Nixon’s formula for destroying an innocent man: ‘I had to leak stuff’

THOUGH he had never met him, Richard Nixon hated Alger Hiss. Nixon was a young Congressman who had struggled against poverty all his life.

From a poor background and with a law degree from an unknown university, Nixon had pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

He was elected to Congress for the Republican Party just after World War II, when the Democrat Harry Truman was president, and it was said even then that the campaign Nixon ran in California against his Democratic opponent was one of the dirtiest ever seen.

In what was to become his trademark, he succeeded in branding his opponent, a life-long Democrat, as a communist.

It was probably natural, given that background, that Nixon was made a member of a little-known congressional committee called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

The committee's unlikely job was to find communists, but it was spectacularly unsuccessful. Its one achievement was that a journalist named Whittaker Chambers confessed to being a communist agent in his youth, although he was now a rabidly anti-communist writer and agitator. Deeply unpleasant and probably unstable, Chambers was a total fanatic.

It was Chambers who told Nixon that Alger Hiss was a communist spy. Hiss was everything that Nixon despised. Highly educated, wealthy, a member of the Washington elite and a senior official in the US State Department, Hiss was also something of a snob. Nixon was determined to get him, and immediately began a prosecution based on nothing but the word of Whittaker Chambers.

Little by little, and on live television, Nixon began to build a circumstantial case against Hiss. Day after day the committee's broadcasts made Nixon more famous, and hardly a day went by that he didn't produce some new 'evidence.'

The climax of the hearings came when Nixon was able to announce that he had come into possession of several rolls of microfilm apparently containing information damaging to America's interests, and that this microfilm had been given to Whittaker Chambers (when Chambers was a communist agent) by Alger Hiss. Chambers had produced the microfilm from a hollowed-out pumpkin in a vegetable patch in his back garden, and given it to HUAC. The daily coverage of the case, with its implication that there were communists at the heart of government, rocked the US to its foundations. In vain did Hiss protest his innocence. After a number of trials, he was eventually convicted of spying and served a prison sentence.

To his dying day many years later, he protested that he was an innocent man, and no definitive proof that he had ever subverted US democracy or its interests abroad was ever produced.

To this day, no-one can be sure. We do know that Hiss was destroyed, and we know that the evidence against him was never more than the word of a highly dubious witness. We know that the evidence was manipulated by Richard Nixon to launch his own career.

Even though we will probably never know the truth, the Alger Hiss case changed the US in fundamental ways. It changed public discourse profoundly because the rabid anti-communism that Whittaker Chambers espoused was to have a long and deep influence. Nixon's success with the case encouraged others. Senator Joe McCarthy, for instance, followed Nixon, and what became known as McCarthyism was born. McCarthy would never have happened if Nixon had failed in his hounding of Alger Hiss.

McCarthyism, of course, was ultimately discredited because it was built on a foundation of lies. Joe McCarthy's favourite tactic was to level accusations that could neither be proved nor disproved, and to turn friend against friend. More than once he told witnesses in front of his committee that if they weren't prepared to name people who were subverting American democracy, they must be guilty themselves. No other evidence was deemed to be necessary.

As time went on, the lasting change in America became clearer.

The Hiss case led to the real birth of conservatism in the US. Prior to the case, America was a model of liberal democracy. Free speech, the right to due process, the right to trial by jury all these things were taken seriously by the US, written into the constitution in amendments adopted by the people. They were all undermined by the Hiss case and by what followed it.

BUT more than that, the arguments put forward by Chambers, and taken up first by Nixon and then by McCarthy, led to the development of a new politics, and to the re-emergence of a strong and deeply conservative Republican party. Nixon built the so-called 'silent majority' around his anti-communism and right-wing economics, and Ronald Reagan (who frequently quoted Chambers with approval, and took his description of Soviet Russia as the "Evil Empire" from a book by Chambers), George Bush senior and junior all built on that.

In the short term, the destruction of Alger Hiss catapulted Nixon from being an unknown congressman to national prominence. In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower chose him as his running mate, and although Eisenhower wanted to drop him as vice-president after four years, he held on to the job until 1960. Ultimately, Nixon became US president the job he always wanted in 1968.

By then his greed for office, his willingness to do whatever it took to win, was a guaranteed recipe for corruption. And corruption overtook him in the form of the Watergate scandal.

Watergate was investigated by many, but most notably by a senate committee headed by Senator Sam Ervin, a man who became famous throughout America for his decency and honour. Interestingly, Ervin had two favourite quotations, which appeared often in his speeches. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

Sam Ervin's committee ultimately discovered that President Nixon had taped everything that happened in his office. It was the discovery of those tapes that eventually led to the 'smoking gun' that forced Nixon to resign the revelation that he had covered up the Watergate break-in. The man who had destroyed Alger Hiss with some microfilm found in a pumpkin patch was himself destroyed by tapes. But those tapes remain fascinating to historians.

Nearly 25 years after he had destroyed Hiss, and made his own reputation, Nixon mused one day in the Oval Office on how he had done it. This is what the Nixon tapes record him as saying: "We won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn't even cooperate. It was won in the papers. We have to develop a programme, a programme for leaking out information. We're destroying these people in the papers. I had Hiss convicted before he got to the grand jury... I no longer have the energy, [but we need] a son of a bitch who will work his butt off and do it dishonourably. I know how to play the game and we're going to play it."