The New York Times featured the story on its front page, and it was covered prominently by the international media. “It’s what I’ve been fighting for for forty-four years,” said Hiss, by then nearly ninety years old. Nixon, at home in New Jersey, refused to speak to the press, but privately he exploded. “Hiss was a goddamned spy, and they still don’t want to admit that I was right.” He remained furious for weeks.
Dimitri Simes, the Russian affairs specialist who had delivered Nixon’s original letter, hurried back to confer with Volkogonov. A month later the general issued new statements conceding that his search had perhaps not been thorough enough. By then, however, the media was taking little notice, leaving Nixon to splutter that “they put the lies in headlines, but the truth they bury back in corset ads.”
Before Nixon died, however, there came what appeared to be a measure of vindication. Even as Hiss was triumphing in his “not guilty” headlines, a historian was turning up damaging information about him in Hungarian secret police files. These documents recorded the responses under interrogation of Noel Field, an American who had known Hiss and worked with him at the State Department and whom Chambers had also linked to Communist espionage. Field had fled behind the Iron Curtain after the war, only to spend five years in prison on charges that he was an American spy. According to the Hungarian files, he told his captors Hiss had confided that he was “working for the Soviet secret service” and had tried to recruit him “for espionage.” Field insisted that he had demurred, explaining that he was already working for Soviet intelligence.
Are these assertions credible, given that they were made in jail, where Field claimed he was starved and beaten, and at a time when he was desperate to prove that his loyalties had always been to the Soviets?9 Perhaps not. Field’s claims seem to dovetail with similar statements made in 1948 by Hede Massing, a courier for a Soviet spy ring and one of Field’s associates.10 They are also consistent with messages reported by Allen Weinstein, a veteran writer on the Hiss case, to have been located recently in previously unseen Soviet files.
Weinstein, the author of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, followed up on the Volkogonov fiasco by seeking access to old files of the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB. After help from the current Russian intelligence service and its former director, Yevgeny Primakov—later Russia’s prime minister—Weinstein discovered at least ten messages purportedly sent from the United States to Moscow and vice versa in 1936 and 1938.11 All appear to refer to Hiss.
One, sent by Massing, tells in detail how Hiss had asked Field to gather information for the Soviets. The name Hiss appears here in clear text—as it does in two other messges sent by an NKVD agent. Others, referring to “Lawyer,” said to have been one of the code names for Hiss,12 debate the problems caused by Hiss’s contacts. Still another message discusses the risk that a recent recruit “might guess that Hiss belongs to our family.” Yet another refers to Hiss as having first been “implanted” into the State Department and “sent to the Neighbors later.” (“The Neighbors” is accepted code for the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence. Chambers had testified that he and Hiss worked specifically for the GRU.)
In 1990 and 1994, although without supporting documentation, two former Soviet intelligence operatives further implicated Hiss. Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB defector who had worked on an in-house history of the agency, wrote that Hiss had been a Soviet agent. Pavel Sudoplatov, who held high positions in Soviet intelligence in the Stalin era, claimed in a memoir that Hiss had been “close to . . . our active intelligence operators in the United States” but that “there was no indication that he was a paid or controlled agent.” Sudoplatov too suggested Hiss was linked to the GRU.13
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 avail
able 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.
9
* * *
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
—Thomas Jefferson, in 1799
In 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.”