A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case

Campaigning for the US Senate, 1950. Pic - Library of Congress

In this 8th podcast, we explore the thinking of Richard Nixon. Put yourself in his position. You’re 35, elected to the House in a Republican wave year from a district that is usually safely Democratic. Your plum Committee assignment was Education and Labor. But, on HUAC, this throbbing blob of a Case has come rolling in the door. You and Bob Stripling saw possibilities that no one else saw and now The Case is all yours. You have satisfied yourself that Hiss is lying and Chambers is telling the truth. Now, for you, the issue is how far do you take this. Do you risk everything (your whole career) for it? How to prevent The Establishment from rallying around its fair haired boy Alger? How to convince them that Hiss is lying and they should give you free rein? How to satisfy yourself that Chambers will not crack under the pressure of public scrutiny and Democrat attacks, that he’ll convince typical Americans, that there’s nothing fishy in his past, that his love of melodrama will not carry him away into fantastication? If anything goes wrong, in six months you’ll be back in Whittier doing slip and fall cases. In this podcast, you’ll hear about the inner turmoil and external events that made up the mind of the future President.

Further Research:

Episode 8: Speculating about the thinking of Richard Nixon has been an indoor sport for people who knew him and the American intelligentsia for decades. In his own writings about this moment in the Case, he is unusually candid about how uncertain and anxious he was. See Six Crises at 19-23; see also Weinstein at 36-37. Nixon sent his brother Ed and his Mother to chat with the Chamberses. Ed Nixon & Karen Olson, “The Nixons: A Family Portrait” (2009) at 137-38. Nixon also consulted a reporter for the leading liberal Republican newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune. This Reporter, Bert Andrews, had been very critical of HUAC and other security agencies for being sloppy in recent investigations. Nixon used him as a sounding board and devil’s advocate in this Case and Andrews became a fascinated eyewitness to these and later crucial moments. Andrews’ posthumous memoir, “A Tragedy of History: A Journalist’s Confidential Role in the Hiss-Chambers Case,” by Bert and Peter Andrews (1962) at 72-77 describes Andrews’ first chats with Nixon and Chambers. Andrews says that Chambers, when he needed time to shape his answers to questions, paused for 30-40 seconds and looked like he had gone into a trance. Nixon, by the way, did not include Stripling in his deliberations at this phase.

Questions: You’re Richard Nixon. How do you decide whether to risk your whole career by supporting Chambers all the way? How do you verify or discredit all the (alleged) facts about the Hisses’ life in 1934-37 that Chambers divulged in his secret testimony? Use HUAC’s staff, obviously. How else? How do you get to know Chambers and form an opinion about his honesty (and perhaps sanity)? Remember, he doesn’t have to talk to you if he doesn’t want to. How can you investigate his past and see if there’s anything fishy there? How do you deter the natural pro-Hiss inclination of the Republican Establishment, which is itself invested in Hiss? (Hiss’s mentor at the Carnegie Endowment is John Foster Dulles, chief foreign policy advisor to Republican Presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey.) Assuming you decide to ‘bet the farm’ on Chambers, how do you get the news media involved so that this Case becomes Nixon’s Triumph and not HUACs? How do you separate yourself in the public mind from HUAC and launch a spectacular career of your own without earning the undying hatred of those you leave behind — Bob Stripling and the other members of HUAC?

