Joan Brady: Alger Hiss 'was framed by Nixon'
Susanna RustinNovelist who knew Hiss for more than three decades has written a personal history that accuses president of fitting him up as a communist spy
Joan Brady first met Alger Hiss on a hot summer evening in Manhattan in 1960. She was a 20-year-old ballet dancer, her future husband Dexter Masters was 52, and she was used to feeling patronised by visitors to their apartment.
Irritable and conscious of her limitations as a cook, Brady was taken aback by Hiss when he came to dinner. He showed a highly developed interest in ballet, was polite about the overcooked beef, and showed “no anger, no bitterness” although he claimed to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice when he was convicted of perjury in 1950, jailed and denounced as a communist spy.
As she recounts the remarkable tale of their first meeting, Brady still sounds surprised: ”Here I am meeting somebody that I read in my school books was such an evil human being, and he comes to the door and looks like a boy scout.”
Though Joan never warmed to Hiss’s wife Isabel, the couples became friends. Hiss was reliable, cheerful and a great letter writer. Had he really spied for the Russians? Neither Joan or Dexter knew or much cared.
Fifty-five years on from that first meeting, Brady has changed her mind. Her new book America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged sets out to clear Hiss’s name. Hers is not the first attempt. Pulitzer prize-winning historian Kai Bird and former editor of the Nation Victor Navasky are among those who have already tried. But Brady’s book, which she has worked on for 10 years and will be published in the US next spring, offers a unique perspective.
“This is probably the biggest and longest-lasting cover-up in history, when you think about who was involved,” she says. “It was instigated by a guy who became the president, it was supported by the secret services. It involves all these important people and has so many ramifications and every American schoolchild knows who this traitor is. It is extraordinary.”
When he was brought down by Richard Nixon, then a California congressman, Hiss belonged to the top slice of the American elite: he was president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and seen as a likely future secretary of state. There are photographs of him with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at the 1945 Yalta conference.
Hiss’s fall was spectacular and when Brady knew him, he was a salesman. But though she recognised his loyalty and her husband enjoyed their conversations, she says she failed to appreciate him: “I should’ve been fascinated but I wasn’t, the flaw was in me.” Events in her own life caused her to reassess. Starting in 2000, Brady fought a protracted battle with South Hams District Council in Devon, after a shoe factory moved into the building next door to her home. Brady was poisoned by chemicals used in the factory, but the council refused to support her complaints and, when she built a wall in an attempt to block out the fumes, took her to court for planning violations and threatened her with jail.
The whole, traumatic experience, which left her with neurological damage and, eventually, a £115,000 payout, gave the author – who has joint US and UK citizenship, and who won the Whitbread prize in 1993 for her novel Theory of War – new sympathy for Alger Hiss as a fellow victim of injustice.
In the US, Hiss is famous. Whittaker Chambers, who testified against Hiss, remains a hero to American conservatives and was awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Hiss’s conviction opened the way for the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, and was the crowning achievement of the House Un-American Activities Committee, set up in 1938 to investigate links with Nazi Germany but soon diverted to catching communists.
Brady, who I visited at the house in Oxford she has lived in for 10 years, insists the Hiss case is “simple”. For the uninitiated it can appear baffling, so here is a summary: in 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and gave the names of several government officials he claimed were part of a communist network. All but Alger Hiss took the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, but Hiss chose to appear in public to deny Chambers’s claim.
Brady believes Hiss was doomed from this point on, by a combination of his own arrogance and naivity, and by the determination of the committee, steered by Nixon, to get their man. At first Hiss denied knowing Chambers, but it turned out he had known him by another name. When Chambers accused Hiss of communism on the radio, Hiss sued him for libel. Chambers went on to claim that both men had been involved in espionage, and produced documents – one batch from a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm – to support the claim. Hiss was twice tried for perjury, and convicted the second time.
Aside from Chambers’s evidence, the case against Hiss relied on these documents as well as an earlier batch. In the decades since, defenders of the conviction have relied on the identification of an agent codenamed “Ales” who some historians believe was Hiss. Brady points out that a libel suit brought by Russian researcher Alexander Vassiliev in the UK in 2003 tested this identification and that Vassiliev lost the case.
