum, his guilt or innocence still hotly debated along ideological lines. When the Venona decrypts were declassified in the 1990s, some saw smoking-gun proof of his guilt, while others argued that the case had only entered an even murkier stage. In the end, Hiss will likely be seen as a perplexingly mixed bag: a fundamentally loyal American who had associated with left-wing circles in Washington and was not entirely forthcoming with Congress, but was never a serious threat to national security.

  The least credible aspect of Hiss’s testimony was his insistence that he had never known “an individual by the name of Whittaker Chambers.” When Nixon later staged a face-to-face meeting between the two men, Hiss finally acknowledged that he had known Chambers, though under another name, and only briefly in 1935. But the evidence pointed to a more intricate relationship than that. The political complexity of the Hiss case was further entangled by its interpersonal complications. Although a married man with children, Chambers confessed to the FBI that he had led a secret homosexual life. He was clearly enamored of Hiss and his family. In Witness, he wrote that he came to regard Alger and Priscilla Hiss “as friends as close as a man ever makes in life.” Under questioning from Nixon, Chambers warmly described Hiss—the man whose life he was in the process of ruining—as “a man of great simplicity and a great gentleness and sweetness of character.” It was a far cry from how Nixon viewed the “cold and callous” Hiss.

  Chambers recounted the final meeting he allegedly had with Hiss—when he went to Hiss’s Washington home in 1938 to beg the diplomat to leave the Communist Party—with the wounded clarity of a man remembering a lovers’ breakup: “We looked at each other steadily for a moment, believing that we were seeing each other for the last time and knowing that between us lay . . . a molten torrent. When we turned to walk in different directions from that torrent, it would be as men whom history left no choice but to be enemies. As we hesitated, tears came into Alger Hiss’s eyes—the only time I ever saw him so moved. He has denied this publicly and derisively. . . . He should not regret those few tears, for as long as men are human, and remember our story, they will plead for his humanity.”

  Hiss came to believe that Chambers’s accusations against him were those of a rejected suitor. Chambers had never made sexual advances, said Hiss, but “his attitude to me, and his relations, were strange . . . he had a hostility to the point of jealousy about my wife. . . . My guess is that he had some obscure kind of love attachment . . . about me.”

  Hiss’s reluctance to acknowledge his relationship with his accuser might have been due to his uneasiness about the nature of his involvement with the man. Nixon concluded that Hiss had reciprocated Chambers’s passion and that a homosexual drama lay at the heart of the political tempest. “The true story of the Hiss case,” Nixon revealed to a congressional confidante on board his presidential yacht a quarter century later, was that Hiss and Chambers had been “queers.”

  But whatever human subtleties might have explained the Hiss affair were pounded to dust by the blunt instruments of Cold War discourse. The investigative apparatus that Nixon and his patrons built in Washington had no way to measure political nuances and peculiarities of the heart.

  Alger Hiss had moved in political circles viewed as benign in Roosevelt’s Washington but would take on a sinister cast in the panicky atmosphere of the Cold War. Even Allen Dulles had worked with Communists during the war. After the war, you could remain a Communist or Socialist in Western Europe and still be granted a place in the democratic arena. But not in Washington. There, even New Dealers were in danger.

  On August 13, 1948, two days after Nixon met with the Dulles group at the Roosevelt Hotel, the HUAC “show trial”—as the hearings were being called in the liberal press—resumed in the Old House Office Building. Once again, the palatial caucus room, with its Greek revival décor and glittering chandeliers, was the scene of a media extravaganza. The day’s leading witness was a man whom many considered the committee’s top target, since he had held a considerably more important post in the Roosevelt administration than Hiss.

  Harry Dexter White was a slight, bespectacled, fifty-five-year-old former government economist whose name meant little to the general public. But as the big thinker in Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, White had played a major role in shaping New Deal policy. Among his many accomplishments was the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two linchpins of the postwar global financial order that White was widely credited with spearheading. White joined forces with the esteemed British economist John Maynard Keynes to hammer out the plans for the world’s new financial system, but while Keynes provided substantial intellectual input, it was the politically savvy White who was key to bringing the plans to fruition. White would later be hailed as “arguabl
y the most important U.S. government economist of the 20th century.”