Photo: http://www.spartacus-educational.com

Now comes the witness who, in my opinion, dooms Alger Hiss. He gives expert testimony supporting Chambers’ claim that the typed spy documents were passed to him by Alger Hiss after Mrs. Hiss typed them on the Hiss home typewriter. Lloyd Paul Stryker did not ask this witness a single question on cross-examination. Listen to this Podcast to learn who was the witness and how he formed his expert opinion. After the witness left the stand, all ears waited to hear Hiss explain how dozens of documents, obviously prepared for espionage, got typed on his home typewriter but he is still innocent. FURTHER RESEARCH: As one scholar put it, you wouldn’t want to hang a man based on the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and nothing more, but how could you disbelieve Chambers plus 64 pages of typewritten spy documents that had been typed on the Hiss home typewriter? Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford Univ. Press 1962) at 22. The next witness is Raymond Feehan, sometimes called Ramos Feehan — a great multi-cultural name, perhaps only possible in 1949 in New York City. Mr. Feehan was an FBI employee and a member of the profession of The Examination of Questioned Documents. I have been unable to find a photo of him or any other information about him — which makes him the perfect dispassionate expert. Alistair Cooke describes him as “a vigorous, dark-haired F.B.I. expert, . . .strictly a laboratory man . . . [who] appeared quite untouched by the emotions of the case . . . . [and had] all the basking pride of a travel lecturer much in demand.” Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial (1952) at 168-69. Mr. Feehan opined that the typed spy documents and another bunch of documents, which everyone agreed had been typed on the Hiss home typewriter, had been typed on the same typewriter. This opinion, wrote Alistair Cooke (at 168), “provoked quick intakes of breath from many casual spectators.” It is often misstated that this Case turned on a typewriter. That’s not true. Mr. Feehan formed his opinion before the typewriter that everyone agreed was the Hiss home typewriter had been found. Mr. Feehan based his opinion instead on a comparison of two sets of documents — the typed spy documents and the so-called Hiss Standards, which everyone had agreed had been typed on the Hiss home typewriter. It is as if you proved that the fingerprints on a certain glass were my fingerprints by comparing them not to my fingers, but to a fingerprints (say, in the files of the FBI) that everyone agreed were my fingerprints. The Prosecution’s evidence, the evidence that convicted Alger Hiss, would have been exactly the same if no typewriter had ever been found. Concurring in Mr. Feehan’s opinion was the founder of the profession of The Examination of Questioned Documents, one Ordway Hilton. Ordway Hilton, Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents (Revised Edition) (Elsevier Science Publishing Co. 1982) at 224-25, 232. Questions: How will Hiss explain how the typed spy documents got typed on his home typewriter? His Explanation #1, to the Grand Jury, that Chambers snuck into the Hiss house and typed them up himself when no one was looking, didn’t work. He’ll need a damned good Explanation #2, won’t he? You’ll have to wait for Podcast #26 to hear it. In the meantime, can you think of a way that Chambers (or someone with more time and resources) could make a ‘fake’ typewriter and produce typewritten documents that looked exactly like documents that had been typed on the real Hiss home typewriter? For that, you’ll need to wait for Podcast #35.

Federal Courthouse, NY, 1938

This is a short podcast to acquaint you with the actors about to come on stage in the drama of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. They are the government Prosecutor Thomas Murphy, Hiss’s principal defense lawyer Lloyd Paul Stryker, Judge Samuel Kaufman, and the jury. Additional Research Murphy, a 6’ 4” muscular giant of a man with an enormous walrus mustache, tried to come across as the quiet, somewhat plodding, but totally competent and honest government attorney just doing his job. He knew he could not match Hiss’s barrister Lloyd Paul Stryker, the greatest criminal defense lawyer in the country and a dramatic actor who could resemble a July 4 fireworks display if he wanted to. Also, prosecutors’ excessive drama can create sympathy for defendants. In later years, Murphy was briefly Police Commissioner of New York City (appointed by a reform Mayor) and for decades afterwards was a judge, appointed by President Truman, in the court where the Hiss trials occurred — the federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. A lawyer/friend who practiced before him told me that Murphy was a very quiet, laid back, passive trial judge and that these traits reflected his inner total self-confidence and sense of his own competence. My friend said that no matter which side of a case you were on you were always happy when you got Murphy as trial judge. He would let you put on your case as you wished and wouldn’t be interrupting your choreography to preen before the jury, comment on the evidence, or audition for higher office Lloyd Paul Stryker was a magnificent performer, a real barn-burner. He might be out of place in today’s cool culture. To him, his client was all things good and the other side was pure evil. It was that simple. He tended to ‘swing for the bleachers,’ ignoring details and endlessly pounding away at one or two simple points in Shakespearean English. He had a one man office, employing very young lawyers for a few years and then letting them go (with the benefit of having worked for a grand master). Among the books he wrote (in his spare time!) are laudatory biographies of our first impeached President, Andrew Johnson, and the famous 18th-19th century liberal British barrister Thomas Erskine, and two legal treatises — all available on Amazon. By the time of this trial, he was approaching old age. He had made a lot of money but I think he had spent most of it. Little is known about the judge at the first trial, Samuel Kaufman. He must have been good to become a judge in the prestigious Southern District, but he left no mark and was thought by some to be a hack from the Manhattan Democratic Party’s ‘machine’ in Tammany Hall, which was still quite powerful in the 1940s. He was so small physically that, when he leaned back all the way in his swivel chair up on the bench, he sometimes disappeared from view. About the jury, the important thing is that, judging from their occupations, none of them had been to graduate school and perhaps none of them had been to college. They were the kind of people who can’t afford to live in Manhattan any more. This trial took them into an unfamiliar world, of conceptual policy making and political ideology. Questions: Do you think Murphy and Stryker were well suited for the roles in which fate cast them? If you were one of them, how would you use the other’s character traits to your advantage? If you were Murphy or Stryker, how would you take the jury into the foreign (to them) world of the State Department and espionage for the Soviet Union in a way that made your side look good and the other side look bad? How would you make your man, Hiss or Chambers, seem to someone on the jury as just an honest ordinary person like me?

