But Richard Milhous Nixon was a bright man, and an ambitious one. He was looking for a chance to excel and move up the ladder. Sitting on the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was set up to investigate whether communists had infiltrated the U.S. government, Nixon thought he might very well have found that chance.
Along with the rest of the country, Nixon had been startled by allegations made a few days earlier by Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet spy. The attractive blonde testified that she had been a courier for a Communist Party spy ring in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the ring included key members of the U.S government. She said that her involvement with the Soviet espionage ring was so integral to their plans that the Soviets had made efforts to take her life. Her testimony caused a sensation in the press, emboldened congressional investigators convinced that communists had infiltrated the government, and put the administration of Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, on the defensive.
Nixon, like other members of the committee, knew they needed a second source for the allegations. Bentley had, after all, admitted to being a communist herself, so her credibility was very much in doubt. At today’s hearing, Nixon believed they just might get that corroboration.
Whittaker Chambers was not an ideal witness. He was short and plump and unattractive. He was also an admitted communist, though he told the committee that he had broken with the ideology in the 1930s, at which point he had defected to U.S. authorities. Now, working as an editor for Time magazine, Chambers had a reputation for being intelligent and accomplished. Sitting in front of the committee, he corroborated Bentley’s testimony and provided further names.
Among those names was one in particular that shocked the committee: Alger Hiss, a former State Department official currently serving as president of the Carnegie Foundation.
The story Chambers told was persuasive: Shortly after moving to Washington following his graduation from Harvard, Hiss had become a member of a discussion group organized by Harold Ware, a member of the Communist Party. But, in reality, Chambers told investigators, it was much more than a discussion group; it was also engaged in advancing the communist agenda. Although Ware died in a car crash, the group’s activities continued and, according to Chambers, involved individuals in numerous federal agencies. Chambers claimed that he got to know Hiss and his wife, Priscilla, while living rent-free in an apartment owned by Hiss.
Chambers acknowledged he previously had given names of communists to federal authorities after his defection to the United States.
“Did you name Hiss?” Richard Nixon asked.
“Yes,” Chambers replied.
“Mr. Chambers, were you informed of any action that was taken as a result of your report?”
“No. There was none.”
The revelation infuriated Nixon. It was clear to him that the State Department and the Washington establishment had been protecting Alger Hiss all along. He was, after all, one of their own.
A Few Hours Later
Washington, D.C.
August 3, 1948
“I don’t know Chambers.”
Learning of the allegations made against him, Alger Hiss was indignant—and convincing. “There is no basis for his statements about me,” he told reporters who called after the hearing.
Sitting in his office and contemplating his course, he barely had a moment of quiet to think things through. The phone rang constantly. His many friends in Washington were calling to check in. Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt had rung. Now his old mentor, the man to whom he owed his entire career, was on the line.
“Let the matter drop. If it was a lie, then why should you address it and give it more credibility?” asked Justice Frankfurter. Hiss knew he had a point. Everyone else who had been named as a communist had pled the Fifth and declined to testify.
Hiss said, “I have no reason to beat around the bush. That’s what guilty people do. I’m an innocent man. I don’t know who this Whittaker Chambers is and why he has gone to such lengths to smear me. He’s a troubled soul, that much is obvious. But I cannot tolerate such things being said about me.”
“Well, Alger, whatever you need, know that I will always vouch for you,” Frankfurter reassured him.
After they hung up, Hiss dashed off a telegram to be wired to the committee immediately:
I DO NOT KNOW MR. CHAMBERS AND, SO FAR AS I AM AWARE, HAVE NEVER LAID EYES ON HIM. THERE IS NO BASIS FOR THE STATEMENTS ABOUT ME MADE TO YOUR COMMITTEE. . . . I WOULD FURTHER APPRECIATE THE OPPORTUNITY OF APPEARING BEFORE YOUR COMMITTEE.
It was not long before his request was granted.
U.S. Capitol
Washington, D.C.