  There is little doubt that Harry Dexter White was one of the main topics for discussion, along with Alger Hiss, at the Roosevelt Hotel that night in August 1948. In fact, the Dulles group saw White as a bigger threat to their postwar plans than Hiss. The formidable White was intent on building a new financial order that would be a “New Deal for a new world,” with the new global institutions channeling investment to needy countries in ways that produced the broadest public good rather than the greatest private gain. When the Roosevelt administration unveiled its plans for the World Bank and IMF, Secretary Morgenthau declared that the goal was “to drive . . . the usurious money lenders from the temple of international finance.” Not surprisingly, Wall Street banks saw the new institutions, which were to be “instrumentalities of sovereign governments and not of private financial interests,” as dangerous new competitors in the global capital markets.

  For the Dulles group, there were a number of disquieting developments at the Bretton Woods Conference, held in the green foothills of New Hampshire in the summer of 1944, where 730 delegates from around the world thrashed out the final plans for the new financial system. Morgenthau and White led a movement at the conference to abolish the Bank for International Settlements, an institution they saw as an instrument of financial collaboration among New York, London, and Nazi Germany. It took a major, behind-the-scenes campaign at Bretton Woods—an effort mounted by representatives of Wall Street, the State Department, and the Bank of England—to head off the Morgenthau-White assault on BIS, which the New Dealers wanted to replace with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

  White further unnerved Wall Street and Republican circles by pushing for the Soviet Union to be integrated into the new international framework. The Treasury Department’s financial wizard saw this postwar partnership with the Soviet Union—a nation with vast markets and resources—as a potentially enormous boon for the U.S. economy, which he feared could slip back into depression after the wartime stimulus disappeared. White also saw this East-West financial partnership as a way to continue the wartime alliance with Moscow and to ensure world peace, a goal that President Roosevelt had made clear was a priority.

  By 1948, the visionary internationalism of the Roosevelt years was being rapidly replaced by the hardening nationalism of the Truman presidency. Men like Harry White had been driven from Washington, but he still served as a consultant to the IMF and he was still widely respected throughout the world. And White still had detailed, inside knowledge from his years as Morgenthau’s top aide about the wartime activities of the Dulles group.

  If the political winds had been blowing in a different direction in 1948, it might well have been men like Foster and Allen Dulles, Thomas McKittrick of BIS, and Walter Teagle and William Stamps Farish of Standard Oil instead of New Dealers like Hiss and White who were put under the investigative spotlight for treason. But by turning the table on New Deal officials such as White, who had long wanted to prosecute these high-level Nazi collaborators, the Dulles group ensured their own legal protection. By seizing the investigative momentum, Republicans like Dick Nixon, whom Loftus called “Allen Dulles’s mouthpiece in Congress,” made sure that the Dulles circle would never have to answer for their wartime actions.

  By the time Harry Dexter White walked into the packed hearing room on the morning of August 13, he had been under FBI investigation for seven months. J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had tapped his phones and conducted scores of interviews in a determined effort to find evidence that he was a Russian spy. White’s two principal accusers were Chambers and an emotionally unstable alcoholic named Elizabeth Bentley, who had taken Chambers’s place as a Soviet spy courier in wartime Washington after he fled the Communist Party in 1938. HUAC made Bentley, who appeared in front of the committee two weeks before White, one of its star witnesses. Earlier, she had told the FBI that White was not a “card-carrying Communist,” but when she stepped in front of the dazzling newsreel lights, her story grew more dramatic. White was no longer simply a “misguided idealist” but a central player in the Nathan Silvermaster spy ring, feeding confidential information to the group and using his influence to place Communist “contacts” in key government positions.

  Bentley, however, proved a highly problematic witness for HUAC. The former spy admitted she had never met White, and over time, as her alcoholism grew worse, she became an increasingly erratic “expert”—as the committee billed her—on Communist Party machinations. As her life spun out of control, Bentley blackmailed the FBI into putting her on its payroll. She would remain a deeply troubled ward of the bureau for the rest of her life, a witness-for-hire whom government investigators would drag into the spotlight in between blackouts, car wrecks, and tumultuous lovers’ quarrels. Instead of the glamorous “red spy queen” of the tabloid media’s dreams, the matronly, weak-chinned Bentley grew to become a pathetic symbol of Cold War exhibitionism.

