Nixon Hiss Testimony Released

In the late 1940s, red hysteria swept the nation. A young congressman from California named Richard Nixon was determined to expose Alger Hiss, a State Department official, as a communist.

Fearful that a grand jury might not indict Hiss, Nixon, a member of the Red-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, boldly requested to testify himself.

Tuesday, 4,200 pages of secret testimony given before the grand jury were made public, and they show - as historians expected - that Nixon lobbied strongly for Hiss' indictment. But while he argued convincingly, historians who have read the testimony say he did it with masterful, clever oratory, not blatant manipulation of the grand jury.

They also show, reports CBS News Producer Jeff Goldman, that Nixon said he was upset that the government had known of the connection between Hiss and communist turncoat Whitaker Chambers.

The California congressman credited the House Un-American Activities Committee, of which he was a member, with exposing the communist infiltration of the U.S. government. He criticized the Department of Justice for what he called a lax investigation. "They did not have a particular interest in pushing a charge against Hiss."

Appearing at a news conference, Hiss' son, Tony, said his late father was convinced that the transcripts "contained important information which would help him demonstrate both his innocence and patriotism and the cruel and bizarre unfairness of the case against him."

He said the transcripts are likely to raise new questions about the reliability of his father's accuser, Whittaker Chambers, and about the "propriety and truthfulness of the astonishing last-minute appearance before the grand jury by Congressman Richard M. Nixon."

Days before Nixon testified, Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and a former member of the Communist Party, had led investigators outside his farmhouse near Westminster, Md., and retrieved microfilm he'd hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin - evidence, he said, of Hiss' complicity in a communist spy ring.

"I am here solely as a messenger for the House," Nixon told the grand jury. "I have the microfilm in my physical custody."

The grand jurors wanted the "pumpkin papers." Nixon refused, citing House rules. He didn't want to give the film to a grand jury impaneled by a Justice Department that was run by the Truman administration.

The grand jury foreman again asked Nixon for the film. Nixon refused and suggested the matter be decided by a court.

Then he said: "Regardless of a ruling of the court, I will not part with the films. If the films go into evidence, I go with them."

Two days later the grand jury, which did eventually get the films entered into evidence, indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury - one for having lied about not giving classified State Department papers to Chambers and the other for lying about when he last saw Chambers.

Transcripts of the testimony show Chambers was a repeat witness before the initial grand jury that indicted Hiss and a second impaneled right afterward to conduct a broader probe of communist infiltrators in the government.

On Dec. 17, 1948, Chambers testified that he was asked to go into the communist underground in the summer of 1932 to be a liaison between the underground and more public sectors of the party.

"I understood that the Communist Party is divided roughly into two organizational parts - the open Communist Party which functions as everybody knows, in its public offices, and in the streets and in the trade unions, and an unadmitted secret section of the Communist Party which is - which has its own form of organization for its own purposes," Chambers said.

It was in this capacity that he was allegedly associated with Hiss.

Hiss later went to jail. Nixon went on to become a senator, vice president and ultimately president.

But the case that redefined both men's lives never died. Historians still debate: Did Hiss get a fair trial? Was he the victim of Red hysteria? Was the grand jury process conducted appropriately? Did Nixon interfere in the legal process when he testified before the grand jury?

Nixon teased the jurors with the contents of the microfilm, said historian Bruce Craig, who has read the testimony. He testified in a clever, subtle, masterful way, Craig said.

"This was Nixon's crowning achievement as an orator before his Checkers speech," Craig said, referring to Nixon's emotional televised message in 1952 which kept him from being thrown out as Dwight D. Eisenhower's running mate because of slush fund allegations. In his talk, Nixon spoke of his daughters' puppy, Checkers.

"It was the Hiss case that completely changed the public's perception of domestic communism," Nixon wrote in his memoirs.

The thousands of pages of transcripts will yield more clues.

"I think that this will not end debate, but give each side more ammunition," said David Vladeck, a lawyer for the group of scholars and historical associations that petitioned a federal court for the release of the papers.

Grand jury testimony is almost always sealed in perpetuity. But last year, Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that works to open government records, petitioned for the release of the six volumes of grand jury documents.

Lawyers for the group argued the records could be opened because 50 years had passed, all major figures in the case have died and the records have historical value that overrides the need to keep grand jury records secret. In May, U.S. District Judge Peter Leisure of the Southern District of New York ordered the government to unseal the testimony.