Nixon’s Greatest Moments

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 12 · 24 June 1993

From Michael Meadmore

Like Nixon himself, R.W. Johnson’s review of Nixon: A Life (LRB, 13 May) raises doubt and alarm. Because Nixon rose ‘from the bottom of the social heap’ and, claims Johnson, worked harder and read more than other incumbents, he was ‘in many ways the most impressive of America’s post-war Presidents’. Yet Nixon’s fractured personality (‘he has never known who he is’) rendered him ‘not fit for public office’.

Johnson is not always meticulous with Aitken’s text. Nixon, electioneering in 1952 when McCarthyism was at its height, called Truman, Acheson and Stevenson not traitors but ‘traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe’. In 1947, John Kennedy gave Nixon the telephone numbers, not of tarts, but of ‘three suitable young ladies, one of which was the number of his sister’ as possible social contacts when the Herter Committee visited Paris. On Nixon’s and Kennedy’s rivalry in the 1960 Presidential election, Johnson is misleading: ‘JFK’s famous dismissal of Nixon (“no class”) stuck at the time, but Nixon’s view of JFK as a spoiled Harvard womaniser is now more widely shared.’ Kennedy’s private remark was prompted by Nixon’s changing from gallant, likely loser (on TV: ‘If he does become our next President, he will have my wholehearted support’) to delegating to his press spokesman the culminating moment of conceding the election. Thus, though he conceded by telegram, he failed to thank his nationwide army of workers and signal an end to division. Kennedy’s ‘famous dismissal’ never leaked. It was first published over five years later in Pierre Salinger’s With Kennedy.

‘A spoiled Harvard womaniser’ can surmount illness and have huge voter-appeal. Johnson interpolates a caricature fostered by recent scandal-embroidering biographers. By focusing almost exclusively on the dubious count in Illinois and Texas, Aitken, Stephen Ambrose and virtually all other biographers infer that Nixon was robbed of the 1960 election. He showed statesmanship in declining to contest the result. ‘Nixon behaved well … refusing to ask for a recount,’ says Johnson. But Nixon admits to Aitken that his campaign chairman tried to buy votes – ‘The party had been doing it for years.’ Kennedy’s slight eve-of-election lead put pressure on the Republicans. Their vote-rigging in rural, downstate Illinois is alleged. In the Washington Post of 4 January 1961, Drew Pearson charged that Hoffa’s Teamsters’ Union and Mafia money were vital in ‘switching Ohio, considered safe for Kennedy, into the Nixon column’: of all states, Ohio (26 electoral votes) registered the largest swing by far between eve-of-election poll and result. The matter may have been most fairly put by Theodore White in Breach of Faith: the electoral outcome of ‘counterfeiting across the nation … rested on whether the Democratic crooks or the Republican crooks were the more skilful.’

State recounts, where permitted by law, take an inordinate length of time; legislatures have to be recalled etc. There was only one, in Hawaii, and it took seven weeks; Nixon’s four electoral votes went to Kennedy. Nixon alluded to the minefield when he wrote in his Memoirs: ‘And what if I demanded a recount and it turned out that despite the vote fraud Kennedy had still won? Charges of “sore loser” would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.’

Johnson repeatedly queries Aitken’s ability to understand, but the same can be levelled at him with regard to the American Right. The obverse side of the Right’s ‘naked opportunism’ was a genuinely-held fear that New Dealism, British socialism (much cited in the late Forties) and Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949 heralded eventual engulfment by Communism. Nixon’s ‘persecution of Alger Hiss’ occurred before McCarthy discovered the electoral value of Communism. It is problematic to say that ‘Nixon rode the wave of McCarthyism.’ From the start (1950), Nixon advised McCarthy not to use the witchhunting techniques that in late 1954 were to bring McCarthy down. In his March 1954 speech, Nixon topped and tailed his ‘shooting rats’ metaphor (rightly deplored by Johnson) by insisting that procedures against alleged Communists ‘must be fair and they must be proper … So we have to be fair.’ Johnson omits both quotes.

Perhaps most alarming is Johnson’s failure to understand the Alger Hiss case. He commends age-old conspiracy theories that are repeated in ‘recent biographies of J. Edgar Hoover’. If Hiss had been straightforward in answering queries about his alleged links with Communists in the Thirties and much else, he would not have been convicted of perjury. His own documents experts agreed that the copies of classified papers taken from and returned to the State Department had identical typescript to that in personal letters typed earlier on the Hisses’ typewriter. Long-hand notes of stolen papers, they agreed, were in Hiss’s hand. It is not possible to replicate the typescript of one machine by making another – Hiss’s defence counsel employed a ‘forger’ who tried for over a year and failed. Anyway, it was Hiss’s brother, not the FBI, who traced the long-discarded typewriter. ‘Several of Hiss’s own documents experts, after examining samples of Chambers’s typing, agreed that he could not have typed [the copies]’: Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978). Professor Weinstein had embarked on his five-year study of the case in the belief that Hiss was innocent. The evidence, which included thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, forced him to change his mind.

