National Affairs: The Alger Hiss Issue

In the closing days of the campaign, the long-simmering “softness to Communists” issue finally came to full boil. Two weeks before, the Republicans had opened an all-out attack with a nationwide TV broadcast in which Richard Nixon detailed Adlai Stevenson’s part as a character witness in the first Alger Hiss trial, and concluded: “His actions, his statements, his record disqualify him from leading . . . the fight against Communism at home and abroad . . .” Last week the Democrats launched a defense and counterattack.

At Cleveland, Adlai Stevenson set out to explain his testimony again and more fully than before. Said he: “I had known Alger Hiss briefly in 1933 … I did not meet him again until twelve years later . . . He never entered my house and I never entered his. I saw him twice in the fall of 1947.1 have not seen him since.

“In the spring of 1949, I was requested by the lawyers for Alger Hiss to appear at his first trial and testify as to his reputation. I refused to do so because of the burden of my official duties. I was then requested to give a sworn statement, taken under order of the court . . .”

“I said his reputation was ‘good’—and it was . . . That was the simple, exact, whole truth, and all I could say on the basis of what little I knew of him . . . I am a lawyer. I think that one of the fundamental responsibilities not only of every citizen, but particularly of lawyers, is to give testimony in a court of law, and to give it honestly and willingly … I would point out that 22 of the most distinguished members of the American bar declared last week that in giving this deposition I had ‘done what any good citizen should have done under the circumstances.’ ” Among the 22 members of the bar were ex-Ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies, World War II OSS Chief Major General William Donovan, a Republican, and John W. Davis, 1924 Democratic presidential candidate who is now supporting Eisenhower.

“Inaccurate & Unsound.” On the same day that Stevenson was making his explanation, however, a dissenting opinion was registered by 16 prominent New York lawyers—among them Harold Gallagher, ex-president of the American Bar Association, and J. Edward Lumbard, one of General Donovan’s partners. The statement issued by Stevenson’s defenders, said the 16, was “inaccurate and unsound” because it gave the impression that Stevenson was required by court order to testify in the Hiss trial. “That was not the fact,” declared the 16. “Governor Stevenson was not under subpoena or otherwise required to testify … The only reason that a court order of any kind was obtained was to permit Governor Stevenson to testify without attending the Hiss trial in person. In passing judgment on Governor Stevenson’s action, therefore, it is to be borne in mind that he was an entirely voluntary witness for Hiss.”

Stevenson’s testimony, said the lawyers, showed on the face of it that he did not know Hiss well. “It might well have occurred to the governor,” they went on, “that his testimony was not being sought because he was peculiarly expert on the character or reputation of Hiss … As a lawyer, he should have been aware that his testimony as a voluntary witness on behalf of Hiss might have been construed by the jury as implying a belief in Hiss’s innocence by the governor of Illinois.”

Mistrust & Innuendo. In his Cleveland speech, Stevenson also attempted to turn the tables on his opponents. He began with Ike’s foreign policy adviser John Foster Dulles. “In December 1946,” said Stevenson, “Hiss was chosen to be president of the Carnegie Endowment by the board of trustees, of which John Foster Dulles was chairman.” Shortly thereafter, said the governor, Dulles refused to believe a Detroit lawyer who informed him that Hiss had a provable Communist record.

One of the members of the Carnegie Endowment board during Hiss’s term as president, Stevenson went on, was General Eisenhower—and Eisenhower was still a member of the board when it twice refused to let Hiss resign after he had been indicted for perjury. Said Stevenson: “I bring these facts to the American people not to suggest that either General Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles is soft toward Communists … I bring them out only to make the point that the mistrust, the innuendoes, the accusations which this [Republican] ‘crusade’ is employing threatens not merely themselves, but the integrity of our institutions.”

Said Dulles in reply: “I became a witness for the prosecution against Hiss … I do not criticize Governor Stevenson for responding to the dictates of his conscience. I merely point out that his faith in Hiss outlasted mine . . .Also, Governor Stevenson was misinformed when he said that I was chairman of the Carnegie Endowment board when Hiss was elected president. That is not true. I was elected chairman at the same meeting at which Hiss was elected president . . .”

Precision & Silence. Two days later in Boston, where Democrats fear the Communist issue may cost them Catholic votes, Stevenson declared that the Republicans had done little to combat Communism either abroad or in the U.S. Said he: “Men who seek to fight [Communism] by indiscriminate accusation of their fellow citizens—by spreading suspicion and smear and slander—are serving no one but the Communists themselves … In fighting Communism at home, I shall rely on such experienced guardians of our security as J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and General Bedell Smith of the Central Intelligence Agency. These men fight Communism as it must be fought—with care, thoroughness, precision and silence.”

Republicans thought they were getting the better of this argument over Stevenson’s testimony in the Hiss case. In a weekend speech, Nixon summed up the G.O.P. case: “Mr. Stevenson has never expressed one word of indignation at Alger Hiss’s treachery. Like Dean Acheson, he says he does not question the legal verdict. But, also like Acheson, to this day he has not ‘turned his back on Alger Hiss.’ ”

-On cross-examination in the second Hiss trial, Dulles testified that Hiss’s reputation had been very good at the time Hiss was appointed to the Carnegie Endowment job.