The Crucial Phone Call: How Richard Nixon Nailed Alger Hiss and Launched His Rise to the Presidency

Alger Hiss died 10 years ago today. The former State Department official and alleged Communist spy, who had served 44 months in a federal prison on perjury charges, had just turned 92, and he had failed in his lifelong quest to overturn his conviction and clear his name. But it must have given him a small measure of satisfaction to know that his chief tormenter, Richard Nixon, whom he outlived by two years, had died with a name little cleaner than his own.

At the time of his conviction, in 1950, Hiss had most recently been president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. He had degrees from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, past service as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and cordial relationships with many of the nation’s most powerful. When Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and ex-Communist, accused him in 1948 of having given classified documents to Soviet agents 10 years earlier, most of Washington loyally took Hiss’s side. Nixon, then a freshman congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee, was one of Chambers’s few supporters.

In the whirlwind of events that followed, Hiss sued Chambers for libel; Nixon called reporters to Chambers’s weekend farm in Maryland and dramatically revealed microfilmed copies of classified documents that experts later determined had come from Hiss’s typewriter. The government prosecuted Hiss for having lied about his contact with Chambers in the 1930s. After a jury delivered a hung verdict, in July 1949, a second trial six months later resulted in a conviction.

Hiss’s guilt or innocence has been a matter of controversy for more than 50 years. (See this AmericanHeritage.com article for a review of the debate.) But there’s little doubting the importance of the case. It brought broad credibility to the anti-Communist movement and launched Richard Nixon’s national career.

Before Chambers named Hiss in testimony before HUAC, in August 1948, the anti-Communist cause had enjoyed only limited success. Most Americans were deeply suspicious of Communism (in 1946 some 67 percent of those polled wanted to bar Communists from government jobs), and the Truman administration’s Loyalty Boards made life distinctly uncomfortable for any government employee with left-wing commitments. But anti-Communism still had a strong whiff of the conspiratorial and the crazy.

Three years earlier, in 1945, in the first major anti-Communist action of the postwar era, federal agents had raided the offices of the left-wing Asian-affairs journal Amerasia, believing its editors had reprinted classified intelligence documents that cast China’s anti-Communist Nationalist government in an unfavorable light. After following up with illegal searches and wiretaps of Amerasia’s staff, the government had arrested six people for conspiring to commit espionage, including Philip Jaffe, a left-leaning businessman, and John Stewart Service, a high-ranking career diplomat. But as quickly as the case came together, it began to fall apart. Because most of the evidence had been attained illegally, the government was unable to make much headway in court. Jaffe wound up facing minor charges of possessing classified documents; Service’s diplomatic career was through, but the case was ultimately a public-relations fiasco for the FBI and, more generally, for anti-Communism.

HUAC’s 1947 hearings concerning Hollywood were more successful, in that the major studio chiefs ultimately blacklisted some 250 left-wing directors, screenwriters, and actors in an effort to stave off further inquiries. But the hearings were controversial, and HUAC’s moral authority was widely contested. Prominent Hollywood figures including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and Katharine Hepburn challenged the committee openly and with impunity. “Before every free conscience in America is subpoenaed,” said Judy Garland, “please speak up! Say your piece. Write your congressman a letter! Airmail special.” Frank Sinatra warned, “Once they get the movies throttled, how long will it be before we’re told what we can say and cannot say into a radio microphone? If you make a pitch on a nationwide radio network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie?”

In 1948, then, the Alger Hiss controversy was high-stakes political poker. Nixon, who had largely stayed clear of the Hollywood hearings, considering them too farcical, understood that the credibility of the anti-Communist cause would ride on his ability to prove that Hiss, not Chambers, was lying.

For Nixon, the climax came on the morning of December 5, 1948, when he called a press conference to review the contents of the microfilm Chambers had produced. Just moments before the conference was set to begin, the Eastman Kodak company informed the committee’s chief investigator that the emulsion figures on the rolls indicated that the film had been manufactured after 1945, which gave the lie to Chambers’s claim that it dated back to 1938. “Oh, my God, this is the end of my political career,” Nixon said.

Indeed, had he been forced to tell the press that he had been sold a bill of goods, his career would likely have fizzled out then and there. But with reporters stirring about HUAC’s offices, he stepped inside a private room to call Chambers. He angrily revealed the substance of the Eastman Kodak revelations and demanded, “What is your answer to that?” A dejected Chambers insisted that he had microfilmed the documents in 1938 and replied, “I can’t understand it. God is against me.”

Moments later, the representative from Eastman Kodak phoned back to inform Nixon that he had been mistaken. The emulsion number actually corresponded to film that had been manufactured in 1937, discontinued during the war, and manufactured again after 1945. Chambers’s story checked out. Or at least it wasn’t disproved.

And so by 1950 Hiss was serving time in Lewisburg Federal Prison, and Nixon was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in California. With his anti-Communist credentials so firmly established, Nixon was able to smear and slander his Democratic opponent, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, with little fear of reprisal. He called her the “pink lady” and accused her of being “pink right down to her underwear.” He had slain a dragon, and the people trusted him. That November he crushed Douglas in the general election and moved up to the Senate. Two years later Dwight Eisenhower chose him to be his vice-presidential running mate.

Seldom in history has a single short phone call been so decisive. Had Eastman Kodak not corrected its error, Alger Hiss might never have gone to jail, and Richard Nixon might never have become President. There’s little doubting that Alger Hiss was still contemplating this possibility at the time of his death, 10 years ago today.