A Look Back at Richard Nixon and the Hiss-Chambers Case

by Kenneth Schmidt

Kenneth Schmidt examines Richard Nixon’s pursuit of Alger Hiss during the Cold War era and the pro-Communist biases that contributed to Nixon’s downfall.

One of the dominant figures in US Republican politics from the 1950s through the 1970s was Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon was a congressman, senator and vice-president under Eisenhower. Beaten narrowly by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race, he made a comeback, eventually serving as president from 1969 to 1974. Nixon eventually fell victim to a political scandal, Watergate, and did not complete his second term.

I have been thinking about Nixon lately, mainly because, in the last couple of years, a non-profit organization called the Richard Nixon Foundation has been promoting the long-dead ex-president on YouTube. The foundation runs Nixon’s presidential library and promotes scholarly study of the man. I visited the library and museum, out in Whittier, California, many years ago. I found it smaller than the similar facility dedicated to Ronald Reagan, but better organized and more interesting. I get the distinct impression that the folks running the Nixon Foundation are, to use an old Soviet term, trying to “rehabilitate” him. Looking back, the Watergate scandal was hardly a horrific enormity. Nixon probably didn’t order the burglary of his opponent’s political headquarters, but did try to cover it up and impede the investigation.

Ideologically, Nixon was interesting. He was certainly no conservative. The very young conservative movement of the 1970s, led by William F. Buckley, Jr., correctly pegged Nixon as an establishment guy. They were looking more for someone in the mold of unsuccessful 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The only conservative elements in his program were anti-Communism and, in reaction to an insane rise in minority criminality at the time, an emphasis on “law and order.” The only conservatives Nixon had working for him were a very young Patrick Buchanan, who served as a kind of informal ambassador to conservatives, and Howard Phillips, a man I came to know in the early 1980s, running the US Office of Economic Opportunity. In the latter part of the Watergate scandal, both Buckley and his brother James, a senator from New York, distanced themselves from Nixon so people wouldn’t associate the scandal with conservatives.

As president, Nixon was hated by the media and political elites with a white-hot hatred. Until the beginning of Trump’s presidential run in 2015, no public figure was more hated by the Left and the establishment than Nixon. This used to puzzle me a great deal, considering Nixon’s very moderate, sometimes even mildly left-wing policies. I’m convinced that the root of most of this intense hatred goes back to the beginning of Richard Nixon’s political career, when he was a humble congressman from the state of California.

Elizabeth Bentley, an American-born NKVD spymaster, defected to the West and was called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee in 1948, on which newly minted Representative Nixon was a member. She named about 80 high and medium profile persons as part of her network. One of the names caused a big stir, that of Alger Hiss.

Hiss was a rather highly placed official in President Roosevelt’s New Deal bureaucratic apparatus from the onset of his administration. By the last two years of the war, Hiss managed to work himself into a rather exalted position in the State Department. He ended up having a key role in the Yalta Conference and was even more influential in helping to set up the United Nations. In 1946, he left the State Department for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

After the Bentley revelations, Nixon, who was by now convinced that Hiss was a Soviet agent, invited one Whittaker Chambers to testify before HUAC. Chambers affirmed that Hiss was a part of his espionage group. Hiss asked to testify before the committee, where he denied being either a Communist or a spy. Chambers was a rather brilliant Communist theoretician, a sub-editor at New Masses and contributor to The Daily Worker but also, significantly, part of the Soviets’ “Ware Spy Group” who worked regularly with Hiss on espionage projects. Once a zealous Communist, Chambers left the party in 1938 in reaction to the Stalinist purge trials. Chambers had managed to keep some papers, which included some documents typed on Hiss’ typewriter. Hiss was eventually convicted, not of espionage but of perjury before a congressional committee, after two sensational trials, and sentenced to prison for five years. Chambers got a job writing for Buckley’s National Review for a couple of years and faded from view.

The Left never forgave Nixon for going after Hiss. They saw Hiss’ involvement with Communism as a youthful foible. It was felt that the great suffering that took place in the Great Depression inspired many to toy with the idea of Bolshevism in the 1930s, which they saw as a perhaps naive but not evil reaction to events. The wartime propaganda which led American newspapers to refer to mass murderer Stalin affectionately as “Uncle Joe” didn’t fade right after the war either. A lot of folks in the media didn’t want people to look too closely at other figures in the New Deal who were Communists, like Harry Dexter White, or had Communist leanings, like Roosevelt’s second vice president, Henry Wallace.

There can be no doubt that one of America’s forms of snobbery, the educational kind, also had an influence on the Hiss case. Nixon did his undergraduate work at a humble institution called Whittier College and went to law school at Duke University, which has some prestige today, but was still considered an upstart institution in the 1940s and 1950s. Hiss, on the other hand, went to Johns Hopkins and Harvard. He even had the honor of clerking with the Supreme Court, always considered an automatic entrée into success in the legal field. European readers might be surprised that such things are terribly important, but they are considered essential to the pecking order that exists in American society. Nixon was essentially considered a low-class upstart. His parents were humble orchard owners.

I would be remiss if I didn’t explore other reasons for the deep antipathy toward Nixon by the ruling class. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the far left smelled blood in the water. They were convinced that their time had come, but the American people stubbornly persisted in voting for the center-right Nixon in two presidential elections. 1972 was a particular humiliation, with the Democrat candidate, George McGovern, winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Although the real populist presidential aspirant in several elections of the era was Alabama governor George Wallace, Nixon did have some populist appeal — this in spite of his uncharismatic personality, a result of his Quaker upbringing. Nixon was somewhat stiff in public. In his speeches, Nixon hit upon the term “silent majority,” a slogan used by President Coolidge in the 1920s. Richard Nixon saw himself as an advocate for common folk, as opposed to hippy activists. He was the first Republican presidential candidate for many decades that got a fairly good chunk of the white working class vote.

Pushing for the prosecution of Hiss made Nixon an important public figure, but it also led to his downfall. The left-leaning establishment probably would have soft-pedaled the Watergate scandal, but they never forgave him for Hiss, so he had to go. Many of the themes and issues of the Nixon era still have their echoes in today’s politics.