August 5, 1948
It had been just forty-eight hours since Whittaker Chambers had sworn an oath and made his allegations. Hiss was eager, even thrilled, to be given the chance to respond. He would show his accusers that the reputation he had worked so hard to build could not be pulled apart by a former communist with a clear agenda.
Alger Hiss walked into the hearing room looking like a poster child for establishment elegance. Dressed in a gray suit and dark tie, a white pocket square carefully tucked into his breast pocket, he stood up straight and walked with a purpose. He knew that his résumé had entered the room before him and would underscore every word he’d utter. Johns Hopkins University. Harvard Law Review. A Supreme Court clerk, New Deal lawyer, and senior official in the U.S. Department of State. Now he was the president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and, according to some whispers, a future candidate for secretary of state.
With a studied sense of command, impeccable manners, and graceful carriage, Hiss made it clear that he had come this morning before the HUAC to rebut the allegations made by this Chambers character, a man who, he repeatedly assured his questioners, he had never known.
Karl Mundt, a forty-eight-year-old Republican congressman from South Dakota, administered the standard oath to Hiss, asking if he would tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
“So help me God,” Hiss replied. Then, with a voice that had the power of a thunderclap, he said those words again.
“So help me God.”
Hiss knew how to take over a meeting, and this one would be no different. As he settled into the witness chair, behind a pair of large microphones, his voice was assured, confident, and resolute. He had worked on his opening remarks with his brother and several prominent Washington attorneys, yet the illusion was what was most important. These were meant to be the indignant words, all but spontaneously uttered, by the wrongfully accused.
Hiss was so confident in himself and his message that he appeared before the HUAC without the benefit of counsel. He sat alone to face the lions—though, he thought, if they were lions, they were toothless ones. He could not have been less intimidated by the blowhard members of the HUAC; he’d had tougher bouts with faculty members at Harvard. In fact, the committee itself had been under pressure from the media and the left for months, most recently over its clumsy investigation into Hollywood. According to reports, Truman’s White House counsel already had a bill in his desk drawer to abolish the committee if the Democrats reclaimed the House in the 1948 elections. HUAC needed a win, and they believed that Whittaker Chambers’s bombshell of testimony a few days earlier would help them get it.
But the doughy, tentative Chambers was not the sort of witness who would have carried much weight at the Carnegie Foundation, or before the Supreme Court, or at Harvard. Hiss almost felt sorry for him. His allegations would collapse so long as Hiss looked forthright and credible. He’d been impressing sharper, more important men than the ones on this committee all his life.
“I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party,” he said firmly. Nor, to the best of his knowledge, were any of his friends or his wife. “I think I would know,” he added.
In regards to Whittaker Chambers, Hiss reiterated that he’d
never even met a man going by that name, but insisted that he would like the opportunity to do so. “The very name of Whittaker Chambers means nothing to me,” he assured Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator.
Mundt seemed particularly concerned about the prominent role Hiss played at the Yalta Conference, which had become a political hot potato. According to one theory, pro-communist advisors had manipulated the sickly, weak president to further their agenda. If Hiss was, in fact, a communist, that would explain a lot—such as why the United States had agreed to surrendering half of Europe to Soviet influence. But Hiss did not take the bait, instead making it clear to Mundt that he shared some of the congressman’s anger over the fruits of Yalta.
As for Chambers’s allegations, Hiss’s rebuttal consisted of a powerful, sweeping set of denials to each and every charge hurled against him. He expressed his disappointment that the committee did not interview him privately before the ridiculous accusations were made in public. “Denials do not always catch up with charges,” he gently reminded them.
As his testimony continued, Hiss noticed that Congressman John McDowell of Pennsylvania was among the first to begin looking sheepish. His reelection was not going well. The embattled congressman apologized for any damage done to Hiss, a man whom “many Americans, including members of this Committee, hold in high repute.” Chairman Mundt also made the point of expressing his appreciation to Hiss for cooperating in such a forthright fashion.