  When Chambers testified about White before HUAC, he was more circumspect than Bentley. He claimed that he had met with White from time to time as a Soviet courier, but he conceded that the Treasury economist was always cautious and never gave him government documents. “I cannot say he was a Communist,” he testified. In fact, Chambers seemed not to know what to make of White. “His motives always baffled me,” he wrote in his memoir.

  Nixon and his fellow HUAC members knew that their case against White was weak. Earlier in the year, the former Treasury official had already made a successful appearance before a federal grand jury in New York that was investigating government subversion. The jury, which would later bring charges against Hiss, found insufficient evidence to indict White. And despite the FBI’s obsessive surveillance of White, even Hoover’s intimate colleague Clyde Tolson acknowledged that there was simply not enough proof to label him a “Soviet espionage agent” and warned that FBI officials were “making a great mistake in using this phraseology.”

  In his appearance before HUAC, White conducted himself with dignity and eloquence. The committee’s badgering style often brought out the worst in witnesses, with many resorting to obfuscating tactics or outraged histrionics, and others cowering cravenly and surrendering all that was asked of them, including their self-respect. But White responded to the committee’s questions head-on, and when he felt compelled to enlighten his inquisitors on constitutional principles and the fundamentals of the American legal system, he did so with a respectful, professorial calm. White began his testimony by firmly denying that he had ever been a Communist, explaining that he adhered instead to a set of beliefs that he called “the American creed.”

  I believe in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of criticism, and freedom of movement. I believe in the goal of equal opportunity, and the right of each individual to follow the calling of his or her own choice, and the right of every individual to an opportunity to develop his or her capacity to the fullest.

  I believe in the right and duty of every citizen to work for, to expect, and to obtain an increasing measure of political, economic, and emotional security for all. I am opposed to discrimination in any form, whether on the grounds of race, color, religion, political belief or economic status.

  I believe in the freedom of choice of one’s representatives in government, untrammeled by machine guns, secret police, or a police state. I am opposed to arbitrary and unwarranted use of power or authority from whatever source or against any individual or group. I believe in the government of law, not of men. . . .

  I consider these principles sacred. I regard them as the basic fabric of our American way of life, and I believe in them as living realities, and not as mere words on paper. . . .

  “That is my creed. Those are the principles that I have worked for. Those are the principles that I have been prepared in the past to fight for,” concluded White, who had enlisted in the Army during World War I, “and am prepared to defend at any ti
me with my life, if need be.”

  White’s statement, a ringing invocation of the embattled New Deal philosophy that was in full retreat in Washington, evoked a loud and sustained round of applause from the audience. The former FDR official’s performance was so self-assured that committee members lunged at ways to rattle him. HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican who sought to ride the investigation to political glory but instead ended his career in prison for corruption, aimed a particularly low blow at White.

  For a number of years, the economist had been grappling with a serious heart condition. The FBI had been forced to delay its interrogation of White the previous year, after he suffered a heart attack. Before his HUAC appearance, he informed the committee of his medical history in a confidential letter. But when White began speaking about his connection with Nathan Silvermaster, explaining that it was a harmless relationship that consisted of such recreational activities as playing Ping-Pong in the accused spy’s basement, Thomas shocked the room by interjecting a comment about White’s illness. “For a person who had a severe heart condition, you certainly can play a lot of sports,” sneered Thomas. It was a typically ugly moment for the HUAC chairman, and when White replied with gentlemanly restraint, pointing out that his athletic days were far behind him, the audience again burst into applause.

  Nixon also got into a losing sparring match with White, clashing with the witness over whether or not the HUAC hearings were “star-chamber proceedings.” The congressman insisted that they did not meet that definition because they were open to the public. But White pointed out that by denying alleged “subversives” the right to confront and cross-examine their accusers, HUAC veered dangerously close to operating as a royal tribunal. “Congressman,” White patiently explained, “I am sure you appreciate that you need to balance the need for conducting a hearing of this kind against the dangers of doing irreparable harm to some innocent persons. That is a patient heritage which Americans have, that a man is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty . . . and certainly you would be the first to recognize that, in order for a man to have a fair trial, it requires all the rules and regulations of a court hearing.”