The Arrogance of Power

  7. Steward Alsop, writing in 1960, cites an intimate as saying Nixon saved ten thousand dollars from his wartime winnings. A fellow officer, Jim Stewart, said: “I know for a fact he sent home sixty-eight hundred dollars, from Green Island.” Nixon’s daughter, citing one of his last letters home, suggested it was only one thousand dollars. In his memoirs Nixon said both his skill and his winnings had been exaggerated. He added that Pat and he wound up with some ten thousand dollars at the end of the war, taking together his pay, her salary, and his poker winnings. (Stewart Alsop, op. cit., p. 144; JA, p. 108; Pat, p. 85; MEM, pp. 29, 34.)

  Chapter 4

  1. Secret Service agents usually prefer to remain anonymous. The author accepts that this interview, conducted by the experienced former Washington Post reporter and author Ronald Kessler, is authentic. (Int. Ronald Kessler.)

  Chapter 5

  1. According to a Voorhis worker in Alhambra, Zita Remley, she arranged for a relative to apply for paid work in the local Nixon office as a ploy to learn what the Republicans were up to. The relative, she said, reported back that “they had a whole boiler room with phones going all the time.” She was told to dial numbers and ask just one question: whether the person answering knew Voorhis was a Communist. Nixon defender Irwin Gellman, a history professor at Chapman University in Orange, California, claimed recently that such accounts were “tales”—not to be relied upon. (Remley: Bullock, op. cit., p. 276; “tales”: Gellman, op. cit., p. 84–.)

  2. C. Arnholt Smith, the San Diego banker and entrepreneur, who knew Nixon as a child and supported him until as late as 1972, told the author before his death in 1996 that he contributed ten thousand dollars to Nixon’s first campaign.

  Chapter 6

  1. In his 1975 memoir Cohen said the required figure was seventy-five thousand dollars, while his 1962 prison statement gives a figure of twenty-five thousand. The higher figure is used here because the 1975 memoir is a long, detailed account given to an experienced coauthor. On the other hand, the more formal 1962 statement may be more accurate; there is no way to know now. Similarly, the 1962 statement suggests Cohen could not recall for certain whether the Knickerbocker Hotel fund-raiser took place in 1950 or during the 1948 congressional election. The 1975 memoir places it firmly in 1950. The latter is surely the correct date; the Republicans spent a fortune on the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, by one estimate perhaps as much as two million dollars, while the 1948 election was a walkover for Nixon. (1950 estimate: MO, p. 616.)

  2. Cohen gives the address as Eighth and Olive in his 1962 statement but as Ninth and Hill in his 1975 memoir, in which he also names the building as the Guarantee Finance Building (as opposed to the Pacific Finance Building). The most authoritative source on the 1950 campaign, Roger Morris’s book (see Bibliography), refers to a Nixon campaign headquarters in the “Garland Building at Ninth and Spring.” Confusion over the address need not diminish belief in Cohen’s claims; he said he paid for a Nixon office for only “three or four weeks.” The author guesses he helped out in this way during an early stage of the twelve-month 1950 campaign. (Garland Building: MO, p. 536.)

  3. After his defeat by Nixon, former Congressman Voorhis recalled, he was told that “organized liquor interests [in New York] were claiming credit for my defeat. It was some satisfaction to have the right people against me.” Mickey Cohen, who had begun his mob career in bootlegging days, was close to Art Samish, the mob’s political front man in California. Samish had links to underworld liquor and racing interests dating back to Prohibition and was still involved with the Schenley liquor tycoon, Lewis Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel had long been close to Cohen’s ultimate gangster masters, Lansky and Costello. His right-hand man, from 1958, was former FBI Assistant Director Lou Nichols, later an adviser to Nixon in the 1968 campaign. (“liquor interests”: Voorhis, op. cit., p. 346; close to Samish: Cohen, op. cit., p. 2–; Samish, Rosenstiel: Fox, op. cit., p. 229–; Rosenstiel, Lansky: Summers, Hoover, op. cit., p. 248; Nichols: ibid., p. 369.)

  Chapter 7

  1. Depending on which source one credits, Eisler was either a leading Soviet agent in the United States or a lowlier figure. His former wife, Hede, who with her next husband, Paul Massing, also had links to Soviet espionage, told the FBI she had known Hiss as an active Communist operative in the mid-1930s. See later references. (PERJ, p. 176–.)

