Joan Brady - Americas Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged

The Case Nixon Rigged

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Alger Hiss
Secretary General of the United Nations Organizing Conference President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Prisoner 19137 Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary

The Case Nixon Rigged

By Joan Brady

First published 2015 by
Skyscraper Publications
Talton Edge, Newbold on Stour,
Warks CV37 8TR, U.K.
www.skyscraperpublications.com

Copyright 2015 Joan Brady

The authors rights are fully asserted. The right of Joan Brady to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9931533-4-1

Cover design by Grace Fussell

Typeset by Chandler Book Design

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Latitude Press Ltd

PART ONE
Alger Hiss comes to dinner

PART TWO
HUAC in hot pursuit

PART THREE
Smoking guns

PART FOUR
The trial of the century

PART FIVE
Aftermath

Americas Dreyfus:
The Case Nixon Rigged

by
Joan Brady

Joan Bradys highly readable take on Alger Hiss adds valuable, new personal information to his ever-fascinating story. It will be of interest not merely to scholars of the case, but anyone who cares about history and getting it right.

Victor Navasky,

Publisher Emeritus of The Nation, author of
National Book Award winning book, Naming Names

Joan Brady has written an evocative, graceful memoir filled with novel reminiscences of her friendship with Alger Hiss. It is a most unusual book, using memory and a Talmudic examination of legal texts to explore the still contested terrain of the Hiss trials. As such, it is sure to incense those historians and partisans wedded to the national narrative crafted by Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon. Insightful and provocative, Brady has reopened the Hiss case to a new generation of readers.

Kai Bird,

Author of Pulitzer prize-winning book,

The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Joan Bradys Americas Dreyfus, a personal story about the Alger Hiss case, written by one of our most talented and accomplished writers, is a wonderfully vivid account that conveys the intensity of some of the darkest days in our post-WWII history. Its also full of revelatory new material about the case that started young Richard Nixon on his road to the White House and convinced Americans that the Reds really were threatening our freedom. Its time to revisit this extraordinary story, which historians have been debating for the last half-century; Bradys fresh and compelling book will introduce a new generation to the trial that transformed America.

Jon Wiener,

Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

Y ou would expect the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to win a Nobel Peace Prize, especially when hes the same man who organized the United Nations, served as its Secretary General while he did so and then carried the UN charter home to the White House on a special army plane. Instead, this very man was tried in a criminal court, found guilty and sent to prison. It was called the Trial of the Century, and it was a media circus second to none. The year was 1951. The convicted felons name was Alger Hiss.

I knew Alger for more than thirty years, and I never liked him much. I cant for the life of me figure out why not even now but because of that, I didnt bother to learn about his case until I faced prosecution myself, though on hardly a scale approaching his. Still, court cases the threat of a stretch in Holloway do something to a person. Nobody I knew had ever stood in the dock. Except Alger. He was long dead by then, and I started reading about him out of morbid interest in the ordeal of a fellow sufferer. But the more I read, the more outraged I became. Facts had been twisted and distorted to link together chains of events conjured out of nowhere. Witnesses had been intimidated and suborned. Evidence had been created. Evidence had been suppressed. Evidence had been destroyed. This was a vicious, politically motivated frame-up, and its never been properly exposed. The longest-serving justice of the United States Supreme Court wrote: In my view no court at any time could possibly have sustained the conviction.

The Hiss case put Richard Nixon on the road to the White House; he sailed into the Senate while he was still prosecuting Alger, and he went straight from the Senate to the job of Vice President under General Eisenhower. A decade later he had the Oval Office to himself. Hed worked hard for his prize. He says in his White House tapes that he had Alger convicted long before the Trial of the Century began. How? We won the Hiss case in the papers. And so he had. Never before had there been a press campaign like it. Nixon turned the hero of the United Nations into the villain of the Cold War against Communist Russia with headline screamers and an extraordinary jumble of old-fashioned lies. The most jaw-dropping of them involved his proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in American history. This was, he said, microfilm of top secret Army documents to be passed to the Soviets. One of his sidekicks plucked it out of a pumpkin, a midnight raid on a vegetable patch that made headlines all across the country. He said the developed film would make a pile three feet high. Three feet high: thousands upon thousands of pages. Photographs of him examining this very microfilm with a magnifying glass just like Sherlock Holmes were plastered across front pages everywhere.