A reporter asked, “Don’t you think the American public is entitled to this information?”
“What information?”
“That has been brought out in these investigations?”
“What useful purpose is it serving . . . ? They haven’t revealed anything that everybody hasn’t known all along, or hasn’t been presented to the grand jury [a reference to the grand jury charging twelve members of the Communist Party USA with conspiracy to overthrow the government]. That is where it has to be taken, in the first place, if you are going to do anything about it. They are slandering a lot of people that don’t deserve it.”
“Mr. President,” said one reporter, “could we use a part of the quote there, that last: they are simply a ‘red herring,’ etc.?”
“Using this as a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they ought to do,” Truman said again, for emphasis.
It was a clever pun, but a politically dangerous one. The term red herring meant something that is misleading or distracting. “The President simply had acknowledged that this was a red herring,” remembered the reporter Robert Nixon, who was in the room. “The meaning of the phrase ‘red herring’ was even ignored. It was made to appear that the President, in effect, was acknowledging that there was communism in Government and that some of the people in his administration and in the previous Roosevelt administration were traitors who had sold out their country to the Russian Government.”
The next day, the words red herring made headlines on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. GOP leaders used the story to berate the president. His “red herring” comment was “treasonable in spirit,” said Congressman Kingsland Macy of New York. The columnist H. L. Mencken described Truman’s “red herring” comment as “puerile whim-wham,” and called on the House Un-American Activities Committee to “keep on until Truman is booted out of the White House.” Dewey’s campaign manager Herbert Brownell declared himself “shocked” by Truman’s attitude, which was “seeming to cover up” the activities of Communists in government.
Republican senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan went even further. Ferguson pointed to Executive Order 9835, issued by the Truman administration in March 1947, which subjected federal employees to FBI oversight (the so-called loyalty board). Ferguson demanded that the administration start handing over the FBI files of government employees to congressional investigators. Ferguson’s demand backed the president into a corner. If Truman handed over the files, he would be (to his mind) violating the privacy rights of American citizens whom he believed to be innocent. If he did not, he would open himself up to attacks by Republicans that he was weak on Communism, perhaps even participating in a cover-up of Communist infiltration in American government.
Truman flatly refused to turn over the FBI files of any federal employee, and Ferguson responded by demanding an impeachment inquiry. “The trend of presidential arrogance is becoming intolerable,” Senator Ferguson said in a speech on the floor of the Senate, accusing Truman of abusing “executive immunity.” The impeachment process went nowhere, but the headlines hurt Truman and inflamed the anger of conservative voters.
Meanwhile, the Alger Hiss investigation continued. In a private session, Chambers revealed to HUAC members detailed information about Hiss and his wife, supporting his claim that he knew Hiss personally. When Congressman Nixon asked Chambers if he would take a lie-detector test, Chambers said yes.
“You have that much confidence?” Nixon asked the witness.
“I am telling the truth,” Chambers answered.
For many Americans at the time, the handsome, buttoned-up Hiss was more believable than the rumpled Chambers. For decades to come, the Hiss case would remain controversial. It would take years before the government revealed through declassified documents that it had decrypted many Soviet cables from the 1940s—and for most who have studied the matter, those cables and other supporting documents settle the matter: Hiss was lying; Chambers was telling the truth. Congressman Richard Nixon, in 1948, apparently had a winning hand to play.
What did it mean to be a Communist in the first place? In the summer of 1948, that depended on whom you asked. Yet the idea that the enemy could be “walking among us”—the person standing next to you online at the pharmacy, or the neighbor who kept to himself—caused the seed of fear to blossom. “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of fear,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. For Americans, fear of Communism began to coalesce into panic. The Alger Hiss matter rooted this controversy deep in the collective American psychology.
In 1948 the National Security Council aimed to answer the question—what is Communism?—in a top secret memorandum called “Communism Is the Greatest Internal Security Threat at This Time.” (This document was dated August 6, the day after Alger Hiss first testified before Congress.) “In different ages there have been different threats to the internal security of the United States,” it read. “In this present age the threat is communism.” Citing the Communist Party USA’s sixty-eight thousand enrolled members, the document warned of a future in which the United States itself would cease to exist, leaving instead a “stateless, classless, Godless” society in which “there is no God, no soul, no immortality.”
The Hiss case was a political hornet’s nest for both Truman and Dewey. “If there turned out to be substance to Chambers’s charges [regarding Alger Hiss],” recalled Richard Nixon, “Truman would be terribly embarrassed, and ordinarily this possibility alone might have spurred Republicans on in an election year. But special factors in the Hiss case favored a cautious approach [among Republicans].”
One of Dewey’s closest advisers was John Foster Dulles, the world-renowned lawyer and diplomat who was widely believed to be Dewey’s choice for secretary of state in the next administration. Dulles was a friend of Hiss’s and had recommended Hiss for his current job as president of the Carnegie Foundation. And so
