On August 25, Chambers and Hiss faced each other in a public hearing. Thanks to tenacious research, Nixon had with him a copy of a D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles certificate proving Chambers’s assertion that the accused had handed over a car to the party cause. Confronted with the document, Hiss became flustered. “I gave Crosley,” he began, “according to my best recollection—”
Nixon pounced. “I don’t want to interrupt you on that ‘to the best of my recollection,’ but you certainly can testify ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether you gave Crosley a car. How many cars have you given away in your life, Mr. Hiss?” Laughter rocked the HUAC chamber. Nearly two hundred times Hiss would use the phrase “according to my best recollection.”
Chambers, the Orthogonian, was now the convincing witness. “The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting and I am fighting.”
Two days later, Chambers met Hiss’s challenge to make his accusation outside of Congress, thus exposing himself to a libel suit. “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may still be,” he said on Meet the Press. Later, the witness produced sixty-five documents, some of them in Hiss’s own handwriting, that Chambers said Hiss had stolen from the State Department. Chambers had hid the microfilm of the documents in a hollowed-out pumpkin at his Maryland farm. Nixon arranged for news photographers to take his picture studying the “Pumpkin Papers” with a magnifying glass. No newspaper spoiled the picture by noting that microfilm cannot be read that way.
For Nixon, there would be one last moment of doubt when word came that the Kodak film on which the State Department documents had been copied was not produced until 1945, years after the espionage was said to have been committed. “Oh, my god!” he exclaimed. “This is the end of my political career.” Some torturous minutes later, the Kodak official called back to say he’d been wrong, a message that led Nixon and his chief counsel to begin waltzing around the room.
The most powerful evidence that the documents had actually been written on Mrs. Hiss’s own typewriter would come later. In December the man who had presided at the founding UN conference was indicted on two counts of perjury: that he had lied to Congress about not stealing State Department documents and about not knowing Whittaker Chambers. The statute of limitations protected Alger Hiss from an espionage charge.
In beating Hiss, Nixon had also beaten the media. “None of us wanted him to be guilty,” UPI’s Reedy admitted. “We didn’t want that committee to be right about anything. It was a committee that really made you cringe, it was so bad.” At thirty-five, in his second year in Congress, Richard Nixon, the man who led the charge against the now-discredited Franklin, was now what he would remain for the next half century—a household name.
* * *
IF Nixon was at the center of the action for those early postwar years, Kennedy was, with the exception of his perjury motion against Harold Christoffel, out of it. He used what good health he had to enjoy himself. Yet beneath the fop’s exterior lay something more tantalizing. “I’m going to debate Norman Thomas at the Harvard Law School,” Kennedy told Mark Dalton on the telephone one day, “and I would like you to come up. I want to run some things by you.” Dalton arrived at his friend’s Boston apartment to find the congressman busy in his living room. “There was Kennedy sitting on the sofa. There were two or three books open there and six or seven books on the floor opened. Each one had been written by Norman Thomas.”
On a rare occasion, Kennedy would invest the same zeal in his congressional work. Nor were his close aides the only people privy to Kennedy’s furtive commitment to homework. Ted Reardon recalled an issue before the Education and Labor panel that triggered a sudden passion in his boss. “I’m going to dig into this thing,” Kennedy informed his top aide, then headed down to the National Archives himself to retrieve the desired information. Many years afterward, Reardon would describe what happened next: “At the hearing, the thing I remember is when Jack started to talk, Dicky Boy sort of looked at him . . . with a look between awe and respect and fear.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
The Castle or the Outhouse!
FROM the time they arrived in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives, Dick Nixon and Jack Kennedy shared a common ambition: escape. They and their 1946 classmate George Smathers engaged in regular one-upmanship over who would be the first to leave the rambunctious House and move up in status to the “world’s most exclusive club.”
Buoyed by the acclaim he had won in the Hiss case and worried the glow of fame would fade, Nixon decided to make his move in the summer of 1949. Quietly, he sought the advance backing of the Los Angeles Times, which had supported his first congressional race. But the connection to Hiss continued to pose a serious risk, for there remained the chance that the ex-diplomat might still be exonerated. This outcome became all too plausible when Hiss’s perjury trial in New York ended that summer with a hung jury: eight for conviction, four for acquittal. Should the second trial yield a split jury or, worse yet, an acquittal, Nixon’s political stock would plummet. Nervous about the outcome, the California congressman called for the appointment of a “special prosecutor,” a step that, while never taken, would offer retrospective irony during a future, far wider probe of official misconduct.
As he awaited the results of the second trial, outside events made the country’s most celebrated Communist hunter an even hotter political property. In September, President Truman stunned the country with news that the Soviet Union had detonated an atom bomb. Suddenly, Americans looked out beyond their border to a troubled world in which they no longer held a monopoly on the awesome weapon. The news from China that month added to the dark foreboding: Mao Tse-tung declared Communist sovereignty over the entire Chinese mainland, trapping America’s World War II ally Chiang Kai-shek into what appeared permanent exile on the island of Formosa.
