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by Richard Nixon


  The case, which had already provided so many bizarre surprises, had not yet exhausted its supply.

  Chambers was called by Hiss’s lawyers for a pretrial deposition and in the course of routine questioning they asked him whether he had any documentary proof of his charges. He made no reply at the time, but he began agonizing over what he might have to do to defend his position.

  Hiss’s lawyers also questioned Mrs. Chambers. Chambers never told me specifically what had happened, but only that they had been very rough on her and had made her cry. He said that from that moment he realized that they were out to destroy him and that he must react accordingly. He told his lawyer that when the pretrial hearing resumed the next day, he had decided to introduce some documents he had recently retrieved from his wife’s nephew in New York.

  On November 17, Chambers turned over an envelope containing sixty-five pages of typewritten copies of State Department documents and four memos in Alger Hiss’s handwriting. He explained to the stunned lawyers that when he decided to leave the party he had hidden these papers away as a sort of life insurance against any Communist attempts to blackmail or kill him.

  The head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division was immediately summoned from Washington. He impounded the papers and obtained a court order enforcing secrecy on everyone concerned. Chambers returned to his farm assuming that it would only be a matter of a few days before the Justice Department brought the case to a grand jury and Hiss would be indicted. Two weeks passed, however, and nothing happened. On December 1, a small United Press story appeared in the Washington Daily News reporting that the Justice Department was considering dropping the case against Hiss. Another article stated that there were rumors that a perjury charge against Chambers was under consideration. It was hard to believe, but it appeared that the Justice Department was going to use the papers Chambers had produced not to prove that Hiss was a spy but as the basis for indicting Chambers for perjury because he had lied when he testified that he himself had never been involved in espionage.

  These shattering new developments came at the worst possible time for me personally. Our second daughter, Julie, had been born on July 5, 1948. We had hoped to spend a few weeks with her and Tricia out of the sweltering heat of summertime Washington, but once again we were forced to cancel a planned vacation when the Hiss case had completely taken up the month of August. I promised Pat that we would take our first vacation in three years as soon as Congress recessed. We made reservations for a two-week Caribbean cruise at the beginning of December, and both of us looked forward to the trip.

  On the day before we were to leave, I saw the article in the Daily News, and I was shocked that the Justice Department would be party to such a cynical maneuver. That afternoon Stripling and I drove to Chambers’s farm.

  I showed Chambers the newspaper report. He said, “This is what I have been afraid of.”

  He explained that he had turned over a considerable amount of documentary evidence, which had then been impounded by the Justice Department, and a court order prohibited him from disclosing the contents. “I will only say that they were a real bombshell,” he told us.

  We tried unsuccessfully to get some idea of what the papers contained. Finally I asked whether we were facing a situation in which the Justice Department alone would decide if any further action were to be taken.

  “No, I wouldn’t be that foolish,” Chambers replied. “My attorney has photostatic copies, and also, I didn’t turn over everything I had. I have another bombshell in case they try to suppress this one.”

  “You keep that second bombshell,” I told him. “Don’t give it to anybody except the committee.”

  When Stripling and I got back to Washington I was uncertain about what to do. I spent much of that night trying to decide whether to issue a subpoena for the rest of Chambers’s material. I could not understand why Chambers would have withheld any important information from the committee hearings, and I could not help thinking that there might be some good reason the Justice Department was acting in this way.

  After weighing all the factors, however, I decided that the case was too important to risk losing it now, so I asked Stripling to have subpoenas served on Chambers immediately for everything he had. “I mean everything,” I said.

  Our ship sailed from New York that afternoon. Pat and I relaxed in the lazy shipboard routine and enjoyed the company of the other members of Congress and their wives who were on board. We felt a sense of relief from the tremendous tension that had surrounded us in Washington. The next evening, however, I received a cable from Stripling:

  SECOND BOMBSHELL OBTAINED BY SUBPOENA 1 A.M. FRIDAY. CASE CLINCHED. INFORMATION AMAZING. HEAT IS ON FROM PRESS AND OTHER PLACES. IMMEDIATE ACTION APPEARS NECESSARY. CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET BACK?