  2. According to Loftus, the allegation came to him in interviews with former members of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps and of Military Intelligence. He also cites interviews with members of the Strategic Services Unit, the Central Intelligence Group, and the Office of Policy Coordination. (John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, pp. 221, 557; ints. John Loftus.)

  3. Peter Grose’s biography of Allen Dulles, published in 1994, the same year as the Loftus and Aarons book, appears to reject suggestions that Allen Dulles was less than honorable in his relations with his German contacts. (Grose, op. cit., p. 264–, and see refs. in Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.)

  4. With Representative Charles Kersten, a HUAC colleague, Nixon met the Dulles brothers to discuss the Hiss case at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, on August 11, 1948. Foster had previously backed Hiss but later testified for the government, in court. See also Note 10, below. (Allen Weinstein article, Esquire, Nov. 1975, p. 79, and MO, p. 414.)

  5. Whittaker Chambers, for his part, had done work during the War for ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence. (Ralph de Toledano, ed., Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers–Ralph de Toledano Letters: 1948–1960, Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1997, p. 18.)

  6. According to the journalist Howard Kohn, citing CIA sources, Dulles gave Nixon this confirmation at their meeting in New York on August 11, 1948. (See Note 4, supra.) That meeting has long been public knowledge, but it was characterized by Nixon purely as one at which he laid out the known facts and persuaded the Dulles brothers that Hiss was a liar. However, that Allen Dulles was privy to information on Hiss, and that he shared it with Nixon, is entirely plausible. (Howard Kohn article, Rolling Stone, May 20, 1976, and see limited retraction, Rolling Stone, Apr. 28, 1983; MEM, p. 57.) Kohn is a former staff writer for Rolling Stone,and bureau chief of the Center for Investigative Reporting. He wrote the book Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, which exposed unsafe practices at the nuclear fuel plant where Silkwood worked and was the basis for the movie Silkwood.

  7. Dulles and Hiss had encountered each other in the thirties, when Hiss was on the staff of a congressional committee. Dulles had accused Hiss of betraying a trust by revealing private papers of former Secretary of State Robert Lansing, for which Dulles was responsible. (Grose, op. cit., p. 297 fn.)

  8. Nixon’s role in the break-in would not surface publicly until many years later. Not least since it involved accomplices, however, it very likely was known about on the law school grapevine. While there is nothing on it in the surviving FBI file, it is precisely the sort of activity agents pursuing a bureau “character investigation” would have pounced on had they learned of it from contemporaries.

  9. Nixon’s father’s gas station was leased by W. Q. Dietrich, who later operated another station for Richfield Oil. It would be interesting to learn whether this was Will Dietrich, brother of Noah Dietrich, a close aide to Howard Hughes who was to organize the notorious Hughes Loan while Nixon was vice president. According to Nixon’s nephew Don, the family connection with Hughes dated back many years. (G. J. Ross report on RN, Aug. 3, 1937, p. 6, FBI 67-102459; Noah Dietrich and Bob Thomas, Howard, the Amazing Mr. Hughes, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1972, p. 26; int. Don Nixon.)

  10. Former agents reported to Hoover that Nixon spoke alternately as though he wanted to embarrass Hoover and to praise him, leading Hoover to scrawl on one report, “This fellow Nixon blows hot and cold.” (Ladd to Hoover, Dec. 9, 1948, Hiss FBI file in FBI Reading Room.)

  11. In September 1939, literally on the eve of Wo
rld War II, Chambers, in the wake of his defection from the Communist party, had told his story to President Roosevelt’s security adviser Adolf Berle. He mentioned Hiss and his wife and brother as belonging to a group of American Communists. Roosevelt, informed of the allegations during a croquet game, is said to have dismissed them as another attempt to discredit the New Deal. Berle, he supposedly said, should tell Chambers to “go fuck himself.” Sometime later, early in the war, the U.S. ambassador to France, citing the French prime minister and French intelligence, told a State Department friend that Hiss was either a Communist or a fellow traveler. (Berle: Navigating the Rapids [journal of Adolf Berle], eds. Beatrice Berle and Travis Jacobs, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, pp. 24, 582, 598; PERJ, p. 291–; Roosevelt: MO, p. 388, but see Ralph de Toledano, J. Edgar Hoover, The Man in His Time, New York: Manor, 1974, p. 222; French intelligence: PERJ, p. 311; Levitt, op. cit., p. 267.)