Reaction to the Asian situation was swift and angry even within Truman’s own party. “The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State,” Cong. John F. Kennedy declared on the House floor in January 1949. “So concerned were our diplomats . . . with the imperfection of the democratic system of China after twenty years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in non-Communist China.” The Truman policy “of vacillation, uncertainty, and confusion had reaped the whirlwind.” The failure of the president and the State Department had left it to Congress to stop “the onrushing tide of communism from engulfing all of Asia,” Kennedy said.
Against the darkening backdrop, Richard Nixon now drew the perfect cold war rival, one more vulnerable than Jerry Voorhis had been four years earlier. Cong. Helen Gahagan Douglas, actress-wife of Hollywood star Melvyn Douglas, close friend of the Roosevelts, and secret lover of that rising Texas star Sen. Lyndon Johnson, hoped to unseat Democratic senator Sheridan Downey in 1950. Unfortunately for her prospects, Mrs. Douglas had voted against President Truman’s urgent call to stop the Communist advance in Europe through military aid to Greece and Turkey. Nixon, declaring his own candidacy in November, now charged that the Democratic party had been “captured and is completely controlled by a group of ruthless, cynical seekers of power and committed to policies and principles completely foreign to those of its founders. Call it planned economy, the Fair Deal, or social welfare—but it is the same old socialist baloney, any way you slice it!” “Socialist” would be one of the least offensive labels he would pin on Mrs. Douglas.
Nixon’s luck held. In January 1950 a New York jury found Alger Hiss guilty of perjury in denying he had committed espionage for the Soviet Union. His chief congressional prosecutor now had validation of his charge that the whole New Deal establishment, including President Truman, had acted c
overtly to protect one of their own. “This conspiracy would have come to light long since had there not been a definite effort on the part of certain high officials in two administrations to keep the public from knowing the facts,” he said in a lengthy speech on the House floor. Giving credibility to the charges of a cover-up was Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s own steadfastness toward his convicted friend: “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Nixon called Acheson’s remark “disgusting.” The secretary of state suffered, he said, from “a form of pink eye toward the Communist threat in the United States.”
Overnight, the issue of Communist subversion in the U.S. government was transformed from an indictment to a conviction. Joseph R. McCarthy, a heavy-drinking, politically desperate senator from Wisconsin, now escalated the anti-Communist probe from a question of whether there were fifth columnists in Washington to how many there were. Needing something to say to a Lincoln Day group of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy decided to crib from Nixon’s speech in the Congressional Record. “The great lesson which should be learned from the Hiss case,” the California congressman had told the House, “is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get thirty pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon . . . but a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.” McCarthy stole this practically verbatim. “One thing to remember in discussing the Communists is that we are not dealing with spies who get thirty pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.” Having plagiarized Nixon’s words, the Wisconsin senator cloned the Hiss case into hundreds of other “cases.” Whereas Nixon had found one Communist in the State Department, McCarthy now spoke of 205. Whereas Nixon had begun and ended his search with a single name, that of Alger Hiss, this medicine showman from Wisconsin was now pitching something more intoxicating: a list. Whereas Nixon, the old navy poker player, had held his stakes to risk all on Alger Hiss, McCarthy would bet on every hand. For four years the bluff worked.
* * *
NIXON’S 1950 run for the Senate would exploit a deep left-right division in the Democratic party. When Senator Downey quit the race citing health reasons, Mrs. Douglas denounced Downey’s explanation as a “cheap gimmick.” He was dropping out, she charged, because he couldn’t take the heat. With the Downey-Douglas rivalry festering, another Democratic candidate emerged on the right. Manchester Boddy, conservative editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, declared his wish to save California and the country from the Douglas campaign, which he called “a statewide conspiracy on the part of a small, subversive clique of red hots to capture, through stealth and cunning, the nerve centers of our Democratic party.” He wasn’t finished. “Mrs. Douglas gave aid and comfort to Soviet tyranny by voting against aid to both Greece and Turkey.” Now the clincher: Helen Douglas had a “consistent policy of voting along with the notorious radical Vito Marcantonio!”
The Harlem congressman relished his West Coast notoriety. Hearing that the conservative Boddy had tied his voting record to that of Mrs. Douglas, he sent word to Nixon that it might be a “good idea” for him to do the same. “Tell Nicky to get on this thing!” he said, joining in the gang assault on the party colleague he delicately dubbed a “bitch.”
An even more vicious Democratic primary was taking place in Florida, pitting veteran senator Claude Pepper, a New Deal liberal, against George Smathers in a contest to be forever known as the “Red Pepper” campaign. Pepper’s vulnerability, which Smathers brutally exploited, lay in his having continued to back the Soviet Union after World War II was over. Like Mrs. Douglas, he had opposed Truman’s 1947 call for aid to Greece and Turkey. He had added injury to insult by opposing his nomination in 1948. “Do me a favor,” Truman instructed Smathers one day over the phone. “I want you to beat that S.O.B. Senator Pepper.”