  The next morning, I received a cable from Andrews:

  DOCUMENTS INCREDIBLY HOT. LINK TO HISS SEEMS CERTAIN. LINK TO OTHERS INEVITABLE. RESULTS SHOULD RESTORE FAITH IN NEED FOR COMMITTEE IF NOT IN SOME MEMBERS. . . . NEW YORK JURY MEETS WEDNESDAY. . . . COULD YOU ARRIVE TUESDAY AND GET DAY’S JUMP ON GRAND JURY. IF NOT, HOLDING HEARING EARLY WEDNESDAY. MY LIBERAL FRIENDS DON’T LOVE ME NO MORE. NOR YOU. BUT FACTS ARE FACTS AND THESE FACTS ARE DYNAMITE. HISS’S WRITING IDENTIFIED ON THREE DOCUMENTS. NOT PROOF HE GAVE THEM TO CHAMBERS BUT HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT. STRIPLING SAYS CAN PROVE WHO GAVE THEM TO CHAMBERS. LOVE TO PAT. VACATION-WRECKER ANDREWS

  I radioed Stripling to make arrangements for my return. The next morning I was picked up from the ship by a Coast Guard seaplane that took me to Miami, where I caught a flight to Washington. At the Miami airport reporters asked if I had any comment on the “pumpkin papers.” I had no idea what they were talking about. When I reached Washington, Stripling filled me in on the latest turn of this extraordinary case.

  I learned that Chambers had been in Washington on the day our subpoena was served on him, and he arranged to meet two of our investigators that night and drive back to his farm with them. They arrived very late. He led them into a frost-covered pumpkin patch. The flabbergasted investigators watched while he took the top off one of the pumpkins, reached inside, and pulled out three small metal microfilm cylinders. He explained that he had not wanted to leave anything in the house in case any other subpoenas or search warrants arrived in his absence. That morning, therefore, he had hollowed out a pumpkin and used it as a hiding place.

  When the “pumpkin” microfilms were developed they yielded hundreds of pages of photostats. These represented a sampling of the classified documents Hiss gave to Chambers in the period just before Chambers left the party; they ran the gamut from inconsequential bureaucratic trivia to top-secret ambassadorial cables. Hiss’s defense later claimed that the documents were unimportant and represented no threat to national security. That contention was shot down by expert testimony before the committee and at both trials. Some of the documents were relatively unimportant, but the State Department still felt in 1948, ten years after they had been taken from the government files, that publication of the complete “pumpkin papers” would be injurious to the national security. As important as the specific contents of the documents was the fact that many of even the substantively unimportant ones were coded, and anyone able to obtain copies of them could thus break our secret codes.

  The “pumpkin papers” completely captured public attention. The uproar was tremendous, and even many of Hiss’s erstwhile defenders had to admit that they had been wrong and the committee had been right.

  Since the statute of limitations made prosecution for espionage impossible, the grand jury unanimously voted to indict Hiss on two counts of perjury. The first was for having lied when he testified that he had not unlawfully taken classified documents from the State Department and given them to Chambers; the second was for having lied when he testified that he had not seen Chambers after January 1, 1937.

  There were two trials. The first ended with a hung jury divided 8 to 4 for conviction. At the second trial, the jury on January 21, 195
0, unanimously found Hiss guilty. Shortly after the verdict had been announced, I received a telegram from Herbert Hoover. It read:

  THE CONVICTION OF ALGER HISS WAS DUE TO YOUR PATIENCE AND PERSISTENCE ALONE. AT LAST THE STREAM OF TREASON THAT HAS EXISTED IN OUR GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN EXPOSED IN A FASHION ALL MAY BELIEVE.

  Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison. After serving forty-four months he was released on parole and sank into obscurity, working as a stationery and printing supplies salesman in New York.

