The Arrogance of Power (13 page)

Such claims by the former Soviet agent, however, cannot be relied upon. In a 1996 memoir, another former Soviet intelligence officer, Vitaly Pavlov, decried Gordievsky's claims about Hiss, dismissing them as “the pure fabrication of a traitor.” Pavlov said Hiss was not a Soviet agent.

In 1996, after Nixon's death but while Hiss was still alive, the National Security Agency in Washington released a series of long-withheld intercepts of Soviet messages, known by the code word VENONA. One, deciphered by the Army Security Agency, was sent from Washington to Moscow. Dated March
30, 1945, it reports on a conversation with someone named ALES, who, with his relatives,
¹⁴
had been working for the GRU since 1935, concentrating on military information. The report quotes ALES as saying that on a visit he paid to Moscow after the Yalta Conference, the deputy Soviet foreign minister had passed on the GRU's gratitude. ALES and his fellow traitors had, moreover, been awarded Soviet decorations. (See facsimile, p. 493.)

A footnote, appended by a U.S. intelligence analyst, reads: “ALES: Probably Alger Hiss.” By the time this document was made public, the aged Hiss had only months to live. Speaking through his son, he said he was not ALES. Yet two additional reports, said to be from NKVD files, were published by historian Weinstein. They too refer to ALES, are in the same time frame, and contain details that may be consistent with the idea that ALES was Hiss. Weinstein also noted that of the four State Department officials who had flown to Moscow from Yalta, only Hiss has ever come under suspicion of espionage.

“Alger Hiss was most likely a Soviet agent,” a
New York Times
editorial intoned in 1998. Had he lived to hear of these developments, Richard Nixon would doubtless have been delighted. As things stand, however, the newly available data from the old Soviet Union are not proof that Hiss was rightly convicted, at least not the sort of proof that history requires.

The identification of ALES as Hiss is suggestive but must for now be regarded as tentative. We have not yet been able to examine copies of the NKVD reports that appear to be so damaging, and Weinstein reportedly never saw the originals for himself. The one person who apparently did have access to them was Weinstein's coauthor for the book in which the reports are published, Alexander Vassiliev, and he was a retired KGB officer. The supposed NKVD reports were produced as the result of a cash-for-documents deal between Weinstein and his publisher and the association of former KGB officers. Weinstein did not respond to repeated attempts to make contact during the writing of this book.

It can be argued that the identification of ALES as Hiss is less than convincing. John Lowenthal, a lawyer who has long been a student of the subject and who maintains Hiss was innocent, has noted that—unlike the ALES of the 1945 message—Hiss was never accused of betraying “military” information. As he reads it, moreover, the syntax of the message refers not to ALES as having gone to Moscow from Yalta, but a Soviet official. Finally, in an article due to be published in the fall of 2000—and shared with the author—Lowenthal produced a new denial from a Russian official source that Hiss had ever worked for Moscow.

Meanwhile many other important files remained closed, including other Soviet records, and ironically—even though the House Un-American Activities Committee is long defunct–HUAC's own documents. These were sealed, in 1976, for an additional fifty years. Until we have full access, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated.

A fascinating question, still unresolved, is whether Nixon's secret sources—J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, or other OSS/CIA contacts—were aware by
1948 of the deciphered VENONA messages—and of the ALES cable in particular—that seem to point to Hiss's guilt. It is not clear, as of this writing, just when the possibly compromising ALES message was first decoded by U.S. intelligence. A new release of the document, provided to the author in the summer of 2000, appears to establish that the basic text had been cracked at least by 1949. We know, too, that the first breakthrough in decoding the VENONA material had come as early as 1946—well before Nixon began pursuing Hiss.

The Army Security Agency severely restricted access to VENONA—it seems that even President Truman was not allowed in on the secret. FBI Director Hoover, however, apparently was in the know, for his agents were working alongside the ASA staff as they gradually broke the code.