Smathers obliged with gusto. “Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiraling web of the Red network,” he said in announcing his challenge. “The people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.” The Smathers knockout punch was a leaflet, distributed on primary eve, headlined “The Red Record of Claude Pepper.” “I will never forget the feeling of revulsion that gripped me,” Pepper recounted four decades later, “as my eyes fell on the cover, which was a dreadful, snaggle-tooth picture of me. I had never laid claim to being handsome, but this photograph was just indescribably ugly, monstrous, inhuman. That people who fancied themselves decent Americans would resort to such tactics to win an election defies belief to this day.” But if Claude Pepper didn’t like such cutthroat tactics, another Senate aspirant did. “Nixon Jubilant!” the Los Angeles Herald Examiner declared. “How’d you do it?” Richard Nixon quizzed Smathers on his Red Pepper tactics. Helen Douglas would soon be the “Pink Lady.”
One day that summer, Jack Kennedy stopped by Nixon’s office for a chat, as he often did in those early years. What made the visit different was the $1,000 he brought with him from his father. Learning that Nixon wasn’t in, Kennedy handed the contribution to staffer Bill Arnold. “He explained that the check should be used in Nixon’s campaign for senator, that its intention was due partly to admiration for Nixon and partly to a preference for Congressman Nixon over Congresswoman Douglas’s pursuit of the senatorship.” According to a secretary, Nixon was “flabbergasted.” “Isn’t this something,” he said to aide Pat Hillings. “Isn’t this something!” A Democrat had crossed the political aisle to help a Republican.
For Nixon, the breaks kept coming. Back in 1947, the New York Daily Worker had called Congresswoman Douglas “one of the Heroes of the 80th Congress.” Also high on the list, predictably, was New York’s own Vito Marcantonio. By January 1950, another Communist organ, the Daily People’s World, was calling Nixon “The Man to Beat” in the California race. The Communist editors were right. Thanks to their fellow party members on the other side of the world, the California cold warrior would soon be invincible. In June, Communist North Korea attacked South Korea. Five days later, President Truman dispatched American troops. Two weeks after that, Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged with stealing atomic secrets for the Soviet Union. These stories riveted the nation and brought with them a bone-chilling reassessment of Moscow’s intentions. In an internal White House directive, Truman described the Soviet Union as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, [that] seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”
Foolishly, Helen Douglas felt the need to hit the Red button first, issuing a campaign document labeled “The Big Lie” that lambasted Nixon for having “voted with Representative Marcantonio against aid to Korea.” In all, it cited five times where Nixon and the Harlem leftist had voted together. “On every key vote Nixon stood with party-liner Marcantonio against America in its fight to defeat Communism.” Mrs. Douglas called Nixon and the other Republicans in the class of 1946 a “backwash of young men in dark suits,” a reference to Mussolini’s Fascists.
Murray Chotiner, a master at this game, struck back. “How can Helen Douglas, capable actress that she is, take up so strange a role as foe of communism? And why does she when she has so deservedly earned the title of’the Pink Lady’?”
Nixon’s own campaign now took to the road. He rode up and down California in a wood-paneled Ford station wagon; his mission: to alert the townsfolk to the threat posed by Helen Gahagan Douglas. As the Woody arrived on the main drag of each hamlet, a loudspeaker would blare out “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d a Baked a Cake.” Advance man Ace Anderson, cigar in mouth, would urge passersby to gather around and hear Dick Nixon, candidate for the U.S. Senate. When a crowd had gathered, Ace would yell into the Woody, “Okay, Dick, you can get out now.” Nixon would emerge, take his place on the car’s roof, and tell voters why it was imperative that they now send him to an even bigger job in Washington. At
every stop, his favorite topic was Alger Hiss—how he had unmasked him, how the Democrats had tried to cover up Hiss’s perfidies.
The Douglas campaign was able to enjoy a few small victories that fall. A student at the University of California at Santa Barbara named Richard Tuck managed to get himself named a Nixon advance man. His assignment was to prepare a campus location where the congressman would address the student body. The basic strategy in advancing such campaign events is to rent a small room, saturate the campus with posters, blast the local airwaves with radio spots, then pack as large a number of students as possible into the smallest space, thereby creating the greatest possible excitement about the visit. A Douglas mole, Tuck gleefully did the opposite, renting a cavernous room, then inviting practically no one to a speech he billed as a discussion on “the International Monetary Fund.” Nixon gave, according to Tuck’s gleeful report, “one of the most disjointed speeches I ever heard.” On leaving the giant empty hall, Nixon rendered his decree. “Tuck, you’ve made your last advance!”
Nixon, no stranger to the game, worked his own psychological tricks. Each time he encountered Mrs. Douglas on the stump, he executed the same velvet-gloved jab, always with a look of sadness. “It’s awfully hard on a woman, this campaigning.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 116