Michael Meadmore
London W12

Vol. 15 No. 14 · 22 July 1993

From John Lowenthal

Michael Meadmore’s letter (24 June) taxes R.W. Johnson with ‘failure to understand the Alger Hiss case’, but it is Meadmore himself who is wide of the mark. Hiss, a former US State Department officer, was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying that he had given State Department documents to his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, in 1938. Chambers said the papers were destined for the Soviet Union. Congressman Nixon was Hiss’s principal harrier, and the case paved Nixon’s road to the White House.

At his sentencing to five years in prison, Hiss again denied the charges and expressed confidence that ‘how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter’ would eventually be disclosed. Hiss meant that it would be revealed how Chambers had got access to Mrs Hiss’s typewriter, since Chambers had brought forth copies of State Department documents retyped in typescript closely matching that of personal letters typed at home by Mrs Hiss. Unknown to Hiss at the time of his trials, there was another way to forge typing, a technique that Meadmore mistakenly denies is possible: building a replicating typewriter. During World War Two – a decade before the Hiss trials – intelligence operatives using that technique ‘could produce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth’. One such operation, with the collaboration of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, called for rebuilding a typewriter ‘that precisely duplicated the machine in Rome [and produced] a letter so perfectly forged by matching the imperfections of typewriter keys … that it caused the removal of certain key pro-Nazis in South America’ (William Stevenson: A Man Called Intrepid). President Nixon reportedly told his aide Charles Colson that ‘the typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case’ (John Dean:Blind Ambition).

Even if the copies were typed on Mrs Hiss’s typewriter, that says nothing about who typed them or how they came into Chambers’s hands. There was no expert testimony on those questions: only Chambers’s word, against the word of both Mr and Mrs Hiss, that the typist was Mrs Hiss (Chambers had first said it was Mr or Mrs Hiss, but he changed that version when he learned that Mr Hiss could not type) and that Chambers himself had collected the copies at the Hisses’ house. Chambers had been a house guest of the Hisses briefly in the Thirties, and he also had sources in the State Department other than Hiss. In any case, the fact that the typescripts were closely matched suggests a frame-up; no rational intelligence agent would leave such a trail leading back to himself. The form of the papers also belies espionage: short excerpts, summaries and full copies appear at random, and telling parts of the original documents are omitted entirely or paraphrased while routine material is copied verbatim. (They are all publicly available in Volume VII of the printed court record.)

Chambers also produced four notes pencilled by Hiss, which Chambers said Hiss gave him to convey to the Soviets – again, a most unlikely spy story. The notes had been creased and crumpled; portions are unintelligible to anyone but Hiss; and they look just like what Hiss said they were: notes he made to himself for briefing his superior officer on incoming cables and then discarded.

Finally, Meadmore’s reliance on Allen Weinstein’s Perjury betrays his unawareness of the critical and investigatory discrediting of Weinstein’s book and putative change of mind; of his published apology and capitulation to a libel suit; and of his continuing refusal, in violation of the rules of the American Historical Association, to make his supposed source materials available for verification. Far more qualified than either Weinstein or Meadmore are General Dmitry Volkogonov, the overseer of the Soviet intelligence archives, and Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, who last year conducted an archival search at Hiss’s request. They reached the ‘firm conclusion’ that ‘Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union.’

John Lowenthal
New York

Vol. 15 No. 18 · 23 September 1993

From Brian Crozier

The ingenious low technology of the typewriter age, as recounted by John Lowenthal, is hardly decisive proof of Hiss’s innocence (Letters, 22 July). As for General Dmitry Volkogonov, Lowenthal has simply stuck to the original and discredited version of the story, as launched by Alger Hiss at his press conference last October. Hiss had claimed that Volkogonov, having (at Hiss’s request) examined the relevant KGB files, had found no incriminating references to him, and thereupon claimed to be exonerated of the charges levelled against him.

The Volkogonov ploy was destroyed not long after by Herbert Romerstein, a leading American authority on Soviet communism. It turned out that Volkogonov did not have free access to secret files, but merely looked at those made available to him by Yevgeny Primakov, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (successor to the KGB’s First Directorate). It was and remains an absolute rule that Moscow never exposes its spies (defectors excepted). In November 1992, not long after the Hiss press conference, Volkogonov happened to be in Washington to testify before the Senate Committee on prisoners of war. Romerstein met him and Volkogonov confirmed that he had not been given free access to the secret files. Oleg Gordievsky, a major KGB defector, makes a number of conclusive references to Hiss’s espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, in the book co-authored by Christopher Andrew, KGB: The Inside Story. A brief quotation tells it all: ‘The KGB’s main source within the State Department, Alger Hiss, was actually a member of the American delegation at Yalta.’

Brian Crozier
London Wl