The Press: Tasteless Post-Mortem

Even a graceful loser must endure the inevitable round of post-mortems conducted by second-guessers who think they know why he lost or how he might have won. Last week it was Loser Dick Nixon’s lot to suffer a post-mortem that, for pure tastelessness, rivaled Nixon’s own graceless gibe at the press.

Nixon’s dissector was Howard K. Smith, 48, a grey liberal who joined ABC last February after being let go by CBS because of his unconquerable tendency to overeditorialize. Smith’s scalpel was a hastily assembled, half-hour TV panel discussion entitled “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon” and thrust into prime evening time, pre-empted from a Veterans Day tribute called “The Fighting Man.”

Smith’s show was singularly patchy and misshapen, and might have passed unnoticed save for the identity of one of the panelists*: Alger Hiss, who slipped State Department secrets to a Communist spy ring in the 1930s and was later sent to prison for perjury. Nixon, as a tiery young Congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee, helped bring the Hiss case to light. On the air, Hiss, now a printing salesman, all but accused Nixon of framing him: “He was less interested in developing the facts objectively than in seeking ways of making a preconceived plan appear plausible. I regard his actions as motivated by ambition, by personal self-serving.”

Even before the Nixon obituary went on the air, ABC’s switchboard lit up with protests; after the show was over, the network received several thousand phone calls and 300 telegrams, most of them objecting to the presence of Hiss. Even former President Dwight Eisenhower called James Hagerty, ABC vice president and Eisenhower’s press secretary for eight years, to express “astonishment.”

Against the barrage, hapless Jim Hagerty could only defend the program. “It was,” he said, “a fair presentation, giving both sides of a controversy.” Commentator Smith professed surprise; he thought the discussion was “a little overbalanced in favor of Dick Nixon,” and that Hiss, as one of Nixon’s “Six Crises,” had every right to appear. At week’s end, Dick Nixon, whose mail had ballooned after the show, asked rhetorically. “What does an attack by one convicted perjurer mean when weighed on the scale against the thousands of wires and letters from patriotic Americans?”

* The others: Jerry Voorhis, the California U.S. Congressman whom Nixon defeated in California in 1946; Los Angeles Attorney Murray Chutiner, who managed Nixon’s campaign; U.S. Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan, a long-time Nixon friend.