  12. In his 1993 biography Jonathan Aitken claimed Nixon denied having discussed the Hiss case with Cronin or having received information from the FBI until after mid-August 1948. Aitken claimed too that in a 1990 interview Cronin conceded that Nixon was right and that his “stacked deck” remark was unfair. Was Cronin capable of making any such remark in 1990? In January 1991, when approached for an interview, the elderly Cronin was in a home for the aged, deaf, and in a wheelchair and unable to hold a cogent conversation. In addition, Cronin said in 1959—and in subsequent interviews—that he discussed Hiss with Nixon as early as February 1947. Cronin’s FBI file, released in 1999, reportedly shows that Director Hoover was concerned in 1946 because Cronin “talks too much.” It may later have suited the FBI to feed him information precisely because he was a talker. Certainly he had an on-going relationship with the bureau. (Aitken claimed: JA, p. 155 and see Gellman, op. cit., p. 234; Parmet, Nixon, op. cit., p. 166–; 1991 approach: visit to Cronin by Robbyn Swan for this author, Jan. 10, 1991; perjurer: Irish Times, Jan. 20, 1999; 1959: int. Cronin in Kornitzer, op. cit., p. 172, and see Mazo, op. cit., p. 51; subsequent ints.: Lowenthal script, supra., p. 39–; Esquire, Nov. 1975; FBI file: New England Journal of History, Vol. 56, Winter 1999/Spring 2000, p. 24.)

  Chapter 8

  1. Hiss said he recognized Chambers as a man who had used the name George Crosley at the time he knew him. In Six Crises, Nixon wrote, “In the entire history of the case . . . no one could be found who could remember George Crosley—except Priscilla Hiss.” [Hiss’s wife]. The implication was that Hiss had lied and fabricated the name. In fact, Chambers said the Hisses had never known his last name and had never heard the name Whittaker Chambers. He did use aliases, however, and admitted it was “possible” he had used the name George Crosley. One witness, a publisher named Samuel Roth, said Chambers had submitted poems to him for publication asking that they be printed under the name George Crosley; (Nixon, Six Crises, op. cit., p. 39; Levitt, op. cit., p. 17–; PERJ, p. 126; Roth: ibid., p. 40–.)

  2. The book Perjury, by Allen Weinstein, published in 1978 and reissued in an updated form in 1997, was received as the most powerful assembly of evidence against Hiss. While it persuaded many previous skeptics that Hiss was guilty on all counts, it has many critics. Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation, responded to publication of Perjury by checking back with several of Weinstein’s sources. One replied that his interview comments had been distorted. Another said he had been quoted out of context. Both these subjects and two others gave Navasky accounts that conflicted with what they allegedly told Weinstein. (One of the interviewees, Sam Krieger, sued Weinstein and his publisher and won a settlement; an erratum slip was inserted in subsequent copies of the book.) When Navasky published a major article, including the interviewees’ remarks and other criticisms, Weinstein riposted in the New Republic. The paper war has sputtered on ever since. (Nation, Apr. 8, June 17, 1978, Nov. 3 1997; Newsweek, Apr. 17, 1978; New Republic, Apr. 8, 1978, and see the 1976 edition of Weinstein’s Perjury, published by Random House, and Nation, Jan. 4 and 11, 1993, Nov. 3, 1997; Commentary, Apr. 1993.)

  3. In 1945, when he was twenty-two, Timothy was discharged from the navy “on emotional grounds related to homosexuality.” He later married. (PERJ, pp. 359, 482.)

  4. Allen Weinstein has written that Hiss’s brother Donald and Raymond Catlett (son of Hiss’s former maid) had “traced” the Woodstock in February 1949, months before it was actually found, and were thus the only two people in a position to have replaced it with a planted Woodstock. There is no evidence that Donald Hiss and Catlett actually laid hands on the typewriter in February or had anything to do with typewriter substitution. (PERJ, pp. 349–, 518.)

  5. In response to a call from Hiss, Sullivan “tried to back away” from this statement. He also said the typewriter “was not made in the FBI Lab” and that the bureau would not have been capable of fabricating a typewriter. As described earlier, however, it is now known that Allied intelligence had indeed forged typewriters successfully during World War II. (Sullivan, op. cit., p. 95.) The journalist who interviewed Sullivan was Peter Irons, writing for The Real Paper. Historian Allen Weinstein believed Sullivan had confused the FBI’s identification of Mrs. Hiss’s typing with the finding of the typewriter. This is only Weinstein’s interpretation. (New York Review of Books, May 27, 1976, p. 38; Real Paper, March 12, 1975.)