According to the available record, the fledgling CIA was not in the immediate loop on VENONA. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Omar Bradley, however, had authority to brief “anyone else in authority” at his discretion. We do not know if this included the former OSS chief, William Donovan, whose organization had by then been disbanded. Yet because of his eminence and not least because it was he who had provided the army with the tool that enabled it to start cracking the Soviet cipher in the first place—a partially burned Soviet codebook salvaged from a World War II battlefield—Donovan may have been kept apprised of the findings.

If Donovan was privy to compromising VENONA information on Hiss, then Allen Dulles may well have learned of it too.
¹⁵
If he did—and if as reported he briefed Nixon on the case—then therein may perhaps lie the explanation for Nixon's confidence in his pursuit of Hiss. Heavy hints from the world of U.S. intellegence, along with the information he was receiving from the FBI, may have led Nixon to feel he could safely press the matter beyond what the publicly available evidence seemed to justify.
¹⁶

_____

Whether Nixon was being manipulated by others, or driven by his own overweening ambition, the Hiss case was a paradigm for his entire career—in which several themes were paramount:

• Delusion, of himself and others. While the affair brought him fame, he could not resist exaggerating his own role in it. “Pure bullshit!” Robert Stripling, HUAC's chief investigator, said of the
  Six Crises
  account, “Mr. Nixon did not break the Hiss case.” Nixon's intimate journalist friend, Walter Trohan, said Nixon did not develop information in the affair; rather, “It was handed to him.”
  
• An addiction to intrigue. “He developed a weakness for playing cops and robbers in the Hiss case,” Trohan reflected in 1974 in a
  letter to an FBI friend. “Maybe this led him to countenance Watergate.”
  
• A vengeful desire for retribution against those who failed to do what he wanted. Nixon pilloried Samuel Kaufman, the judge in Hiss's first trial, which ended with a hung jury, and pressed for an inquiry into his fitness to serve on the bench. He also wanted the foreman of the jury prosecuted for alleged left-wing bias.
  
• The obsession with the Ivy League elite that he saw as his perennial enemy. “They couldn't bear,” he said, speaking of a posh dinner party he attended during the case, “to find one of their own, like Hiss, being involved in this kind of thing. . . . Those attitudes were all crap, but that was what I had to fight against.”
  
• A perception of himself as a marked man. “Those sons of bitches are out to get me,” he said during the 1952 campaign. “. . . [T]hey tried to get me, and they'll try to get anybody that had anything to do with the Hiss case.” Meanwhile he himself would repeatedly be out to get others, from Adlai Stevenson to Edward Kennedy.
  
• A tendency to fly into a rage and to blame others when things went wrong. “This is all your fault!” he had shouted at Nicholas Vazzana, an attorney hired to assist investigation on the Chambers side of the case, when for a while it seemed that the Pumpkin Papers were about to be exposed as a fraud. “What are you going to do about it?” Nixon's language turned abusive, and both Vazzana and Stripling thought him almost hysterical.
  
• Driving himself beyond his limits, putting himself and his family under intolerable pressure. Even early in the Hiss case, Nixon admitted later, “I was spending as much as eighteen to twenty hours a day at my office. I deliberately refused to take time off for relaxation or a break. . . . I was ‘mean' to live with at home and with my friends. I was quick-tempered. . . . I lost interest in eating and skipped meals. . . . Getting to sleep became more and more difficult.” During the Hiss case, for the first time but not the last, Nixon started using sleeping pills.
  

His mother remembered a weekend when he and Pat came to stay at the elder Nixons' new home, the farm in Pennsylvania. “He wouldn't even come in and eat supper. He just walked from one corner of the yard to the other. I went to him and told him that if he didn't give up this whole Hiss question, he was not going to be on earth very long. I will never forget his pale face and his gaunt look. . . .”

Even thirty years later, her daughter Julie found when writing a book about her mother, Pat Nixon spoke only reluctantly of the Hiss episode. She
had found in her husband's involvement “an absorption that was almost frightening.” She, and even Nixon's parents, had repeatedly accompanied Richard on visits to Chambers and his family, starting a relationship that endured throughout the Nixon vice presidency. Chambers was entertained at the Nixons' home in Washington, and Nixon and Pat trekked out to the farm to dispense, as Chambers put it, “some loving care for us.” To the Chambers children, their father recalled, Nixon in time became “ ‘Nixie,' the kind and the good.”