Alger Hiss is taken to prison Alger Hiss’s conviction — technically for perjury, but effectively for treason — was a major event. It was a disaster for The Establishment, especially liberal Democrats, and vindication for Republicans and populist Democrats. The 18 month labyrinth of HUAC hearings, depositions in Hiss’s libel suit, grand jury proceedings, and two criminal trials were the long, long overture to the so-called McCarthy Era. Senator McCarthy, in fact, gave his famous “I have a list . . .” speech just weeks after Hiss’s conviction. This Podcast gives an overview of the many and complex reactions to the guilty verdict. Everyone, it seems, accepted the factual correctness of the verdict. But many liberals could not help making up excuses for Hiss, or damning Chambers for being fat and melodramatic. And many conservatives and populists could not help painting all liberals and Harvard graduates with the black pitch of Hiss’s treason. Most interesting and encouraging to me, a significant number of liberals and Democrats were sufficiently mature and morally alive to engage in genuine introspection and self-criticism, to admit they had ‘blown it big time’ when it came to Soviet traitors in our midst, and to resolve to fashion a liberal anti-communism that was just as vigorous as what Republican conservatives had been offering for decades. FURTHER RESEARCH The McCarthy Era, although sparked by this Case, is an oceanic subject beyond the scope of these Podcasts. If you want to read about it, among the best conservative books are George H. Nash’s “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” (Basic Books 1976), esp. 84-130; and Richard Gid Powers’ “Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism” (Free Press 1995), esp. 191-272.See also Professor Harvey Klehr’s essay “Setting the Record Straight on Joe McCarthy,” https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/setting-record-joe-mccarthy-straight-harvey-klehr/. Among the far more numerous, totally anti-McCarthy books are David Caute’s “The Great Fear:The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower” (Touchstone 1979), esp. 56-62; Fred J. Cook’s “The Nightmare Decade:The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Random House 1971); Victor Navasky’s “Naming Names” (Viking 1980) (especially the early pages); I.F. Stone’s “The Truman Era: 1945-52” (Little Brown 1953) (Stone was himself a secret agent of the Soviet Union); and James A Weschler’s “The Age of Suspicion” (Random House 1953). I must note that it was a stroke of genius for the minimizers of Communist treason to name the era after anti-Communism’s most irresponsible big name. This is as if racists had succeeded in labeling the civil rights movement The Al Sharpton Movement. Concerning the impact of the Hiss verdict in particular, Dean Acheson, in his autobiography “Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department” (Norton 1987), titles his pertinent chapter (at 354) “The Attack of the Primitives Begins.” Alistair Cooke (at 340) also saw nothing good coming from Hiss’s conviction. A more mature view, at page 267 of Walter Goodman’s “The Committee:The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1968), is that the Hiss-Chambers Case “whip[ped] up a storm which did not last long but left ruins in its wake.” Other more realistic analyses of the Case’s impact on America are in Weinstein at 529-47 (chapter titled “Cold War Iconography I: Alger Hiss as Myth and Symbol”); the best single essay on this Case in my opinion, Leslie Fiedler’s “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” at 3-24 of his “An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics” (Beacon Press 1955) and Diana Trilling’s essay “A Memorandum on the Hiss Case,” first published in The Partisan Review of May-June 1950 and re-published at 27-48 of Patrick J. Swan’s anthology of essays on this Case, “Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul” (ISI Books 2003). The latter two essays I highly recommend. Questions: If you had been adult when Hiss was convicted, what would have been your reaction to his conviction? ‘Justice at long last,’ ‘a miscarriage of justice,’ ‘guilty but a fair trial was impossible,’ ‘technically guilty but with an excuse,’ or something else? Would your reaction have been purely emotional/political/tribal, or would you have cited one or more facts to support your reaction? Would you have been totally certain that your reaction was the right one, or would you have harbored some doubts?

