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When he was offered a place on the House Un-American Activities Committee, earnest Dick Nixon had quite a wrestle with himself. On such occasions, he paces up & down, lights one cigarette after another, talks to the ceiling, suddenly whirls around as if he were trying to catch his problem unawares with a new grip. The committee's reputation was low. Its chairman was J. Parnell Thomas, eventually to be indicted and jailed for fraud. Nixon's friend and fellow Congressman, California's Donald Jackson, recalls how Nixon came into his office and started pacing. "He felt the moral obligation to accept," Jackson recalls, "but he asked himself repeatedly, sometimes aloud, if the condemnation of the committee by liberals was sound, if there were the injustices and the irresponsibilities complained of, if the committee could be brought to do a sound job." As Nixon puts it: "Politically it could be the kiss of death, but I figured it was an opportunity as well as a risk, so I took it."
Opportunity came a year and a half later, when a man called Whittaker Chambers testified before the committee that a man called Alger Hiss was a Communist.
The Hiss Case. As Nixon later recalled it, almost all the committee members believed Hiss when he denied Chambers' charges, and the case was almost dropped then & there. Explains Nixon: "I was impressed by Hiss's testimony. But then that night, when I was reading the transcript as a lawyer, I became convinced that he was hiding something. Everything he said was too smooth, too carefully qualified."
Nixon reasoned that if Chambers had known Hiss as well as he said he did, he would know details of Hiss's life and habits that a stranger would not know. In secret session, Nixon drew from Chambers a mass of detailed information about
Hiss. Then Hiss, unaware of what Chambers testified, was asked about certain details of his own life. His facts and Chambers' fell together like tumblers in the lock of a safe.
Most startling was the case of the prothonotary warbler. Chambers remembered that Hiss's hobby was bird watching, and that Hiss had once told him he had seen a prothonotary warbler. Hiss was asked if he had ever seen one. He said he had, and the incident fitted well with Chambers' previous testimony. This was the turning point of the Hiss case. From then on, most of the committee members were convinced that Hiss was lying. After Chambers had produced the microfilms of State Department documents from his famed pumpkin and the Justice Department was fighting with the committee for possession of this new evidence, Nixon—on his way to Panama—hurried back by plane and Coast Guard cutter.
Writes Chambers in Witness: "To [my children] he is always 'Nixie,' the kind and the good, about whom they will tolerate no nonsense. His somewhat martial Quakerism sometimes amused and always heartened me. I have a vivid picture of him in the blackest hour of the Hiss case, standing by the barn and saying in his quietly savage way (he is the kindest of men): 'If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil.' "