Yet while Chambers long regarded Nixon as his champion, recently released correspondence shows that he also perceived his faults. He thought Nixon lacked real political conviction or vision and believed he was less than loyal to old friends. “I rather pity him,” was Chambers's final verdict.

The Hiss affair was an episode that marked the Nixons, a time of unimagined success yet one that presaged a dark future. Pat recalled it as “a difficult time for us.” Even before her husband plunged into the Hiss case, she told Julie, she had already felt “deep discontent” at the way their married life was going. Soon the Nixon marriage would be in crisis. Within three years, Nixon would be seeking help from a psychotherapist.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

—Thomas Jefferson, in 1799

I
n February 1950, on Lincoln's Birthday weekend, a drunken man climbed onto a plane in Washington, D.C. In his briefcase he carried a bottle of whiskey and the rough draft of a speech. Senator Joseph McCarthy was on his way to address the Ohio County Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, the only campaign speaking slot the Republican National Committee could find for him. The good ladies of Wheeling were expecting him to talk about social issues. What they got instead was the infamous speech claiming that the State Department was riddled with Communists, the allegation that launched the American Inquisition. Passages in it were lifted virtually verbatim from a speech on Hiss made in the House two weeks earlier by Richard Nixon. McCarthy said: “One thing to remember . . . is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 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.” In his speech, Nixon had warned: “The great lesson . . . is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get 30 pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon . . . this is a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.”

Challenged by reporters to reveal what hard information he had, McCarthy responded characteristically. “Listen, you bastards,” he bellowed, “I'm not going to tell you anything. . . . I've got a pailful of shit, and I'm going to
use it where it does me the most good.” Although his charges were mostly reckless and hopelessly inaccurate, McCarthy was soon riding high as the right's champion hunter of Communists.

Nixon stated in his memoirs that he had found McCarthy “personally likeable, if irresponsibly impulsive. At the end I felt sorry for him, as a man whose zeal and thirst for publicity were leading him and others to destruction.” In
Six Crises,
published when McCarthyism was still a raw issue, Nixon did not mention McCarthy once. It is true that as McCarthy was gradually being exposed as an alcoholic and a fraud, Nixon—by then rising to a prominence that required him to appear responsible—prudently distanced himself from the senator's excesses. Historically, though, the two men will remain forever joined.

Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's future aide, first became acquainted with McCarthy as a Senate page, and the two became friendly enough to go to the races together. Baker also picked up information through his wife, Dorothy, who worked both for Nixon and for Senator Pat McCarran, a fanatical right-winger much courted by McCarthy. Baker concluded that McCarthy was one of Nixon's “real hard-core buddies.” Nixon went out of his way to campaign for the man he called “my good friend” in the 1952 elections, when it had long since become apparent that McCarthy's rampage was no more than a witch-hunt. Senior journalists like Stewart Alsop, Eric Sevareid, and Walter Cronkite reached much the same conclusion—namely, that as Cronkite put it in 1996, Nixon was “in the same ideological league as McCarthy and his followers.” Even Nixon's ally Tom Dewey characterized him as “a respectable McCarthy.”

As vice president Nixon attended McCarthy's 1953 wedding. In private, even in the face of McCarthy's evident malfeasance, his loyalty did not waver. The psychotherapist Nixon was seeing by then, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, recalled in 1995 how his patient had remonstrated with him—at the height of the McCarthy period—when the doctor expressed disapproval of the senator. Nixon seemed stunned and insisted, “But McCarthy's a friend of mine.”

It was only in 1953 that Nixon moved publicly to criticize McCarthy—and that at President Eisenhower's behest. The senator's sidekick Roy Cohn thought Nixon's posture on the matter that of an ambitious opportunist. “When they finally decided to do McCarthy in,” he said, “Nixon was the fellow they selected, and he was perfectly willing to turn on his conservative friends and cut their throats—one, two, three. . . . Nixon was a superb hatchet man.”

