A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case podcast

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Episodes

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A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case

The Hiss-Chambers case gripped the nation in 1948 and still provokes controversy. Take a deep factual dive into the story of two brilliant, fascinating men, sensational Congressional hearings, spy documents hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft and a pumpkin, the trial of the century, and the launch of Richard Nixon’s career.

Episodes

Chapter 8: Nixon Takes the Plunge

Campaigning for the US Senate, 1950. Pic - Library of Congress In this 8th podcast, we explore the thinking of Richard Nixon. Put yourself in his position. You’re 35, elected to the House in a Republican wave year from a district that is usually safely Democratic. Your plum Committee assignment was Education and Labor. But, on HUAC, this throbbing blob of a Case has come rolling in the door. You and Bob Stripling saw possibilities that no one else saw and now The Case is all yours. You have sati...

Feb 22, 2023•10 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 7: Chambers' Secret Testimony

Members of the House Un-American Activities Committee visit the home of Chairman John Parnell Thomas; (l-r) Rep. Richard B. Vail, Rep. Thomas, Rep. John McDowell, Robert Stripling, chief counsel, and Rep. Richard M. Nixon] Picture: Library of Congress Were Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss good friends from 1934 through 1937? Chambers says ‘yes’ and Hiss says ‘no.’ In this podcast, HUAC staffer Bob Stripling and Representative Nixon get Chambers under oath, in secret, and fire questions at him a...

Feb 15, 2023•9 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 6: Hiss' Denial

Richard M. Nixon, Library of Congress Alger Hiss calmly and patiently denies Whittaker Chambers’ two charges: that the two of them were in the Communist underground in 1934-37 and that they became close friends. The Commie-hunters on the House Un-American Activities Committee are swept away by his poise and simplicity and tell him what a wonderful witness he is. Only two listeners smell something fishy in Hiss’ carefully phrased testimony: a staffer named Robert Stripling and a freshman Republic...

Feb 08, 2023•13 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 5: The First HUAC Hearing

Above, Elizabeth Bentley, who gave evidence at the first HUAC hearing. Pic: Library of Congress In 1948, Whittaker Chambers is Time Magazine’s Senior Editor. He is forced against his will to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee about his past in the Communist underground. He names seven names, but the Committee zeroes in on one of them — Alger Hiss. With this begins the doom of both men, major climate change in American politics, and the career of a future President. Further Res...

Feb 01, 2023•14 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 4: Communism in the 1930s

Photo: Craig Whitehead on Unsplash The backdrop of this case is American Communism — infatuation with it and disillusionment with it. Communism predicted a violent upheaval that would produce a better life. In actual practice, it produced only drab, poverty-stricken dictatorships that killed and starved millions. Around 1935, the American Communist Party stopped acting revolutionary and posed as “liberals in a hurry.” It got a few hundred Americans to join the Communist underground and work secr...

Jan 25, 2023•9 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 3: Whittaker Chambers - Ex Communist

Whittaker Chambers tries to have a peaceful life, working a farm and becoming a high-paid and powerful editor at Time Magazine. But his past in the Soviet underground won’t go away. Stalin’s pact with Hitler impels him to inform the government about the underground. Worse, from time to time government investigators ask him for more and more information. Chambers tries to expose the conspiracy without ruining his own career or the friends who shared his treason. How long can he continue threading...

Jan 18, 2023•13 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 2: Whittaker Chambers - Communist

Picture: Library of Congress Meet Whittaker Chambers: brilliant, melodramatic, painfully sincere, perpetually discontented and idealistic, and physically hard to forget; writer of controversial poems, plays, short stories, and communist journalism; and, as spymaster for Soviet Military Intelligence, traitor to the United States. Further Research Episode 2: About Chambers’ early and communist years, here are some references: 1) Chambers’ autobiography Witness, the first 450 pages. The book is sti...

Jan 11, 2023•20 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast

Chapter 1: Introduction and Alger Hiss

Meet Alger Hiss: Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerk, left Wall Street to join a New Deal farming agency, counsel to a Senate Committee at age 30, aide to president Roosevelt at Yalta, Secretary General of the UN’s founding conference, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace . . . and the most highly placed traitor in American history? Further Research: Episode 1 : About Hiss’s life before the HUAC hearings, see his own autobiography, Recollections of a Life (Seav...

Jan 04, 2023•14 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast