The Arrogance of Power (11 page)

Two FBI assistant directors, one of them future domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan, said Nixon's application was ultimately set aside because he was judged “lacking in aggression,” a characterization that runs counter to remarks in the FBI file. By another account, the problem was a report prepared by John Vincent, agent in charge in Charlotte, North Carolina, the FBI office responsible for the area that included Duke Law School. It was there that a year earlier Nixon had broken into the dean's offices. Hoover's fact checkers may also have turned up the fact that Nixon had once been briefly under arrest following a student prank at Whittier College, despite his assertion on his application form that he had never been arrested.
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The FBI investigated as well Nixon's claim to have worked during vacations as Richfield Oil's “manager” of the service station next to his father's store. A Richfield representative said Nixon had only “done odd jobs for him from time to time.” Not for the last time Nixon had been caught bending the truth.
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In 1947, when Nixon arrived in Washington, Hoover had access to all file material concerning the incoming representative, for his staff routinely provided him with detailed briefs on all new congressmen. Apparently nothing Hoover learned then about Nixon, however, troubled him. During Hoover's appearance before HUAC that year, when Nixon asked the director several questions, an attorney accompanying Hoover leaned across to offer him a piece of information: Nixon, he said, had used dirty tricks to beat Voorhis in the recent election. “I know all about that,” Hoover replied, “but it looks to me as if he's going to be a good man for us.”

Nixon met with Hoover that year, and—after some initial misunderstandings
¹⁰
—a long collaborative relationship began. Five years later, when Nixon ran for vice president, the supposedly apolitical Hoover hosted a fund-raiser for him. They were seen together at the races and at baseball games. Hoover also secretly supplied Nixon with negative intelligence about other politicians. After the 1960 election had swept Nixon into the wilderness, Hoover was a sympathetic houseguest.

Like many others, Nixon feared what compromising information the director might have about him—so much so that when he was president and Hoover had become senile, he did not dare fire him. On balance, though, the FBI connection was a huge long-term asset. “Hoover,” Nixon said ruefully after the director had died and Watergate was dragging him down to disgrace, “was my crony.”

In 1948 that crony had a motive to encourage the congressman's pursuit of Alger Hiss. Hoover was frustrated by what he saw as the Truman administration's failure to fight domestic communism, and he wanted vindication for the FBI's work against subversives. Like Dulles, he was committed to seeing President Truman defeated in the presidential election.

Truman of course surprised everyone by beating Thomas Dewey in November. Years later Truman would insist he knew what the Hiss case had really been about. “What they were trying to do, all those birds,” he said, “they were trying to get the Democrats. They were trying to get me out of the White House, and they were willing to go to any lengths to do it. . . . They did do just about anything they could think of, all that witch-hunting. . . . The Constitution has never been in such danger. . . .”

Hoover's assistance to Nixon on the Hiss case proved crucial. Although rumors about Hiss had been circulating since 1939,
¹¹
the FBI had taken action only in 1941, when his name appeared on a list of alleged Communists. The bureau began intercepting his mail that year. A few months later Chambers named Hiss as a Communist during an interview with FBI agents.

By 1945 the flow of allegations had increased. A Soviet defector in Canada, a code clerk, described a spy within the State Department in terms that pointed directly to Hiss. Hiss was also implicated by a former Communist courier, Elizabeth Bentley, and Chambers told a State Department security officer that Hiss had been one of the “top leaders of the underground.” Hiss had been a junior figure in the department when the rumors started, but by war's end he had risen to become a close aide to the secretary of state, an adviser to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill, and secretary-general of the founding convention of the United Nations. Claims that such a highly placed figure was a Communist had to be taken seriously.

In late 1945 the FBI had begun tailing Hiss wherever he went, as well as tapping his phone and resuming interception of his mail. Hiss was ultimately eased out of the State Department, but not fast enough for Hoover. In late 1946 the FBI director began orchestrating a series of leaks to friends of the FBI, key press contacts, and members of Congress—among them Richard Nixon.

Nixon was to claim later that the first he heard of Hiss was in August 1948, when Whittaker Chambers testified before the Un-American Activities Committee. “The FBI,” he insisted, “played no role whatever in the Hiss case. . . .”

The facts suggest otherwise. Within a month of taking office, Nixon had accompanied a fellow congressman to a meeting with Father John Cronin, a
Catholic priest who had informed on Communists while working with labor unions during the war. The bureau now used him as a conduit for deliberate leaks. In a report prepared for the Catholic hierarchy, drawing on what the FBI had told him, Cronin had named Hiss as the most influential Communist in the State Department. He later recalled having shown Nixon that report and having discussed Hiss with him. “Nixon,” Cronin claimed, “was playing with a stacked deck in the Hiss case.”
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Once the HUAC probe of Hiss got under way, Cronin said, “the really hard-core material was given to me—uh, informally . . . by my friends of the FBI.” One such friend, Agent Ed Hummer, supplied daily reports of progress in the ongoing bureau investigation. Hummer, Cronin said, would “tell me what they had turned up. . . . I told Dick, who then knew just where to look for things and what he would find.” By the time the HUAC probe became serious, Nixon was on the phone late at night with one of Hoover's top aides, Louis Nichols, and meeting in his hotel room with former FBI agents.

One of HUAC's key investigators on the Hiss case was a former FBI agent, Lou Russell, who by one account had been the initial investigator of the committee's interest in Whittaker Chambers. Russell spent an enormous amount of time with Nixon, traveled with him, and stayed in touch by telephone outside working hours; he reported Nixon's thinking back to Hoover. Russell was a Democrat, but one said to have used the word “liberal” as though it were synonymous with “radical.” First and foremost, though, he was an operator, one who would crop up again in the unfolding story of Nixon's life. Two decades later, he would be a mystery figure at the scene of the Watergate burglary.

They're trying to prove . . . my entire career was built on a fraud.

—Richard Nixon in 1992, on a report that Soviet archives showed Alger Hiss to have been innocent

“I
am a graduate of Harvard Law School,” said the debonair witness. Then, after a pause, he asked, “And I believe yours is Whittier?” Thus did Alger Hiss, at their first Un-American Activities Committee encounter, slyly trigger Richard Nixon's neurosis about the East Coast elite. “It absolutely ripped Nixon apart,” remembered HUAC's chief investigator Robert Stripling. “I realized from that moment on that he could not stand Hiss.”

Hiss himself took a dispassionate view of the man who effectively destroyed his career and put him in jail. “Nixon,” he said years later, “I always regarded as an opportunistic politician. . . . And I knew enough about politicians to know what political ambitions sometimes lead people to do.”

Stripling too questioned Nixon's motives. “Nixon had his hat set for Hiss,” he said. “. . . It was a personal thing. He was no more concerned about whether Hiss was [a Communist] than a billy goat.” Having at first had the impression Nixon was even tempered, Stripling soon saw an immoderate side. “I was surprised one day, sitting in his office. . . . He said to me, ‘Hiss, that son of a bitch is lying . . . lying, lying, lying!” Recalling how Nixon pounded the table during this outburst, Stripling said it was “more than, you know, just somebody saying, ‘I don't believe this guy.' He was just
outraged.
Of course, I knew nothing about him being briefed. . . .”

Nixon assiduously cultivated Whittaker Chambers early in the investigation, making repeated trips to Chambers's home in the Maryland countryside. Hiss, concerned by a news story describing one of the visits, questioned Nixon about it at a HUAC executive session. When he made a minor error, asking Nixon if it was true that he had just spent the weekend at Chambers's farm in
New Jersey
—as distinct from Maryland—Nixon denied it.

Suspicious, he explained, of Hiss's initial denials that he even knew Chambers, Nixon turned detective, searching for compelling evidence that the two men had indeed been associates. Chambers knew myriad details about Hiss and his family life—more, surely, one might add today, than could have been proved to him by FBI agents armed with the fruits of the bureau's surveillance of Hiss. Eventually, at a confrontation with Chambers orchestrated by Nixon and Lou Russell, Hiss conceded that he had known Chambers, albeit under another name.
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Hiss claimed that he had been friendly with Chambers for only a brief period in 1935. Yet he had provided Chambers and his wife with accommodations—first in his own home and then in a furnished apartment—and had given him a used car as a present. Evidence in a real estate agent's files also indicated that in 1936 and 1937 both men had negotiated to buy the same remote farmhouse, a fact that seemed beyond coincidence.

Most reasonable people would conclude from the accumulated evidence
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that Hiss did know Chambers, and for longer than he admitted, and that he did associate with leftists and Communists before the war. There was no crime in that. What, then, was Hiss hiding? That his relationship with Chambers was one of spy working with fellow spy? Or was it something less serious, some embarrassing personal secret?

Twenty-five years after the Hiss affair, in a converation with a senior congressman aboard the presidential yacht, Nixon would reveal what he called “the true story of the Hiss case”—namely, that Chambers and Hiss had been “queers.” He repeated the allegation to others.

Chambers, who was married with children, admitted to numerous homosexual encounters. Once, according to the other man involved, he tried to force himself on a colleague in their rooming house. His homosexuality, Chambers told the FBI, was his darkest secret, and his active homosexual phase had corresponded precisely with the period in which he knew the Hisses. According to one report received by the FBI, he had had relations with Hiss's stepson, Timothy, then in early adolescence.
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The last time he had seen Hiss, Chambers told Nixon, was an evening when Timothy “wanted him to stay overnight.” Mrs. Hiss objected, and he had left.

Chambers denied having had any sexual involvement with Alger Hiss but told Nixon that Hiss had been his “closest friend.” He revealed an attachment to things linked to Hiss that bordered on fetishism, keeping—years after their association ended—numerous items that once belonged to the Hisses, including a wing chair, a table, and a broken love seat. More than a decade later he
produced a carefully folded piece of cloth, explaining that it was the fabric that once had covered the wing chair. He had removed it, had it dry-cleaned, then carefully preserved it.

Hiss suggested that Chambers had framed him because of unrequited sexual passion. His accuser had never made any homosexual advances, he said, 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.” Perhaps there was an emotional foundation to Chambers's attitude toward Hiss, and perhaps it did turn to hatred; but if so, it does nothing to explain the hard evidence that put Hiss in jail: Chambers's hoard of documents and microfilm.

Hiss's accuser produced his first surprise—copies of State Department documents, stored until then in a dumbwaiter shaft, in November 1948, having insisted until then that although Hiss had been a fellow Communist, no espionage had been involved. When word of the material reached HUAC, at a time the Hiss probe seemed moribund, Nixon reacted oddly. Far from being excited at what seemed a big break in the case, he seemed nervous and irritable. When investigator Stripling suggested driving at once to see Chambers, Nixon talked instead of leaving with Pat the next day on an ocean cruise.

“I'm so goddamned sick and tired of this case,” he told Stripling in early December, “I don't want to hear any more about it, and I'm going to Panama. And the hell with it, and you, and the whole damned business!” Hours later, after Nixon did agree to go to see Chambers again, the witness intimated that he had a second bombshell. Surely, Stripling asked Nixon, he would now postpone his vacation plans? Nixon retorted, “I don't think he's got a damned thing. I'm going right ahead with my plans.”

He left on the cruise the following morning, having grudgingly told Stripling to subpoena Chambers for any documents still in his possession. Within twenty-four hours, with flabbergasted HUAC staffers standing by, Chambers produced several rolls of microfilm of State Department documents from the famous hollowed-out pumpkin. Informed by radiogram aboard ship, Nixon decided to return to Washington at once. He did so in theatrical fashion, transferring from his liner to a coast guard seaplane, then flying to Florida to be met by a posse of reporters.

The photograph of the young congressman emerging from the seaplane, accompanied by his declaration (made before he had even seen the new evidence) that Chambers's cache would “prove once and for all that where you have a Communist you have an espionage agent,” was flashed across the nation. Back in Washington, after only a cursory look at the latest discoveries, Nixon announced to the press they were “conclusive proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation's history . . . proof that cannot be denied.”

Two factors may explain Nixon's odd behavior, and the truth may embrace both. His overwrought condition before the trip may have been in part a reaction to too much pressure and a marriage under strain. After a canceled
summer vacation, he said, he had promised Pat he would not postpone another. “He was so exhausted,” his secretary asserted, “that we talked him into a vacation.”

Other information, however, suggests that the interrupted vacation scenario was in fact staged. Nixon had phoned one of Director Hoover's closest aides late the night before his departure, to ask the FBI to stay away from the new development, as he would be holding hearings in two weeks. Telling Stripling he would be back after Christmas, he also tried to put HUAC on hold. Yet it seems he already knew he would be back far sooner than that.

In the early hours of the day he was to leave on his cruise, Nixon had happened to meet the House doorkeeper, William Miller, in a corridor of the House of Representatives. To the congressman it was a casual conversation with a lowly functionary, unlikely ever to be reported. Unfortunately for Nixon, though, Miller later wrote a memoir in which he recalled that as they greeted each other in the corridor, Nixon said: “I'm going to get on a steamship, and you will be reading about it. I am going out to sea, and they are going to send for me. You will understand when I get back. . . .” The puzzled Miller thought the congressman looked “very elated and keyed up, as if he were dancing on wires.”