Not to be outdone by either McDowell or Mundt, Mississippi Democrat John Rankin rushed from behind the dais and pushed his way through the crowd that had gathered around Hiss immediately after the committee adjourned. “Let me congratulate you on a performance unlike any we’ve seen in a decade,” Rankin told Hiss, shaking his hand admiringly.
Hiss squeezed Rankin’s hand firmly. Running over simple-minded politicians was as easy as he thought it would be.
Moments Later
U.S. Capitol
Washington, D.C.
August 5, 1948
Away from the microphones, there was no hiding from the truth: Richard Nixon knew that the hearing had gone terribly and that his colleagues on the committee were panicked.
Alger Hiss had, in a calm, controlled, and humorous demeanor, clearly carried the day inside and outside the committee room. He’d come off as a man with better things to do, yet someone who still performed his civic duty admirably.
Karl Mundt was among the first to buckle. “We’ve been had,” he said, with a loud sigh. “We’re ruined.”
“We should just wash our hands of the whole mess,” Louisiana Democrat Eddie Hébert advised. “Cut our losses now. Let the Justice Department handle the cleanup.”
Nearly all of the committee members agreed. Alger Hiss had gotten the best of them, and they knew they had better find something else soon to distract the public from this fiasco. It was the prevalent view, but it was not the only one.
Nixon had a different impression of Hiss’s appearance than other committee members. He found the Ivy League elitist to be insolent and condescending. He was preoccupied with Hiss’s answer to what seemed like a simple question: Who, Nixon had asked him, was involved in getting you to come to Washington in the first place?
Hiss’s response had been smug: “I would rather limit myself than use names loosely before your committee as so many witnesses do.”
After going back and forth with him on the point, Nixon had finally said, “I would like to have a direct answer to the question.”
Hiss reluctantly complied, naming several members of Washington’s establishment, including Justice Frankfurter. It had mollified Nixon, but only for the moment. Nixon believed that Hiss was playing with him. He could have answered the question easily the first time, but instead he seemed to enjoy making Nixon work for it. The man was so smug, so sure of himself, so utterly unfazed by the accusations against him, that it was all a little too perfect. Sure, there was manufactured outrage, he’d hit all the right notes, but none of it seemed quite real. There was, of course, also the matter of Whittaker Chambers’s assertions. Everyone on the committee now seemed to be discounting them, but Chambers himself did not back down from his allegations in the slightest.
One of these two men—Chambers or Hiss—Nixon realized, was an accomplished liar. It gnawed at him that the Washington establishment was so quick to absolve a man who was part of their clique. How did they know with such conviction that Hiss was the one telling the truth?
“I understand the concerns being expressed,” Nixon told his colleagues. “But retreating now would only make the committee look worse.” He volunteered to personally take the lead on the investigation.
At this key juncture, with the future of the committee hanging in the balance, Robert Stripling, the committee’s veteran investigator, spoke up and backed Nixon. Either Hiss or Chambers had lied under oath to a committee of the United States Congress. Stripling, like Nixon, strongly believed it was Hiss. There was something about the way he’d handled the questions, curiously hedging so many of his answers.
With Stripling’s backing, Mundt agreed to take the freshman up on his offer to lead the investigation. Nixon’s colleagues were visibly pleased by the decision, but Nixon knew they were thinking about themselves, not him. Nobody cared about throwing the ambitious but unknown young Californian to the wolves.
Roosevelt Hotel
New York City
August 8, 1948
It was troubling news. There was no doubt about it. If what Nixon’s colleague from Wisconsin, Charles Kersten, had told him was true, then Nixon’s hopes for the investigation, and his moment in the spotlight, were sure to be dashed.