So what does Brady, by her own account an amateur historian who did much of her research online, bring to all this? “I suppose the first thing was a memoir,” she says. “Meeting Alger was so odd. I found him absolutely astonishing that first evening.” Because she knew Hiss, and although she steers clear of psychological speculation, her memories are a primary source and carry some weight. Second, she is an expert storyteller who clears a reasonably comprehensible path through a tangle of evidence. Initially, she had thought of using Hiss’s life as the basis for a novel, but decided the truth was stranger than any fiction could be: “At every turn in this case you find yourself thinking ‘no’. Can you imagine? Treason in a pumpkin? Ha ha ha.” She spent hours reading transcripts of hearings and has identified gaps in the record – including a crucial moment where the date in Chambers’s account changed from 1937 to 1938 – where she believes the conspiracy to frame Hiss was hatched.
Third, she found some new information that led to a theory of her own: a letter of condolence from President Nixon to the widow of a Kentucky lawyer named William Marshall Bullitt, thanking him for “his invaluable help in the case of Alger Hiss”. Bullitt’s first cousin William Christian Bullitt was the first US ambassador to the USSR, and Brady believes the two men supplied Nixon with the documents needed to prove Hiss’s involvement in spying.
Brady also did some research on Whittaker Chambers, found an FBI file referring to a claim that he sexually abused Hiss’s young stepson, and uses this to bolster her view that Chambers did Nixon’s bidding under duress. And she uses the example of her parents – neither of whom were communists and both of whom had FBI files – to give a painful account of how extreme the persecution of suspected leftists was. Brady’s father, a professor of economics, headed a protest against a loyalty oath at his university, but later capitulated and tried to kill himself. The local newspaper called him a “pink professor” when it reported the overdose, from which he never fully recovered. Brady was a teenager at the time.
She also read up on dealings between corporate America and Nazi Germany, and suggests Hiss made powerful enemies, some of whom went on to become Nixon’s backers, when he worked for the Nye Commission investigating arms sales in the 1930s. And she flags up the surely remarkable fact that no corroborating witness or evidence has ever emerged.
“You see how stupid the evidence against him was, and how stupid the evidence keeping him in this position is, and in all the 67 years since this thing started, not a single witness has come forward in Russia.” Nor are there any Russian history books or biographies of this once-celebrated American who is supposed to have been a Soviet spy.
Those who continue to maintain Hiss’s guilt will no doubt dismiss all this as a conspiracy theory. Brady admits she was shocked by what she learned about the extreme rightwing leanings of some of Nixon’s allies (Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator, had been a publicist for the Nazi-supporting German American Bund). She takes aim at those she calls the “New Prosecutors”, led by historian Allen Weinstein, whose book Perjury reaffirmed Hiss’s guilt in 1978. Weinstein died in June this year, but no doubt his allies will fire back.
But the plank of Brady’s argument that looks hardest to shift concerns the role the press played in demolishing Hiss’s reputation. On his White House tapes, Nixon said of the case: “I convicted him in the press, I played them like a master”. Brady has spent hours in online newspaper archives, reading news reports alongside transcripts of the hearings, and believes what she found is “jaw-dropping”.
Again and again, what Hiss told the committee is twisted beyond recognition in the following day’s stories: so he is said to have categorically denied knowing Chambers, when he didn’t; said to have refused to take a lie detector test, when he didn’t; while Nixon claims to have cracked “a spy case” long before Chambers even accused Hiss of spying. Chambers worked for Time magazine, which paid his costs. Brady shows it wasn’t only Time that did a terrible job of writing the first draft of history.
“If I were writing the Greek play, I think the tragic flaw was the belief that he was right. All his friends said don’t do it, take the Fifth, get out, and he wouldn’t,” Brady tells me. She is pleased with her work, happy it will be published in the US, though her health means she won’t travel to promote it.
Based on her research, she thinks Hiss unwittingly colluded in his own destruction. What he showed her during the period of their friendship, from 1960 until his death in 1996 – and which took on new significance after her own ordeal at the hands of vindictive officialdom in south-west England – was how to survive.
America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged by Joan Brady is published by Skyscraper for £20. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £14.
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