Being Nixon: A Man Divided (7 page)

The next morning Hiss telegraphed the committee demanding the right to formally and publicly deny Chambers’s charge. He appeared before a packed hearing room on August 5. Hiss was tall and handsome,
elegantly dressed, “coldly courteous, and at times, condescending,” Nixon recalled. He denied ever having heard the name Whittaker Chambers. Shown a picture of Chambers, he paused, looking up at Congressman Karl Mundt, the acting chairman of the committee. “He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the Chairman of this Committee.” Mundt, who was pudgy like Chambers, looked taken aback. “I hope you are wrong about that,” he said.

The spectators tittered. When the hearing was over, a crowd clustered around Hiss to congratulate him. “It was a virtuoso performance,” Nixon recalled. “Without actually saying it, he left the clear impression that he was the innocent victim of a terrible case of mistaken identity.”
¹⁸
The liberal press agreed. A
Washington Post
editorial compared Hiss to “an innocent pedestrian, splattered with mud by a passing vehicle.” The
Post
’s cartoonist, Herbert Block—“Herblock”—who would later become one of Nixon’s great tormentors, drew a picture of an innocent man cornered by a tiger; the tiger was labeled “Smear Statements.”
¹⁹
At a press conference, President Truman was asked about HUAC’s latest foray into the underworld of communist espionage rings. “A red herring,” said the president, dismissively and perhaps a little too cleverly.

Most of the committee members folded like the schoolyard bullies they were. “We’ve been had. We’re ruined,” moaned one. “Let’s wash our hands of the whole mess,” said another. Only Nixon wanted to keep going.
²⁰

At lunch, he said to his secretary, Dorothy Cox, that there was something a little too suave, a little too sure about the man in the Ivy League suit. Hiss seemed to be overplaying his hand. Nixon decided to press forward with his own investigation.

In his 1962 memoir,
Six Crises
, Nixon asserts that he had known nothing of Hiss until Chambers named him to the committee. Various historians have insisted that Nixon was tipped off by a “Red hunter” named Father John Cronin who had good FBI ties. Toward the end of his life, Nixon insisted to biographer Jonathan Aitken that he didn’t discuss Hiss with Cronin until after he had broken the case.
Cronin largely backed up Nixon’s version, according to Aitken: “Nixon may have read something about Hiss in my reports…but we didn’t discuss the case until after Hiss made his public denial.”

Nixon scholar Irwin Gellman has pored over Nixon’s diaries and papers and found no trace that Cronin tipped off Nixon beforehand. It is possible that Nixon read Cronin’s 1945 document, “The Problem of American Communism,” which mentions Hiss four times in 146 pages. But, using the colloquial smear of the day, Cronin lumped Hiss in with “fellow travelers” like Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who were hardly reporting to the Kremlin.
²¹
Cronin regarded Hiss as a communist sympathizer, but he had no inkling that the diplomat was a Soviet spy.

Nixon could not know, either. But even as an obscure congressman, he had an instinct for what he liked to call “the big play.” Nixon may not have known that Hiss had served the Soviet intelligence service, but he could tell a phony when he saw one, especially one who affected an upper-class accent.

On August 17,
Hiss appeared before Nixon and a committee investigator at a suite in the Commodore Hotel in New York City. Hiss noted that he was supposed to meet his wife at the Harvard Club that night; he hoped someone would let her know if he had to be late.
²²
The patrician Hiss, who came from a genteel, if threadbare, Wasp family, had an almost incurable need to remind Nixon that he was dealing with a social better. At a later session, as Nixon and Hiss were sparring over some point of law, Hiss huffily declared, “I am familiar with the law. I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier?” Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator, observed that “Nixon turned red and blue and red again. You could see the hackles on his back practically pushing his coat up.” Stripling later said that “Nixon set his hat for Hiss. It was a personal thing.”
²³

Nixon’s pursuit of Hiss has been portrayed by some as a class vendetta, by others as a noble crusade. Stripling was too cynical; Nixon was a true anticommunist. Still, ideology was not his sole, or
even his primary, motivation. Personal ambition, patriotism, and an almost eerily prescient sense of timing moved Nixon more than fixed political principle. Nixon always emphasized the loneliness of his quest, and he must have
felt
alone as he defied conventional wisdom in Washington, including, at first, the opinions of his own colleagues on the committee. But Nixon was not one to swing wildly. Quietly, before he went public with his attack on Hiss, Nixon checked in with some paragons of the ruling order. The first was Christian Herter. Nixon was “particularly disturbed,” he recalled, by his conversation with Herter. “I don’t want to prejudge the case,” Herter told Nixon, but he warned against getting “taken in by Chambers.”