  To this day, Alger Hiss has emphatically insisted on his innocence and makes periodic attempts to clear himself. This tenacity, together with the passage of time and the vagaries of memory, has now and then been rewarded with favorable publicity and increasing acceptance. In 1975, for example, he was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar. Whenever the Hiss case is considered on the facts and the testimony, however, the verdict is the same: the evidence against him is still overwhelming.

  It was very difficult for me to understand President Truman’s conduct during our investigation of the Hiss case. I knew that he had defied his liberal advisers and supporters by proposing aid to the anticommunist governments in Greece and Turkey, and I considered him to be someone who understood the threat of communism and recognized the need to oppose its subversive spread.

  Yet in the face of overwhelming evidence that Hiss was at best a perjurer and at worst a spy, Truman persisted in condemning our investigation as a “red herring” and, through his public statements and executive orders, doing everything in his power to obstruct it. Before the 1948 presidential election I could understand that he would do everything possible to contain the investigation in order to avoid political embarrassment. But I was surprised when, even after he had won the election, he continued this same stubborn course.

  Bert Andrews, who had excellent sources in the White House, told me that when a Justice Department official showed Truman the typewritten documents that clearly seemed to implicate Hiss in espionage, Truman had furiously paced the floor in the Oval Office, saying over and over, “The son of a bitch—he betrayed his country!” At a press conference after Hiss was indicted, reporters asked Truman whether he still believed our investigation was a “red herring.” Truman cut off one reporter abruptly and snapped: “I have made my position perfectly clear on that subject, and I have nothing further to say on it. My position hasn’t changed. Period.” When one of his aides later asked him about this, he replied, “Of course Hiss is guilty. But that damn committee isn’t interested in that. All it cares about is politics, and as long as they try to make politics out of this communist issue, I am going to label their activities for what they are—a ‘red herring.’ ”

  Truman honestly believed that the investigation was politically motivated, and in return his motives were political. He finally approved a full Justice Department and FBI investigation, but for months he used the power and prestige of his office to obstruct the committee’s work. But I did not think then, and I do not think now, that his actions were motivated by anything other than the political instincts of an intensely political man.

  The Hiss case proved beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of Soviet-directed Communist subversion at the highest levels of American government. But many who had defended Hiss simply refused to accept the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Some turned their anger and frustration toward me, as if I were somehow responsible for the fact that Hiss had taken them in. While there is no doubt that my reputation from the Hiss case launched me on the road to the vice presidency, it also turned me from a relatively popular young congressman, enjoying a good but limited press, into one of the most controversial figures in Washington, bitterly opposed by the most respected and influential liberal journalists and opinion leaders of the time.

  I think that Foster Dulles expressed the real lesson of the Hiss case when he said, “The conviction of Alger Hiss is human tragedy. It is tragic that so great promise should have come to so inglorious an end. But the greater tragedy is that seemingly our national ideals no longer inspire the loyal devotions needed for their defense.”

  This, to me, went to the heart of the problem we faced then and in the years ahead: how could we instill in brilliant young Americans the same dedication to the philosophy of freedom that the Communists seemed to be able to instill in people like Hiss.

  RUNNING FOR SENATOR: 1950

  I attended the 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia as an observer. I had great respect for the front-runners, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, but I believed that the Republicans needed a fresh face and a change in 1948, and I supported Harold Stassen of Minnesota—the one-time “boy wonder” of the Republican Party—for the presidential nomination. Dewey won the nomination on the third ballot, and he chose Earl Warren as his running mate.

  Since I had won both the Democratic and Republican nominations for re-election to the House, I did a great deal of speaking for the national ticket across the country in the fall campaign. Although there was nothing specific I could put my finger on, I was not as optimistic about our chances as most Republicans were. The crowds I spoke to were large and friendly, but they did not convey the electricity that so often means the difference between victory and defeat. I was also bothered by Dewey’s gingerly approach to Truman and by his refusal to rebut Truman’s attacks on what he labeled the “do-nothing Eightieth Congress.” Because of his temperament, overconfidence, and misjudgment, Dewey ran a lofty and detached campaign, while Truman behaved as if he really wanted the job. Truman won an eleventh-hour victory that stunned the forecasters. While I was deeply disappointed by Dewey’s loss, I thought that our complacency had caught up with us.

