Eisenhower & Stevenson Both Blaming Each Other for Alger Hiss in the 1952 Presidential Race
Surprise: they were both guilty of close association with America's foremost spy
In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers’ accusations against Alger Hiss became a matter of public record.
Hiss had been accused by name, publicly, by Elizabeth Bentley.
Bentley had no evidence though, and her stories were outlandish. She claimed she had been the sex-kitten connection between Soviet intelligence and high-level Americans. Yet she looked like a frumpy middle-aged teacher.
Chambers had previously blown the whistle on Hiss and others to then Assistant Secretary of State Berle on September 2, 1939 but it was all done in private.
To say that Hiss had powerful friends at this moment in time is an understatement. Hiss was at the seat of U.S. and global power.
Then Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Hiss to an honorary position to honor the United Nations two days prior to revelation of his spying by Bentley and Chambers.
Marshall was “General of the Army” meaning he was a five-star U.S. General. One of eight total in U.S. history.
Gen. Marshall was the patron of Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1948 Eisenhower was being courted by elites in both political parties to run as their nominee.
The other two people Marshall appointed to the UN gig, Harper Sibley (1885-1959) and Frank B. Frederick (1905-1985), were odd pro-UN leftists. Sibley had been a Harvard classmate of FDR. Frederick was in the Boston law firm of Johnson, Clapp & Knight. Frederick was born in 1905 in Boston, went to Suffolk law, and was active in Boston legal scenes. Alger Hiss was also there, and the same age, but at Harvard. It seems odd and obvious that there’s some Hiss-Frederick connection, but I can’t find one so far. Frederick shows up in the Congressional Record later in 1972 suing with Sen. Gravel and Alan Dershowitz and Harvey Silverglate about releasing the Pentagon Papers.
Anyway, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chambers, one of several former Communists who came forward, said that Alger Hiss was a Communist. Chambers, eventually, revealed that Hiss was not just friendly with the Soviet Union, he was actively spying for them by passing along documents.
Chambers didn’t want to ‘hurt’ Hiss, so he perjured himself to avoid telling the whole truth about Hiss.
Modern scholars hint at a gay romance between the two, real or imagined, to explain away why Chambers was repeatedly trying to help Hiss.
According to Chambers, famously, he said that:
“The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.”
Hiss was goaded into filing a libel suit against Chambers. Few of Hiss’ legal friends and colleagues wanted him to file it. Even then in 1949, libel suits were tar babies of accusations, hearings, motions, risks.
But Hiss had used the fact of Chambers’ then-immunity while testifying before Congress as a way to undercut Chambers’ credibility. Hiss dared Chambers to make the same charges outside the committee room where they would not be legally protected.
Chambers willingly complied and made the same remarks outside the committee.
Hiss was then in a pickle. Chambers seems content to let the issue die.
But when Chambers appeared on “Meet the Press” on August 27, 1948 he was asked why Hiss had not filed suit yet.
These choices by Alger Hiss set the stage for his own downfall.
Understanding the timeline is critical, and it’s not well explained elsewhere. Here’s that timeline again in case you were understandably confused:
August 3rd - Chambers testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, “HUAC” and names Hiss as a Communist sympathizer and associate.
August 5th - Hiss tells HUAC he was never a Communist, and has never seen Chambers.
August 7th - Chambers testifies again before HUAC, this time in New York. Chambers gives details: talks about collecting dues from Hiss, details about the Hiss family including their nicknames, and mentions the infamous prothonotary warbler.
August 16th - Hiss before HUAC. Hiss tries to explain how he knew Chambers after denying it previously. Hiss says he knew a “George Crosley” who was skinnier and had bad teeth, and whom he let stay in his house and gave a spare car. HUAC is confused as summed up by this statement, “whichever one of you is lying is the greatest actor that America has ever produced.” Hiss demands to see Chambers. Hiss falls into the prothonotary warbler trap.
August 17th - Chambers and Hiss before HUAC in New York, the two confront each other. Hiss claims he recognizes Chambers as Crosley by virtue of his voice and teeth.
Hiss: “The voice sounds a little less resonant than the voice that I recall of the man I knew as George Crosley. The teeth look to me as though either they have been improved upon or that there has been considerable dental work done since I knew George Crosley, which was some years ago. I believe I am not prepared without further checking to take an absolute oath that he must be George Crosley.”
August 25th - Hiss and Chambers before HUAC again. The two confront one another. In greater detail, the committee starts to see who is lying and who is telling the truth.
August 27th - Chambers before HUAC again. Later that night, Chambers is on Meet the Press, repeating the accusations against Hiss. Chambers says Hiss "was a Communist and may be now."
September 27th - Hiss files suit against Chambers for $50,000.
October 14th - In a Grand Jury session, Chambers denies Hiss engaged in espionage.
