THE CAMPAIGN: Nixon on Communism

This week Dick Nixon once more appeared on the nation’s TV screens. This time he was not defending himself; he was an accuser. The subject: Communism in the U.S. Government.

“The failure of this Administration to deal effectively with the Communist threat,” said Nixon, in earnest and subdued tones, is the “greatest issue in the election.” To demonstrate the failure, Nixon retold the story of the Hiss case: Whittaker Chambers’ first accusation, the confrontation of the two men, Alger Hiss’s admission, after twelve days of denial, that he had known Chambers after all. Nixon outlined the Administration’s attempts to “cover up” the case, including an executive order by President Truman, forbidding “the FBI … to cooperate with the Committee [on Un-American Activities] in its investigation.”

He recalled that Harry Truman had called the Hiss case a red herring “not only once, but seven different times.” Beginning in 1939, Chambers again & again warned Government officials that Hiss and others were Communists. The Government did nothing “except to promote the members of the ring,” said Nixon. If the Government had acted, “we might have nipped the Communist conspiracy in the bud;” other Communist agents might have been prevented from stealing atomic information which gave Russia the bomb five years before they might have had it.

Communists and fellow travelers, asserted Nixon, “have not yet been cleaned out of the Government.” He quoted a member of the President’s loyalty review board, who had said of the way the loyalty program is operating in the State Department: “They’re taking the attitude that they’re there to clear the employee and not to protect the Government.”

Which candidate, asked Nixon, is best qualified to do something about the Communists in Government? Stevenson, he recalled, testified that Hiss’s reputation “for veracity, for integrity and for loyalty was good,” and he did so 1) after the essential facts of the Hiss case were known, 2) voluntarily. “Mr. Stevenson,” said Nixon, “has never expressed any indignation over what Hiss has done.” Nixon quoted a Stevenson speech in which he said: “There aren’t many American Communists—far fewer than in the days of the great Depression, and they aren’t on the whole very important.” Then Nixon quoted J. Edgar Hoover: “In actual numbers, their [Communists] membership may not be large. This has been cited by the ignorant and the apologists and the appeasers of Communists in our country as minimizing the danger . . .”

Said Nixon: “There is no question in my mind as to the loyalty of Mr. Stevenson, but the question is one as to his judgment … He has failed to recognize the threat . . .”

Eisenhower, on the other hand, “will need have no fear [of finding] Communist skeletons in his political closet.” Many Americans wondered, said Nixon, whether “we may lose the struggle . . . against Communism.” His reply: not a chance—”provided we get proper leadership.”