Nixon's Role: No Heroics

Richard Nixon regarded the Alger Hiss case as his first major crisis, and one that he handled masterfully. As President, he frequently urged his aides to read the account of it in his autobiographical Six Crises. "Warm up to it, and it makes fascinating reading," he told H.R. Haldeman. Charles Colson claimed to have read the book 14 times. "The fact is," says Historian Allen Weinstein, "Nixon didn't behave very courageously during the Hiss case. He buckled under pressure."

At the climactic point--when the House Un-American Activities Committee was seeking documentary evidence from Whittaker Chambers to revive the flagging case against Hiss--Nixon and his wife left Washington for a cruise to Panama. "I don't think he's got a damned thing," he told Robert Stripling, who was HUAC's chief investigator. Writes Weinstein: "If Chambers' bombshell fizzled, or if it exploded in Stripling's face, Nixon would be in Panama, far from the scene of carnage. He might be embarrassed but not discredited." The day Nixon left the country, Chambers turned over five rolls of film--two of them containing photographs of State Department documents. Three days later, Nixon made a dramatic return to the U.S. aboard a Navy seaplane.

The next day, Nixon was confronted with another crisis: the manufacturer of three rolls reported that they had been made in 1945, meaning that Chambers' evidence was forged. By Nixon's account, he reacted coolly, almost stoically. But Stripling and other HUAC investigators told Weinstein that Nixon actually became almost hysterical, exclaiming: "Oh my God. This is the end of my political career." In abusive language, he blamed the investigators. He threatened to tell reporters that "we were sold a bill of goods." Minutes later the film manufacturer phoned to say that there had been a mistake: the film had actually been made in 1937.

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