  Dewey’s defeat and our loss of both houses of Congress turned me overnight into a junior member of the minority party, a “comer” with no place to go. For the first time I began to consider the possibility of trying to move up on my own instead of patiently waiting for seniority or party preferment in the House of Representatives.

  The term of Sheridan Downey, California’s Democratic senator, was to expire in 1950, and not long after the 1948 election I began to consider challenging Downey for his seat. At first glance the prospects were not promising. Downey was a popular and uncontroversial incumbent, and it was by no means clear that anyone could beat him.

  Virtually all my political friends and advisers told me that running for the Senate would be tantamount to political suicide. But I recognized the worth of the nationwide publicity that the Hiss case had given me—publicity on a scale that most congressmen only dream of achieving. Running for the Downey seat was the only possibility for me to move up the political ladder at a time when my political stock was high. On August 11, 1949, I wrote to my friend and political adviser, Frank Jorgensen, summing up the situation as I saw it:

  I have built up quite a file of people who have written me pro and con on the Senate matter. Most of those who are against it, incidentally, are afraid of the risk of my losing the House seat. As I wrote you before, however, I have virtually reached the conclusion that although it is admittedly a long shot, it presents such an unusual opportunity that the risk is worth taking, provided, of course, that we do not have too determined an opposition in the primary. As I have told several of my friends here, unless the Republicans do make substantial gains in both the House and Senate in 1950, which necessarily would mean a Republican trend, I seriously doubt if we can ever work our way back into power. Actually, in my mind, I do not see any great gain in remaining a member of the House, even from a relatively good district, if it means that we would be simply a vocal but ineffective minority.

  On the other hand, if the trend is on, the chances for winning the Senate seat in California will be good. If the trend is not on, rewinning the House seat might prove to be a rather empty victory.

  At the beginning of October Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas announced that she was going to run against Downey in the Democratic primary. Her e
ntry brightened my prospects considerably. If Downey won the primary, he would be weakened by her attacks; if Mrs. Douglas won, she would be easier to beat than Downey.

  During the fall I learned from Kyle Palmer, the astute political editor of the Los Angeles Times, that if I became a candidate for the Senate I would be endorsed by the Times. I received similar assurances about the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. These endorsements were vital not only for the boost they would give my candidacy but because they would virtually assure that I would not face any opposition in the Republican primary.

  On November 3, 1949—exactly one year before the election—I announced my candidacy for the Senate before a crowd of more than five hundred supporters in Pomona. I made a hard-hitting speech that foreshadowed the kind of campaign I planned to run. I said that the central issue of the campaign would be “simply the choice between freedom and state socialism.” I charged that “the Democratic Party today, nationally and in our own state of California, has been captured and is completely controlled by a group of ruthless, cynical seekers-after-power who have committed that party to policies and principles which are completely foreign to those of its founders.” I ended my speech with some lines that would be quoted frequently in later years: “There is only one way we can win,” I said. “We must put on a fighting, rocking, socking campaign and carry that campaign directly into every county, city, town, precinct, and home in the state of California.”

  Thus began one of the most hectic and heated campaigns of my career. It had been hard enough to convince the voters in one traditionally Republican congressional district to elect me; now I had to campaign all through the second most populous state in the nation, seeking the support of millions of voters—most of them registered Democrats.

  I decided to campaign all over California, and to get around I used a second-hand wood-paneled station wagon with “Nixon for Senator” signs nailed on each side. It was fitted with portable sound equipment, and as we came into a town we played a phonograph record of a popular song over the loudspeaker. That usually attracted at least half a dozen people at a busy street corner. Once a small crowd had gathered, I would speak for a few minutes and then answer questions.

 

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