October 25th - Chambers answers the Hiss libel suit by filing his response.
November 5th - In a deposition for the libel suit, Chambers admits Hiss was engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union.
November 17th - Chambers tenders documents implicating Hiss as part of a deposition for the libel suit.
December 2nd - HUAC Investigators go to Pipe Creek Farm, home of Whittaker Chambers, to retrieve the microfilm hidden in Chambers’ pumpkins.
In a moment that would fit in any Greek tragedy: the lawyer Hiss was ultimately foiled by the arrogance of his own legal expertise. Thinking that he could master the law, and have an advantage over Chambers, he was baited into taking actions that ultimately proved his downfall.
Because as part of the pre-trial depositions of Chambers, Hiss demanded any and all documentation that would support Chambers’ claims.
Chambers at first produced an envelope of classified documents.
Since they were classified, the Department of Justice immediately took possession of them and refused to release them.
This maneuver seemingly saved Hiss and stopped the HUAC investigation in its tracks. Because of the nature of classified documents, the Executive could deny them to Congress on the grounds that they were secret. The fact that the government was inadvertently authenticating the documents was a secondary matter.
But then HUAC and Chambers were faced with the conundrum that they had evidence proving their allegations that they had now lost access to, and were unlikely to ever receive it again.
Which is when Chambers produced the hidden microfilm which he stored overnight in his pumpkin patch, which have become immortalized as ‘the pumpkin papers.’ In these photos were classified documents, including some in Hiss’ own handwriting, and whose documents were retyped on Hiss’ Woodstock typewriter.
So this libel suit resulted in Chambers producing the photographs showing he was telling the truth, along with the microfilm rolls known as the ‘Pumpkin Papers’ where Chambers’ version of events became almost irrefutable.
The suit brought out the evidence that provided Hiss’ undoing and downfall.
The rollercoaster for Alger Hiss from June 26, 1945 through Thursday March 22, 1951, must have been electric.
Here is Hiss in June 1945, at the bottom right, sitting as the United Nations Secretary General, at the same table as the U.S. President, arguably as his equal as a head of state.
And here is Hiss on March 22, 1951, 5 years, 8 months, 24 days later, being shipped off to Lewisburg prison in Pennsylvania. He’d basically spent the last three years fighting in court to clear his name, only to end up in prison himself.
But not for treason, but rather for perjury. That legal distinction was lost on most people, they understood that Hiss was a traitor and his prison sentence was a legal consolation prize for an expired statute of limitations, since Chambers’s accusations were, at the latest, from 1937/1938.
Hiss was a darling of the New Deal. He had been one of several far-left Harvard Law grads who ended up in key positions in the Roosevelt administration defending the President’s worst policies. Hiss was being groomed for higher office, and as late as 1945 was going to Yalta advising FDR and setting up the United Nations and chairing its first conference, in effect becoming the UN’s first Secretary General.
After Hiss’ libel case imploded, he was charged in January 1950 with perjury. After the first criminal trial ended in a mistrial, Hiss was convicted in the second trial. The Court of Appeals refused to give relief to Hiss by December 1950. Hiss reported to federal prison on March 22, 1951.
The perception was that Hiss and the Communist subculture were being ground down by Hoover at the FBI and others in the intelligence community. From the benefit of 75 years hindsight, I suspect that what was really happening was a series of defensive measures to protect higher-level Communist agents.
Hiss was an easy sacrificial lamb in order to protect higher-value agents. These agents were easy to place under Roosevelt who catered to them, but under Truman and a Republican Congress, it became more difficult.
The transition in American politics between 1945-1952 is a major one.
By September 1952, pro-Soviet FDR Vice President Henry Wallace was finally repudiating both Communism and Communists.
Politica Classic: VP Henry Wallace's Handwritten Notes During his '44 Trip to Soviet Slave Camps
Most of that was probably motivated by the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. A war that would last until the armistice on July 27, 1953.
Some of it was also motivated by the loss of China to the Communists on December 7, 1949 when the Kuomintang government retreated to Taiwan.
It was also partially due to the Soviet Union’s first testing of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, a result of the massive theft of nuclear secrets through an espionage ring within the Manhattan Project, as well as deliberate Roosevelt policy to aid the Soviet development of the weapon.
The left makes this out to be a so-called ‘Red Scare’ - and, to be fair, it is pretty frightening. To say that it wasn’t frightening is to ignore the millions who died in Vietnam from Communist expansion, the millions who died in Cambodia from Communist expansion, the tens of millions who died in China as a direct result, the millions who died in Korea.
Somewhere between 200,000-600,000 South Vietnamese ‘boat people’ died trying to escape the Communist regime by heading into the ocean to escape, victims who are completely ignored and dismissed by modern left-wing historians.