Nixon admired Herter, but he also knew that Herter was a member of Hiss’s tribe and was perhaps blinded by class loyalty. So Nixon pressed on. He went to see John Foster Dulles, the senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, the same Wall Street firm where Nixon, as a needy Duke Law student, had sat forlornly in the lobby worrying about the shabbiness of his one good suit. Dulles was Governor Dewey’s chief foreign policy adviser in the presidential campaign of 1948, but he took the time to see young Congressman Nixon, possibly because he was shrewd enough to see some risk of his own exposure in the Hiss case. Dulles had recommended Hiss for his current job as head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Nixon showed Dulles the testimony of Hiss and Chambers. A careful lawyer, Dulles read the document closely, noting that Chambers was able to identify personal details about Hiss’s life. “There’s no question about it,” he finally said. “It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.” Should Nixon proceed with the investigation? Dulles told Nixon, “In view of the facts Chambers has testified to, you’d be derelict in your duty if you did not see the case through to a conclusion.” Dulles displayed a curious mixture of high righteousness and expedient cunning; he had already begun writing memos to files distancing himself from Hiss.
²⁴

Nixon got a little help from the FBI, but not much. The Bureau’s J. Edgar Hoover regarded himself as the nation’s chief bulwark
against communism, but he was ultimately interested in preserving his own vast power above all. He deftly played politicians against each other, dispensing or threatening to expose secrets, national and personal, as it suited his purposes and ambition. With Nixon he entered a dance that, as it turned out, would go on for another twenty-five years. An FBI agent shared evidence on Hiss with Nixon, partly to help goad the Truman administration, but he did it selectively and warily. In late September, Hoover’s trusted assistant, Clyde Tolson, wrote a memo to Hoover asserting that Nixon was a headline seeker who “plays both ends against the middle.” Hoover wrote in the margin: “I agree.”
²⁵

Certainly, Nixon worked hard to play reporters. He would invite groups of them to his office in the evening, making sure, with characteristic studiousness, to memorize their names and favorite cocktails. Bert Andrews was the Washington Bureau chief of the
New York Herald Tribune
, an organ of moderate Republican reason, widely regarded as second only to
The New York Times
in clout. Andrews had won a Pulitzer Prize a year earlier for articles critical of HUAC’s heavy-handedness. Nixon offered Andrews what newsmen prize: exclusive access. He invited Andrews to come with him to visit Chambers on his farm in Maryland.
²⁶

Thanks partly to Nixon’s leaks, press interest in the Chambers-Hiss investigation began to mushroom during the hot Indian summer of 1948. Nixon had to sneak out a window of the Old House Office Building to slip past the press pack and drive to Chambers’s farm, where he spent days quizzing the moody ex-Red. Chambers had a shadowy past—he had been arrested for homosexuality and had told a great many lies during his underground existence as the member of a communist cell. Chambers was gloomy and martyrish, shy and tortured, and Nixon, for his part, may have related to him; certainly, he understood him. The two became family friends. Nixon took Chambers to meet his mother, while Chambers later wrote that his children worshipped “Nixie, the kind and good, about whom they will hear no nonsense.”
²⁷

During several days of testimony in late August and September, at the first-ever televised congressional hearings, Nixon, Chambers, and Hiss parried over the facts that might—or might not—expose Hiss as a Soviet agent who had worked in cahoots with Chambers in the 1930s. The details were petty and arcane—Chambers was able to show that he knew that Hiss’s Quaker wife, Priscilla, used the “thee” and “thou” of “plain speech” and that Hiss was an avid bird watcher. Slowly, under hot lights in a crowded hearing room, Hiss’s veneer of aloofness and haughty innocence peeled away.
²⁸

Nixon drove himself harder. He “immersed himself in the case with an intensity that was almost frightening,” recorded his daughter Julie.
²⁹
Nixon later wrote that he felt enormous tension, that he was caught in a constant state of crisis—but that he regarded his feelings as normal and healthy in a way, or at least necessary for any warrior girding for the fight. In
Six Crises
, he was quite frank about the emotional and physical toll: “I began to notice…the inevitable symptoms of tension. I was ‘mean’ to live with at home and with my friends. I was quick-tempered with members of my staff. I lost interest in eating and skipped meals without even being aware of it. Getting to sleep became more and more difficult.”