A similar comment on the Nixon-McCarthy relationship comes from a leader of the Soviet Union, but it was perceptive even considering the source. “When McCarthy's star started to fade,” Nikita Khrushchev told an American visitor in the sixties, “Nixon turned his back on him. So he was an
unprincipled
puppet, the most dangerous kind.”

In 1954 Nixon asked a colleague, James Bassett, to dine with him at a favorite Washington restaurant, La Salle de Bois. He downed three gins,
followed by white wine with oysters, guffawed at a dirty joke, and then said brusquely of McCarthy: “It's probably time we dumped him.” In the same conversation, Bassett noted in his journal, “RN said he's 100% for the President, and will do anything needed. But anything!” Even so, as presiding officer when the Senate finally brought McCarthy's antics to an end a few months later, Nixon used his prerogative to sweeten the pill, striking out the word “censure” from the wording of a motion condemning McCarthy. He also was among the mourners at the funeral when McCarthy died of drink in 1957.

_____

One day in 1950, a congresswoman from California found herself being warned about Nixon by the venerable Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. Rayburn, who thought him “the next thing to McCarthy in the United States,” warned his colleague “not to make any mistakes.” The warning was timely, for the congresswoman was Helen Gahagan Douglas, then about to battle Nixon for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Nixon's run for the Senate was a virtual replay of the 1946 campaign against Voorhis—this time with even cruder use of dirty tricks and inflammatory rhetoric. His tactics reflected the fact that he knew precisely why he had decided to run against Representative Douglas. “The House,” he told a friend, “offered too slow a road to leadership, and I went for broke.”

Kyle Palmer, the power broker at the
Los Angeles Times,
claimed it was he who first pitched the Senate idea to Nixon, and certainly the
Times
and most of the California press gave him unconditional support. Of twelve papers in the state, nine backed Nixon. The
Times
did not run a single picture of Douglas during the campaign. The press baron who ran most of the other papers in the state, William Randolph Hearst, arranged for the planting of pro-Nixon articles. Orchestrated “letters” were placed in the correspondence columns. A search began for any photographs of Douglas that might help brand her as a leftist.

Douglas, a forty-nine-year-old former Broadway star and opera singer, had begun her political career as a left-wing Democrat. She was both a supporter of the New Deal and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. While outspokenly anti-Communist, she was also—to her detriment—in favor of reining in big business, not least the oil industry. She proved no match for the Nixon operation, once again managed by Murray Chotiner.

Along with his other functions, Chotiner masterminded a public relations blitz similar to the one during the congressional campaign of 1946. Skywriting planes traced out Nixon's name over California's beaches. A blimp pelted the Los Angeles city streets with leaflets promising voters that if they answered the phone with the magic mantra “Vote for Nixon,” and if the call came from Nixon headquarters, then they could win:

The Republicans were especially proud of a four-page ad that resembled a photo spread in
Life
magazine. “Practically nothing but pictures,” said a grinning Chotiner. Nixon was sold aggressively as “an ardent American,” “the perfect example of the Uncommon Man.”

The
Los Angeles Daily News
had dubbed Douglas the Pink Lady, and more than half a million of Nixon's anti-Douglas leaflets were printed on pink paper. In public Chotiner was to claim that the color of the paper had been fortuitous, that pink had been the only choice available. In private, in the company of fellow Republicans, he would say, “It just seemed to appeal to us.” Then he would smile sardonically.

Nixon's people seized Douglas's own flyers by the thousands and dumped them in the ocean. Meanwhile they produced phony Douglas propaganda purporting to have been issued by the “Communist League of Negro Women,” a surefire way to alienate white middle-class voters.

