Nixon's Secret (10 page)

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Setting the Mafia element of the ‘46 campaign aside, Chotiner’s tact to destroy Voorhis on his “red” ties
had
worked, and though the trumped-up charges against Voorhis were unfounded, Nixon took the threat of Communist infiltration seriously. Anti-Communism as a creed would serve Nixon well. He won his nationwide anti-Communist credentials by unmasking FDR protégé, State Department employee Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. In many ways, the Hiss case would forge Nixon’s understanding of the mass media of the day and just how quickly one could become “an overnight sensation.”

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a pudgy and waxen-looking editor at
Time
magazine, took the stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and plainly stated that Harvard-educated diplomat Alger Hiss, who was at FDR’s right sleeve at Yalta and was a friend of both Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Adali Stevenson, was a Communist while working for the US government. Chambers, who had been a passionate Communist for fourteen years before deserting the party, claimed to have belonged to a sleeper cell of government employees and said that he recognized Hiss, amongst others, as a member of the group.
23
A defiant Hiss denied the charges and requested an opportunity to testify before the committee.

In front of HUAC on August 5, 1948, Hiss was asked by Nixon for the name of the person who had recommended he come to Washington. Hiss rather slyly flipped the script, proposing that Nixon was only asking for a name to further fuel the Red Scare with an innocent American.

“Is it necessary?” Hiss asked Nixon. “There are so many witnesses who use names loosely before your committee?”
24
Hiss would treat Nixon with elitist disdain.

Hiss proceeded to chip away at Nixon’s education and background, which fed into Nixon’s Eastern resentment. Hiss may have been suspected of Communist leanings, but he was also Ivy League. It was Nixon, Hiss implied, who was the outsider.

“I am a graduate of Harvard Law School,” Hiss said defiantly. “And I believe yours is Whittier?”
25

Hiss was then shown a photograph of Whittaker Chambers, held up by Robert Stripling, HUAC’s Chief Investigator. “If this is a picture of Mr. Chambers,” Hiss said to the delight of his powerful friends in the room, “he is not particularly unusual looking. He looks like a lot of people. I might even mistake him for the Chairman of this Committee.”
26

The media and committee members in the room rushed to congratulate Hiss at the conclusion of the testimony. “He had won the day completely,” Nixon later wrote. “It would not be an exaggeration to say that probably ninety percent of the reporters at the press table and most of the committee members were convinced that a terrible mistake had been made, a case of mistaken identity, and that the Committee owed an apology to Hiss for having allowed Chambers to testify without first checking into the possibility of such a mistake.”
27
It would be the beginnings of a decade-long crusade by the liberal media to defend and later, to exonerate Hiss.

According to Nixon, Hiss put on “a virtuoso performance,” but he also thought Hiss was bluffing. Hiss, in Nixon’s estimation, was overstating his case and had been a bit too “mouthy,”
28
yet he “had been careful never to state categorically that he did not know Whittaker Chambers.”
29
Nixon believed he could prove Hiss and Chambers knew each other.

When Nixon got Chambers back in front of the committee, he elicited many important details from the portly magazine editor that only a man who knew Hiss could provide. The pet names Hiss and his wife used in each other’s company, the shelter they brought their dog to, and most importantly, a 1929 Ford car Hiss had donated to the Communist Party. Chambers said from 1936 to 1937 he was constantly in contact with Hiss and sometimes stayed over his house, which Chambers called a “kind of headquarters.” Hiss was “the closest friend I ever had in the Communist Party,” said Chambers.
30

“The story checked out in every detail where corroborative evidence was available,” said Nixon.
31

When the committee again questioned Hiss on August 16, his story changed. Backed by new evidence, no longer was the picture of Chambers unrecognizable. Chambers, Hiss now believed, resembled a man he once knew named George Crosley, a man who, in Hiss’s words, “was a writer.”