Certainly, this Case was painful for Chambers — bringing him close to prison for perjury, ending the quiet and lucrative life he had enjoyed for years and costing him the only decent and decently paying job he had ever had. All the same, Chambers loved melodrama, and can you imagine any more satisfying melodrama than, on a dark and freezing night, leading two government investigators to a pumpkin vine behind your farmhouse and presenting them with five rolls of camera film containing proof of espionage and treason by the man who personifies the governing class of the country?

Further Research:

The dramatic, and sometimes almost comic, events of the first week of December 1948 are recounted in 191-207 and 287-93 of Weinstein’s “Perjury,” still the definitive history of this Case.

The memoirs of the major participants tell what happened, each somewhat differently from all the others: Bert Andrews’ “A Tragedy of History” at 174-91, Chambers’ “Witness” at 751-60, Nixon’s “Six Crises” at 46-56 and his “RN” at 67-69, and Stripling’s “The Red Plot Against America” at 141-51.

The most fascinating discrepancy in the accounts concerns the auto trip that Nixon, Stripling, Bert Andrews and the stenographer Rose Purdy took from Washington to Chambers’ Maryland farm on the afternoon of December 1 to find out ‘what the hell’ had caused Hiss’s lawsuit against Chambers to blow up. Chambers, at 751 of Witness, says that Stripling came to see him — strongly implying that Stripling made the tip alone. Nixon adds himself to the trip. (“Six Crises” at 47, “RN” at 67.) Bert Andrews adds himself as the third member of the trip (at 175). Stripling mentions only himself and Nixon (at 143-44). Why would Chambers want to give the impression that only Stripling came to see him? Why would Chambers want to leave Nixon out of the scene? I don’t see how that would help him or his side. I doubt he would have forgotten about all the others.

If you go to YouTube and search for “Pumpkin Papers,” you will find a group of film clips, starting with Nixon’s and Stripling’s press conference and including excerpts from the prior HUAC hearings and later films taken on the courthouse steps during Hiss’s trials. You can find other newsreels (which were shown in movie theaters and were the only form of moving image news before TV) about this case by searching on YouTube for “Alger Hiss” or “Whittaker Chambers.” The same search requests, made on CSPAN’s web page, will yield more newsreels, lengthy films of the August 25 hearing, as well as many interviews and much commentary on this Case. I suspect that this Case, and Chambers in particular, were favorites of Brian Lamb.

Questions: Who do you think is the most likely leaker of Chambers’ first bombshell to the Washington Post? Personally, I have no idea; no evidence, no rumors, not even a theory.

Do you feel sorry for Pat (“Here we go again!”) Nixon?

Do you sympathize with Nixon’s rage at Chambers for not telling him, during the HUAC hearings, that he had proof that Hiss was not only a Communist, but a spy? Can you think of one or more reasons Chambers held back that fact (if it’s a fact)? Chambers gave several reasons, which he gave to the Grand Jury. For them, you will have to listen to the next Podcast.