The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. David Talbot
Dewey’s hotel suite to discuss the Hiss-Chambers case. The Wall Street attorney appreciated the delicacy of the situation. As Dewey’s top foreign affairs adviser, Foster was poised to become the next secretary of state. The last thing he needed was a Washington tempest that tied him to a Soviet spy.
For Nixon, the anxiety hovering around the meeting was heightened by the fact that he harbored his own doubts about the case against Hiss. But men of action learn to conquer these disquieting voices inside, Nixon reminded himself. “One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or fly from it,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers.” A leader acted decisively. The failures are “those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee.”
Published in 1962, Six Crises was Nixon’s strangely belated answer to Profiles in Courage—the 1957, Pulitzer Prize–winning book by the charismatic man who had just beat him for president. Nixon intended his book to be a leadership manual, but it only highlighted his neuroses. Many observers thought Nixon’s desperate self-puffery bordered on hysteria. Writing in his journal after the book’s publication, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it “an orgy in unconscious self-revelation.” President Kennedy told Schlesinger it showed that Nixon was a “sick” man.
But, as usual, Nixon’s opponents underestimated him. Nixon may have suffered from a tortured psyche, but it made him acutely sensitive to the nuances of power. He had a Machiavellian brilliance for reading the chessboard and calculating the next series of moves to his advantage.
When Nixon walked into Suite 1527 at the Roosevelt Hotel that summer night in 1948, he faced a formidable array of power. With Foster were his brother Allen, Christian Herter, and Wall Street banker C. Douglas Dillon, who would later serve President Eisenhower in the State Department and presidents Kennedy and Johnson as Treasury secretary. These men made up a significant section of the Republican Party’s ruling clique. If Nixon failed to convince them that he had a solid case against Hiss, HUAC would have to close its noisy show, and his political career would be wrecked just as it was gaining traction.
Foster felt that Nixon approached the group with the proper sense of humility, and no doubt trepidation. “It was clear he did not want to proceed [with the Hiss investigation] until people like myself had agreed that he really had a case to justify going ahead,” Foster later remarked. Nixon knew that he was facing a skeptical audience. Herter, a mentor ever since their Marshall Plan junket, had already told Nixon he didn’t think he had a case. Herter had checked with his friends at the State Department, who assured him Hiss was not a Communist.
But Nixon was also aware that he came into the room with his own unique leverage. As the leading inquisitor in the Hiss case—an affair whose tendrils laced their way as far as John Foster Dulles himself—Nixon had the power to upend the Republican presidential campaign.
Nixon sat quietly in the suite while the Dulles brothers carefully read through the Hiss and Chambers transcripts. When they were done, Foster got to his feet and began pacing the room with his hands clasped behind him. The brothers realized that Nixon was right—and they had a problem. “There’s no question about it,” Foster frowned. “It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers knows Hiss.”
The Republican wise men took Nixon into their confidence, and once again the ambitious young politician came to a mutually convenient arrangement with the Dulles circle. It was another significant step for Nixon through the portals of power. With the Republican brain trust’s full support, Nixon would continue his aggressive pursuit of Hiss while keeping the spotlight carefully away from Foster and other GOP luminaries who were tied to the accused man. Meanwhile, Foster moved quickly to distance himself from Hiss, pressuring him behind the scenes to resign his Carnegie Endowment post, while Allen fed incriminating intelligence to Nixon to bolster his case. Some of this confidential information about Hiss likely came from the Venona project, the Army intelligence program that had been set up in 1943 to decrypt messages sent by Soviet spy agencies. The Venona project was so top secret that it was kept hidden from President Truman, but the deeply wired Dulles might have enjoyed access to it.
Nixon was impressed by the Dulles brothers’ bold decision to politically exploit the Hiss affair rather than run from it. The HUAC investigation could have been “acutely embarrassing” to Foster, Nixon later noted. The Dulleses “could have suggested that I delay the proceedings until after the election.” But instead, with Nixon’s help, they turned the Hiss case to their advantage, with Dewey fulminating against the laxity of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations that had allowed Communists to penetrate the government. The meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel proved a turning point. For the next decade, Republicans would use Cold War hysteria not just to indict Communist Party members and sympathizers as traitors but to brand the entire New Deal legacy as un-American. Even former high-ranking New Dealers with impeccable credentials like Alger Hiss would be fair game in Washington’s new inquisitorial climate.
The age of paranoia brought out Nixon’s brilliance as a political performer. He had a deep, demagogic instinct for playing on the public’s darkest fears. Robert Stripling, his right-hand man on HUAC, came to believe that there was no genuine ideological passion in Nixon’s pursuit of the “traitor” Hiss, just the same cold-blooded calculation he had brought to his campaign against Jerry Voorhis. “He was no more concerned about whether Hiss was [a Communist] than a billy goat,” the HUAC investigator later remarked.
This was not an entirely fair assessment of Nixon. The young politician clearly had developed deeply felt convictions about the brutality of the Communist system. When his Marshall Plan tour took him to Greece, Nixon was horrified to meet a young woman whose left breast had been hacked off by Communist guerrillas. He returned from the trip with a firm belief in the implacability of Communist regimes, and the conviction that they only understood force—a view that he would modify when he became president and engaged both the Soviet Union and China in strenuous diplomacy.
But at home, Nixon’s anti-Communism reeked of political cynicism, earning him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” He smeared his opponents with reckless abandon, labeling them as Reds or “dupes” or, in the case of his 1950 senatorial opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a woman who was “pink down to her underwear.” Nixon never proved that Hiss was a card-carrying Communist or a Soviet agent, but, with typical hyperbole, he treated him like he was a mortal threat to the American way of life.
The highlight of Nixon’s obsessive, Javert-like pursuit of Hiss came when Chambers dramatically led HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm, where he produced a hollowed-out pumpkin containing sixty-five pages of retyped State Department documents, four pages of copied government documents in Hiss’s handwriting, and five rolls of classified film—all of which, Chambers claimed, had been slipped to him by Hiss in 1938. Nixon staged a dramatic return to Washington from a Caribbean vacation cruise, with the help of a Coast Guard rescue plane, in order to publicize the so-called pumpkin papers. The documents, which seemed to prove that Hiss did have an espionage connection to Chambers, sealed the diplomat’s fate. He was indicted in December 1948 by a federal grand jury for lying to Congress.
Hiss continued to vigorously deny his guilt, insisting that the pumpkin papers had been forged by Chambers. Neither he nor his wife, Priscilla, could have retyped the State Department documents, said Hiss, because they had given away the Woodstock model typewriter that they allegedly used to copy the classified memos before 1938. Four jury members at his first deadlocked trial believed Hiss, agreeing that someone other than Hiss or his wife had retyped the State Department documents. Hiss’s suspicion that he was framed was given further credence