“He hoped to sell articles to magazines about the munitions industry,” Hiss recalled.
32
Hiss said he
had
lent the man cash, provided him shelter, and bequeathed him his dinged-up Ford. But Hiss said he did not believe that this man Crosley was Whittaker Chambers.
33

Nixon felt Hiss was back peddling and wanted to strike before he had time to regain balance. “The obvious thing to do then was to confront these two men,” Nixon said, “since it was apparent that both men must know each other in view of the testimony we had.”
34
The very next day, Hiss and Chambers met before the subcommittee in a suite of the Commodore Hotel in New York City.

Hiss, who had such a difficult time identifying Chambers only two weeks prior, was now faced with a litany of details coloring in the relationship between the two men and, indeed, with Chambers himself. Hiss backed further into his lies. “The ass under the lion’s skin is Crosley,” Hiss proclaimed, admitting now that he knew Chambers, but only as Crosley and not as a Communist. “I have no further question at all. If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off, I would be sure.”
35
Disgusted, Hiss proclaimed that Chambers should repeat his claims in a public forum, where they would be deemed libelous.

Chambers would take up Hiss’s challenge and on August 27 appeared on the radio program
Meet the Press
, declaring that “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now.”
36
Hiss, perhaps distressed over Chambers’ public assertion, went weeks without taking action or making a statement. “Mr. Hiss himself has created a situation in which he is obliged to put up or shut up,” declared an article in the
Washington Post.
37
Hiss eventually would take action, seeking $75,000 in damages in a defamation of character lawsuit. Hiss’s lawyers demanded proof to confirm his accusations.

On November 17, Chambers obliged and produced four notes in Hiss’s handwriting and sixty-five typewritten copies of State Department documents that had been copied on Hiss’s typewriter.

On December 2, pushed for even more evidence, Chambers and two HUAC investigators went to retrieve it. “At about 10 o’clock that night, three men came out of the back door of a white farmhouse on Pipe Creek Farm off Bachman Valley Road near Westminster headed for a small pumpkin patch,” journalist Gilbert Sandler wrote in the
Baltimore Sun.
“When they arrived at a particular pumpkin, one of the men, the short and stout one, bent down and removed the lid of the hollowed-out gourd. To the amazement of the other two, he reached in and pulled out several cylinders containing rolls of microfilm.”
38

There were five strips of microfilm, some of which contained photographs of State Department documents, which contained the unique imprint of the Hiss typewriter. As the evidence mounted, Hiss was indicted for perjury.

Chambers asked HUAC investigator Robert Stripling to find the typewriter, and when Hiss arrived for trial in the summer of 1949, the Woodstock machine, serial no. N230099, was set on a table before him. “It had a powerful psychological impact,” Hiss said, “ . . . sitting there like a murder weapon.”
39
Hiss though denounced the papers and claimed they were forgeries. “Even his most ardent supporters could not swallow such a ridiculous charge,” Nixon later said. “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.”
40

Hiss was convicted on two counts of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison.

The case made Nixon a political star overnight. American liberals who hated Nixon have argued, particularly after Watergate, that Nixon smeared an innocent man in his climb to the top. “I have often thought that my liberal friends in the Eastern establishment—of which I have been a part—could never forgive him for being right about Alger Hiss,” said Nixon speechwriter Ray Price.
41

We now know, however, that KGB files attained after the fall of the Soviet Union proved that Hiss was a spy and that Nixon’s instincts were correct. In 1996, translations of decrypted Soviet cables were released, detailing atomic-era spies in America. One of the spies pinpointed in the cables, code named “Ales,” was thought by many to be Alger Hiss.
42
Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist, who for two years labored over declassified Stalin-era KGB files, later confirmed the suspicion.
43

While the Hiss case and Nixon’s role in it would win the animosity of liberal elites and large swathes of the left-leaning media of the day, it would also win him millions of adherents and admirers. This anti-Communist base, when combined with organizational Republicans, sustained Nixon through it all. When he was under fire as Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate in the famous “Secret Funds Scandal,” it was the anti-Communist and Republican base that remained by this side. It was this base that allowed him to be picked as Ike’s VP to begin with. It was this base that allowed him to come within an eyelash of being president in 1960 and from which he launched his 1968 comeback. It was the same 30 percent base in the country that stuck with him through Watergate and to whom he pitched his rehabilitation after avoiding prison through a presidential pardon.