Flying squads of pickets pursued Douglas at her speaking engagements, heckling her at every stop. During a speech at the University of Southern California “students” let fly with water siphons, drenching the Democrat. One of the ringleaders was reportedly Patrick Hillings, a young man soon to become Nixon's close associate; another, Joe Holt, later joined Nixon's staff. At times the contest turned violent. Douglas's San Diego organizer was forced off the road by other drivers. She herself was pelted with red ink, and even stones, and began traveling with bodyguards.

The Democrats also resorted to questionable tactics, but they occurred late in the campaign and were primarily an effort to strike back. A student named Dick Tuck, who later became a specialist in anti-Nixon pranks,
¹
posed as an advance man for a Nixon speech and ensured that only a handful of people turned up. Pat Nixon, who again went on the stump with her husband, claimed he was often prevented from speaking by labor union members. Enraged Douglas workers once overturned a Nixon campaign car.

Douglas eventually tried to lash back at Nixon by “Red-baiting”
him
—a nonsensical ploy that failed—and by talking about Republican “young men in dark shirts,” evoking fascism. Such efforts were not only wrongheaded but pointless, for nothing the Democrats could muster could outdo the scale of the propaganda pumped out by the Nixon side.

According to Douglas supporters, the last days of the campaign brought an onslaught of anonymous phone calls to voters, just as in the Nixon push against Voorhis. “Did you know that Helen Douglas is a Communist?” a caller would ask, then hang up. It was later claimed that this was a massive, statewide operation allegedly involving more than half a million calls.

Pat Nixon's account of the campaign, published later in a homey story in the
Saturday Evening Post,
suggested, without stating it directly, that her husband had been short of funds. “A friend who is an automobile dealer lent us a used station wagon,” she wrote, “and we painted it with big signs . . . and with it we covered California.” The Nixons did have a station wagon, in which they drove massive distances, but the vehicle was only a few months old and came with a chauffeur. The friend who provided it, Henry Kearns, was one of Nixon's wealthy backers.

Once again, Nixon had heavy financial backing from power brokers in the oil business—Nixon was pushing for the oil policy that best favored their interests—and from big industry, real estate, and banking. One supporter, another car dealer, was Henry Haldeman, father of Nixon's future White House chief of staff.

To fund this campaign, the net was also cast outside the state, among the oil tycoons of Texas. Two of them, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, soon welcomed Nixon to Del Charro, the luxury California resort Murchison owned. “They spoke to Nixon like he was an office boy,” recalled the resort's manager, Allan Witwer.

Serving on Nixon's finance committee was Dana Smith, heir to a lumber fortune and a Pasadena attorney who within two years would be at the center of the furor that nearly cost Nixon the vice presidency, the scandal over behind-the-scenes cash supplied to Nixon by California businessmen.

There was, too, illicit money: five thousand dollars funneled to Nixon, against Senate rules and through a crooked fixer, by Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, and seventy-five thousand dollars strong-armed out of the gambling fraternity by the mobster Mickey Cohen.
*

There is no knowing now how much money was poured into the Nixon campaign. Figures available at the Nixon Library suggest that it received more than two hundred thousand dollars. This, however, may be a fraction of the true amount. Billboards alone, by Chotiner's reckoning, cost “around $50,000.” Some estimates suggest that the real expenditure may have been between $1 million and nearly $2 million, fabulous sums by the standards of the time, whichever was correct. The Nixon people had generated so much money that they gave away cash to Republican candidates in other contests. The Douglas campaign, by contrast, was impoverished, so much so that at one point it had no money to pay printers for brochures.

In such a situation, in the anti-Communist ferment of 1950, with the Korean War in its first months and American casualties mounting daily, the “Pink Lady” was doomed. Yet Nixon did not behave as though he expected to triumph. On election day he sat on the beach in the drizzle with Pat, then went to the movies by himself. He emerged “sure that we were licked,” only to learn that he had won a fabulous victory.

Nixon made light in his memoirs of the fact that the Senate fight earned him the nickname that stuck with him for the rest of his life, “Tricky Dick.”
²
He made no mention of the huge funding, the one-sided media barrage, or the organized heckling by his supporters. Instead, he wrote plaintively of Democratic heckling, casting himself as the offended party.
³