Three days later, with Nixon on his way back to Washington, Miller recalled, “Finally I knew what he meant about the trip. The [newspaper] story said he had been aboard the steamship when the call came to return to Washington. I thought to myself, ‘That clever guy—he knew all the time.' . . . I had been in on the start of something very peculiar.” Coast guard logs also reportedly suggest that arrangements for Nixon's return had been made even before his ship left harbor in New York, which would confirm suspicion that the trip was a charade to ensure maximum publicity.

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With the Pumpkin Papers in hand, however, things moved apace. Concerns about Chambers's credibility were put aside, and by Christmas Hiss had been indicted for perjury. The big issue now was the need to link Hiss to the copies of the compromising documents with hard evidence. “Attempt,” Chambers had told HUAC investigator Stripling, “to locate the typewriter . . .” And they did find a typewriter.

When Hiss came to trial in the summer of 1949, an antiquated office machine sat on a table in the courtroom in full view of the jury. Its keys clacked noisily as an FBI agent demonstrated that it still functioned. The Woodstock machine, vintage circa 1929, serial no. N230099, became one of the prosecutor's “imutable witnesses” against Hiss.

“It had a powerful psychological impact,” the accused man remembered long afterward, “. . . sitting there like a murder weapon.” “The typewriter evidence,” Nixon said, “was a major factor in leading to the Hiss conviction.”

Document examiners for both sides judged that the purloined State Department documents had been retyped on the same machine as old letters known to have been typed on the Woodstock the Hisses had once owned. They had given the machine away, however, and just when they did so it became a crucial issue in the case. For if the Woodstock had been no longer in the family's possession before the earliest date on the papers in Chambers's hoard, then Hiss was surely innocent.

The Hiss defense team and the FBI hunted eagerly for the family's old typewriter, tracking the chain of possession from person to person. The Hiss group found it first—or believed they had—when they recovered Woodstock N230099 from a junk dealer. However, its discovery brought the defense no comfort, for again experts for both sides were in agreement: The type on the salvaged Woodstock matched that on both the stolen government documents and the Hiss family correspondence, hard evidence that appeared to be devastating.

“It is the contention of the government,” the trial judge was to conclude as he summed up the evidence, “that this is the typewriter upon which the Baltimore exhibits were typed.” In fact, the prosecution had carefully contended no such thing. It was not just that there was ultimately uncertainty about whether the Hisses were still in possession of their machine at the time the State Department documents were purloined and copied, for the evidence on that issue has always been hopelessly muddled. There was also serious doubt about whether the Woodstock produced in court was really the old Hiss family machine. Its serial number, N230099, almost certainly indicated that it had been manufactured too late to be the Hiss typewriter. While the FBI had that information when the case went to trial, the defense did not.

Hiss spoke only two sentences in court after he had been found guilty. The first was to thank the judge. The second was to assert that one day in the future it would be disclosed how “forgery by typewriter” had been committed. “Even his most ardent supporters could not swallow such a ridiculous charge,” Richard Nixon scoffed in response to Hiss's claim as late as 1976. “A typewriter, is, as you know, almost the same as a fingerprint. It is impossible, according to experts in the field, to duplicate exactly the characteristics of one typewriter by manufacturing another one.”

Nixon was wrong. Contrary to his claim, typewriters have been expertly forged, and with the government's blessing, in a very relevant time frame. By 1941, as part of World War II liaison between American and British intelligence, operatives had developed machines that, according to one of the British officers involved, “could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth.” One successful anti-Nazi operation achieved precisely that by rebuilding an old Italian typewriter.

Who, though, might have performed such a feat in the Hiss case? And who else, then, might have had the means, motive, or opportunity to frame Hiss with a counterfeit typewriter? Who would have had access to the original typewriter in order to do so?

The machine was apparently recovered by the defense team a full five months after Chambers had produced his cache of documents.
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There are some indications, though, that it was actually retrieved much earlier than that—by HUAC, or by the FBI, or by HUAC and the FBI working together. Just a month after Chambers released the papers, the
New York World-Telegram
cited congressional investigators as saying they had found the machine “with the assistance of the FBI.” Similarly, HUAC's final report credited the FBI with “the lcoation of the typewriter.” A HUAC congressman, John McDowell, wrote that committee investigators and the FBI deserved the credit for “finding the typewriter.”