  6. The reference to the typewriter’s having been found in December 1947 does not appear in later editions of Six Crises. The 1968 and 1990 editions carry a footnote referring obliquely to “rumors” and to the World-Telegram article. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who looked into the matter in 1962 in light of the furor over the first edition, reportedly found nothing in the files to indicate that the FBI ever had the typewriter. (Nixon, Six Crises, op. cit., p. 64, and 1990 ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990, p. 60; Kennedy: Fred Cook, “The Ghost of a Typewriter,” Nation, May 12, 1962, p. 421.)

  7. Previous writers have also noted the White House tape of February 28, 1973, in which Nixon discussed the Hiss case with John Dean. In the first transcript released, which cheered those who championed Hiss, Nixon is rendered as saying, “We worked that thing. We then got the evidence, we got the typewriter [author’s italics].” A later transcript, however, made by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, reads: “We got Piper [author’s italics],” which makes no sense. In Perjury, Allen Weinstein suggests that “Piper” may have referred to Hiss’s attorney at the time Chambers produced his documents, William Marbury of Piper and Marbury. This is reaching. Having listened to the tape again and again during research for this book, the author finds it more likely that Nixon said, “We got the typer [again, author’s italics], a remark that might make some sort of sense if Nixon meant to refer to Mrs. Hiss who, according to Chambers, typed the copies of the documents her husband brought home. (Feb. 28 “first transcript”: Gerald Gold, ed., The White House Transcripts, New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 71; “later transcript”: WHT, Feb. 28, 1973, 9:12–10:23 A.M.; Weinstein: PERJ, p. 492; “for this book”: monitored for the author by researcher Robert D. Lamb, Dec. 9 and 12, 1998.)

  8. The activities of Schmahl and his associates were to intersect with those of the CIA—and of Nixon—in the decade that followed. In 1954, as vice president, Nixon directed the former FBI agent Robert Maheu in a secret operation to thwart shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis’s bid to gain a virtual monopoly over Saudi Arabian oil traffic. Lou Russell, Nixon’s former HUAC aide, was assigned to place taps on Onassis’s phones, but Schmahl reportedly took over the job. In 1956 Schmahl was questioned in connection with the disappearance and reported murder of Professor Jesús de Galindez, a political enemy of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. Schmahl was questioned in connection with Galindez’s abduction, as was another Maheu operative. After Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, Nixon, by then a practicing attorney, handled attempts to recover Trujillo’s fortune for the dictator’s family. In 1961, when running his Florida boatyard, Schmahl was involved in the CIA’s anti-Castro operations, for which Nixon had b
een White House liaison while vice president. (Schmahl: Hougan, Spooks, op. cit., p. 289–; Levitt, op. cit., p. 203; Nixon, Trujillo: Murray Kempton, “How Nixon Endures,” undated clip, DPP.)

  9. The Hungarian interrogation transcripts were seen in 1992 by a Hungarian historian, Maria Schmidt, and presented in a paper to New York University’s Center for European Studies the following year. Schmidt found Field’s statements about Hiss convincing. Attorney Ethan Klingsberg, who examined the same material later, warned that “uncritical readings of Communist secret police files . . . does [sic] not serve the interests of truth.” Field’s statements must be treated with caution, while it is acknowledged that they seem consistent with other evidence. (New Republic, Nation, Nov. 8, 1993.)

  10. See chapter 7, Note 1, supra. Massing was the former wife of Gerhart Eisler.

  11. So far as the author has been able to ascertain, Weinstein did not see the actual documents. He did not respond to letters or messages from the author.

  12. Historian Weinstein asserts that Hiss was allotted the code name Lawyer in the mid-1930s, presumably because he had trained as a lawyer and worked in a New York firm, on the legal staff of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, on a Senate legislative body (the Nye Committee), and then—before joining the State Department in 1936—at the Justice Department. Another individual identified as a member of the U.S. Communist underground, Harry Dexter White, was also supposedly code-named Lawyer at one stage. (Weinstein and Vassiliev, op. cit., pp. 7, 165.)