But they don’t mean all those killings. They mean that you were concerned that Hollywood was purposefully subversively instilling Communist messages into films.
I mean, my God, the Hollywood blacklist suffered… career setbacks!
Dalton Trumbo had to write Hollywood scripts under pen names for almost a decade. Pen names! The humanity!
And I mean, the idea that the left would purposefully use subversive messaging to indoctrinate the young and youth of America is just crazy right-wing claptrap I tell you, it’s… it’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” according to Communist Richard Hofstadter.
I’m giving all this backstory to explain the pivotal 1952 Presidential campaign.
The contest was ultimately between Democrat Adlai Stevenson II against General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The elites in America were very careful to ensure that leaders like Robert Taft of Ohio weren’t considered. When Taft had threatened to be the Republican nominee in 1940, Ralph Williams’ uniquely-timed death at the Republican convention ensured that Willkie dominated the convention.
Politica Classic: Pearl Harbor: The Consequential Death of Ralph Williams in 1940
The 1952 Presidential election gave American voters the choice between a technocratic New Dealer and… a technocratic New Dealer.
You got to choose between the guy who came to DC in the 30’s on the backs of his family connections to serve political leaders reporting to FDR and… and well the other guy with the exact same background.
But hey, one had been in the military! Actually they both worked at the Pentagon from 1940-1944. Stevenson worked for the Secretary of the Navy. Eisenhower worked in the Army.
Stevenson had worked with Hiss at the Department of Agriculture when both were attorneys, and Stevenson was working with the nest of Communists in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration “AAA”, from 1933-1935. Stevenson also gave testimony in Hiss’s perjury case, attesting to his “good character.” Hiss and Stevenson started their careers at the Department of Agriculture, and Hiss ended his professional life as President of the Carnegie Foundation for Peace. Eisenhower’s brother Milton worked with Hiss at Agriculture, and Dwight joined the board for the Carnegie Foundation in 1948, while Hiss was President, overseeing Hiss as President.
Stevenson was so frugal he wore shoes with holes in them.
Eisenhower was so frugal he painted his own shitty art.
These two men had much in common, including poor choices for mistresses.
Stevenson’s primary mistress was Marietta Tree.
Eisenhower’s was his British assistant Kay Summersby:
Stevenson’s wife was Ellen Borden Stevenson (1907-1972), who was also pretty modest.
And then there’s Mamie Eisenhower (1896-1972), who… well let’s just let the picture speak for themselves.
So anyway, given all these similarities, and these close connections to Alger Hiss, how did the two campaigns handle it? By blaming the other for being closer to Hiss than they were.
On October 23, 1952 this Alabama paper says Ike is more vulnerable on the Hiss question than Stevenson.
Eisenhower’s people had hinted at Stevenson’s close association because Stevenson testified as Hiss’ character witness at his perjury trial. Stevenson’s team then pointed out that Eisenhower was brought onto the board of Carnegie when Hiss was President.
Both Eisenhower and Stevenson were creatures of a certain internationalist set, funded and propped up by Rockefeller money, among others.
Forgotten Anti-Communist columnist George Sokolosky points this out in 1952 when he notes that Hiss sat atop and directed a non-profit fund balance of $11 million altogether, which in 2024 dollars is about $130 million.
So with their backgrounds so similar, their patronage coming from the highest echelons of elite American families and banks, with both of them tied to Alger Hiss in several ways, all things being equal I would bet on the guy associated with the recent major American military victory.
A safe bet.
And just to be sure, include the most famous Senator who, as a Congressman, investigated Alger Hiss for good measure.
A safer bet.
Mainstream historians claim Eisenhower added Nixon to the ticket because he wanted a brash young Congressman tied to the so-called “Red Scare.”
Maybe Nixon served a different purpose: he took the spotlight off the fact Eisenhower was associated to all sorts of Communists and other Reds, including his own brother Milton.
Politica classic: “Ike's Red Brother: Milton Stover Eisenhower”
Team Eisenhower tried to dump Nixon, using the flimsy pretext of Nixon’s finances allegedly augmented by private donors. That’s when Nixon gave the infamous “Checkers speech” on September 23, 1952 to painstakingly go through his finances one by one to show that the one thing he took from a donor was a cocker spaniel his kids named Checkers, and they weren’t going to give it back.
Eisenhower let it be known that he was trying to dump Nixon, now that he’d used him for his usefulness to beat Senator Taft at the convention, for Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen.
Stassen had some experience to trade on, including being part of the American delegation to the United Nations organizing conference, the ‘San Francisco’ conference, in 1945. Stassen had signed the UN Charter on behalf of the United States.
Here’s a picture of that moment:
The Secretary General of the San Francisco conference, who also knew Harold Stassen well, was of course: Alger Hiss.
Hiss is one man who shows up across the entire U.S. power structure in this period of U.S. history.