A day earlier, Kersten learned that members of the Carnegie Foundation board were pressuring John Foster Dulles to issue a statement in support of Mr. Hiss. A titan of the Wall Street legal community, the Republican Party’s éminence grise on foreign affairs, and a close advisor to the Dewey campaign, Dulles was widely expected to be sworn in as secretary of state once New York governor Thomas Dewey trounced Truman in the November presidential election. If Dulles came out in support of Hiss, it would mean the end of the investigation. No Republican in Congress would want to tangle with a party leader of Dulles’s stature or come crosswise with the Dewey administration.
On the train from Washington to a New York City hotel, where they were set to meet with Dulles, Nixon and Kersten had fretted. What would they say to persuade him to stay out of this? What would they do if he refused?
In his suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, which served as “Dewey for President” headquarters, Dulles, joined by his brother Allan, welcomed the congressmen warmly and showed Kersten and Nixon to their seats. The Dulles brothers listened to Nixon’s concerns carefully, and then both reviewed the transcripts of Chambers’s original testimony.
Nixon and Kersten waited patiently on the sofa in silence. Minutes passed, then minutes more. Finally, John Foster Dulles put down the papers, rose from his chair, and folded his hands behind his back. Then he paced back and forth in front of the fireplace with his head down for what seemed like an eternity.
At last he stopped, his careful eyes turning toward Nixon and Kersten. “There’s no question about it,” Dulles concluded. “It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers does appear to know Hiss.”
Dulles told Nixon that he would not write a letter in support of Hiss and that it was, in fact, clear there was a real case against him. “In view of the facts Chambers has testified to, you’d be derelict in your duty as a congressman if you did not see the case through to a conclusion.”
Nixon exhaled and smiled broadly. He was back in business.
Commodore Hotel
New York City
August 16, 1948
Situated conveniently adjacent to Grand Central Terminal, the Commodore was impressive in both scope and grace. One end of the hotel was specially stocked with telephones, stock tickers, even stenographers—everything busy men of aff
airs required.
Room 1400 of the Commodore became the HUAC’s New York City headquarters. There, the Nixon subcommittee met, far away from the D.C. media frenzy, to further their investigation into Alger Hiss.
The first step, Nixon knew, was to prove that Hiss had lied in his August 5, 1948, testimony about ever knowing Whittaker Chambers.
Under questioning, Chambers gave Nixon and his colleagues extensive details about his relationship with the Hisses. He told them all about the times he had stayed with the family and he knew details like family nicknames, loan balances, and personal hobbies. He could even describe the cars parked in their family garage. The details about Hiss were so extensive that Chambers was either telling the truth or was a complete and total psychopath. Nixon talked with him long enough to conclude the latter wasn’t likely. Sure, Chambers was an odd duck, but he didn’t seem insane or delusional.
As Hiss entered the hotel room and sat before members of the subcommittee, Nixon still saw the same smug, self-satisfied man who’d bested them days earlier. But this time, Nixon was determined to reach a different outcome.
As the subcommittee grilled Hiss on the details that Chambers knew about him, Hiss began to backtrack ever so slightly. Now that he thought about it, he acknowledged, Nixon might be describing a man he had known as George Crosley when he’d been on detail from the Department of Agriculture to a U.S. Senate committee. But this Crosley, Hiss said, was nothing but a passing acquaintance. And Hiss would have to see him in person to know for sure if it was the same man.
Nixon watched as his colleague, John McDowell, leaned forward. “Mr. Hiss, have you ever seen a prothonotary warbler?”
It was not every day that a United States congressman asked a suspected communist about the sighting of a rare songbird, and Nixon was curious to see if Hiss would dodge it. “I have,” Hiss replied, politely. “On the Potomac.”
Nixon struggled to keep his expression blank. What Hiss did not know was that Chambers had told the committee that Hiss and his wife were bird-watchers who had gotten very excited about seeing that particular warbler—one of the rarest, most prized sightings by mid-Atlantic birders. Only someone very intimate with Hiss and his wife—certainly more intimate than a passing acquaintance like “George Crosley” had been—would have known this and many other small details about Hiss’s private life.