He continued, a little self-consciously:

I suppose some might say that I was “nervous,” but I knew these were simply the evidences of preparing for battle. There is, of course, a fine line to be observed. One must always be keyed up for battle but he must not be jittery. He is jittery only when he worries about the natural symptoms of stress. He is keyed up when he recognizes those symptoms for what they are—the physical evidences that the mind, emotions, and body are ready for action.

If these passages are to be believed, Nixon did not look inward in any truly self-scrutinizing way. There was no attempt at self-analysis, as there might have been by a member of a later generation; surely, he
did not see what some future biographers would discern—a frightened boy cowering before his father’s hand or an over-eager youngster desperately seeking to win his withholding mother’s conditional love.
³⁰
Rather, he saw a fighter, a battler. Sleeplessness and short temper were not signs of neurosis or even “jitteryness.” They were, for Nixon, the predictable manifestations of the “mind, emotions, and body” bracing for noble combat. What Nixon really felt, deep down, is unknowable, but no one ever worked harder at maintaining a facade of upbeat stoicism, not just to the outside world, one suspects, but in his own mind as well. He was determined not to worry about being worried.

He was not insensitive. He was not a blunt instrument, a “planing machine gouging a deep self-beneficial groove through life,” as William James had described Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Indeed, despite his later jealousy, he had been able to see past JFK’s show of effortless grace to a kindred shyness. Nixon felt that he had overcome his disadvantages not by giving in but by fighting back—by audacity and grit, not equivocation and self-doubt. He rarely lowered his guard or stood down.

Still, it was exhausting always to be on alert, like a ship in harm’s way. Nixon could not sustain such a high state of readiness indefinitely. On the eve of a big hearing on August 25, Bert Andrews stopped by Nixon’s office and said, “You look like hell. You need some sleep.” That night Nixon took his first sleeping pill.
³¹

The Nixons had
not taken a vacation in three years. The Herter Committee ruined a planned holiday in 1947, and the Alger Hiss affair put off a trip to the beach in August of 1948. Finally, in December, Nixon took Pat on a Caribbean cruise. On the first night at sea, they were dining at the captain’s table when the purser brought over a radio telegram. It was from Stripling, the committee investigator. Chambers had produced some documentary evidence proving that Hiss was a Soviet spy. Stripling’s “cablese” was breathless indeed: “Case clinched. Information amazing. Heat is on from the press and other
places. Immediate action appears necessary. Can you possibly get back?”

Nixon read the telegram aloud at the table. Pat threw up her hands and said, “Here we go again.”

A telegram followed from Bert Andrews, the
New York Herald Tribune
man who was working so closely with Nixon that he was practically on staff: “Documents incredibly hot. Stop. Link to Hiss seems certain. Stop….Love to Pat. Stop. (Signed) Vacation-Wrecker Andrews.”

Stripling arranged to have a Coast Guard seaplane pick up Nixon at a mid-ocean rendezvous. (Pat was to make her way home, alone, from the ship’s next port of call.) The press, duly tipped off, was waiting in Miami when Nixon emerged from the co-pilot’s seat, hero to the rescue. Reporters yelled for Nixon’s comments on the “Pumpkin Papers.” Nixon, befuddled, asked, “What is this, a joke?” The reporters explained that Chambers, leading investigators out into the fields on his farm, had taken the top off a pumpkin and produced five rolls of microfilm containing photographs of secret State Department documents—and, most damningly, summaries in Hiss’s own handwriting.
³²

The revelation of the microfilm sparked an intense media circus. Nixon was photographed peering through a magnifying glass at the evidence, like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes (never mind that the film could be read only on a microfilm projector).
³³
The film of the Pumpkin Papers, announced Nixon, was “conclusive proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation’s history”—true enough, because America, since Benedict Arnold, had experienced relatively little treason.