Mobster Mickey Cohen came through for Nixon again in 1950, when one of California’s US Senate seats opened up with the surprise retirement of Senator Sheridan Downey. Hollywood Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melvyn Douglas and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nixon would emerge as the two contenders. It was a slugfest.

Cohen convened a meeting at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel on North Ivar Avenue, Hollywood, to which he invited more than several hundred associates from the gambling business, some of whom flew in from Las Vegas. Cohen was later to say, “There wasn’t a legitimate person in the room.” Attending a meeting were representatives of Meyer Lansky, Los Angeles mobster Jack Dragna, and representatives of the Cleveland mob including John Scalish and Jewish mobster Bill Presser, whose son, Jackie Presser, would parley his relationship with Ronald Reagan into the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
44

Cohen would later write that the goal for the evening was $75,000 for Nixon’s coffers from his crime and gambling associates and that he ordered the doors locked when the group came up $20,000 short, refusing to let anyone leave until the financial goal was met.

Nixon had met with Cohen who dominated the Los Angeles mob scene for Lansky while Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel watched Lansky’s business in the growing Las Vegas, as early as 1946 at Goodfellow’s Grotto, a fish restaurant in Orange County where the booths were private and politics could be talked frankly.

Cohen made it clear that the orders to help Nixon in 1950 came from “back East,” meaning New York boss Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, both of whom set up the National Mob Syndicate.

On the Democratic side, a glamorous former movie actress who had starred in light opera, on Broadway, and in Hollywood, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, would face off with conservative Democrat Manchester Boddy, the publisher of the
Los Angeles Daily News
, in the Democratic primary. Nixon would exploit the bloody primary in which Boddy insinuated that the left-leaning Mrs. Douglas was sympathetic to the Communists. Chotiner picked up the theme.

Douglas would make an error she would live to regret. She would tie Nixon to Congressman Vito Marcantonio from Harlem, a pro-Communist radical, claiming a “Nixon-Marcantonio Axis.” “On every key vote Nixon stood with party hard-liner Marcantonio against America in its fight to defeat Communism,” she said.
45
She printed a flyer with the charge on yellow paper.
46
Mrs. Douglas began the red-baiting in the 1950 campaign.

Chotiner would then compare the voting records of Congresswoman Douglas and Marcantonio, claiming they were kindred souls, but Murray did it on
pink
paper. Marcantonio was a pro-Stalin leftist hard-liner. In truth, Marcantonio disliked the socially pretentious Mrs. Douglas and had gotten drunk with Nixon on more than one occasion when they served together on a House subcommittee. “Tell Nicky [Nixon] to get on this thing because it is a good idea,” Marcantonio would tell a Nixon associate, giving his approval to review the records.
47

Chotiner claimed, “Mrs. Douglas has voted with the notorious Communist hard-liner 86 percent of the time. She votes the Moscow line.”

“She’s pink right down to her underwear,” Nixon would say on the stump.

Nixon and Chotiner had carefully studied the 1948 campaign of Miami’s playboy congressman “Gorgeous George” Smathers of Florida. A handsome conservative, Smathers had attacked Florida’s incumbent liberal Senator Claude Pepper, who was a public friend of Joe Stalin’s, as “Red Pepper” in a slashing campaign that toppled the incumbent. Chotiner would amend this appellation to “The Pink Lady” in California.

In the final days of the campaign Chotiner would launch a telephone drive promising anyone who answered the phone with the words “Vote for Nixon.”

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