PS

-- Nixon's memoirs on the Alger Hiss case, and his wariness of Senator McCarthy --

Richard Nixon, a year or two after resigning the presidency, sat down to write his memoirs. Early in the process of writing what turned into a huge thousand-page tome (presidential memoirists have the right to write at the length they choose and publishers will take it), Nixon wrote on the "Ager Hiss case." It is a separate section in an early chapter and focuses entirely on the Hiss case and his (Nixon's) role in it.

It's an interesting, self-contained 8000- or 9000-word account of "the exposure of Alger Hiss" and the subsequent trials. Events happening over the period of August 1948 to January 1950 (the conviction). Nixon's role in (mainly the early stage) of this drama was used for decades, by the aging Alger Hiss after his release from prison, as a mainstay of his insistence that he was framed by a right-wing conspiracy. Nixon's account is effectively also of 25-years-later retrospective, and written still during the period when most Good People believed his was framed or that, at least, it was an unsettled matter.

At one point during the House Un-American Affairs Committee hearings, someone from the Hiss side insulted Nixon as being of lower class and not having attended an Ivy League university, which meant Nixon was someone ambitious with a chip on his shoulder; much the same attack as made against Whittaker Chambers in other ways.

Nixon also says he was skeptical of Joe McCarthy from the start, ever since he personally broke up a fist-fight the man was having with a newspaper-reporter at a social club, successfully coaxing them apart and saying he was a Quaker peacemaker. Nixon said McCarthy had never shown interest in "anti-communism" or exposing communists in government before it became fashionable, which was conveniently after Alger Hiss was defrocked and sent to prison. In other words, Nixon felt "McCarthyism" was well-intended but not morally-serious enough about absolute seeking of the truth while also acting under the serious burden of evidence, i.e., the Western tradition.

PS

"Was the CIA involved with the (anti-Nixon) press effort too?"

People in the know are very confident that certain ranking people in "the intelligence agencies" very regularly "leak" to certain favored press-entities. By the early 1970s, the Washington Post was such an entity. There is good reason to suspect Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were both involved in this. All while it was happening, you had Nixon fuming at a conspiracy against him, and he was right.

There was a fifty-year-later coda to Bernstein's role in the anti-Nixon Watergate "take down" process. During the several-week-long attempted take-down of Biden (between the late-evening of June 27 (which was debate night) and the weekend of July 20-21, 2024), CNN trotted out Carl Bernstein to give long commentary on what was going on with Biden, and he pushed hard saying "his sources" were telling him Biden was not mentally competent, etc. He was pushing hard to get Biden to resign.

When is the last time you'd heard the name Carl Bernstein? But here comes another presidential takedown attempt, and the now-octogenarian Bernstein pops up again and, nightly on CNN, demands " Bidengo Delenda Est!"

CNN also evolved some strong ties to the intelligence community, which were evident to even the dimmest of witted among us by some point in the 2010s. It's been years since any hint of hiding these ties. Former CIA ties are a point-of-pride there. You also have a large number of Democratic politicians of note with CIA ties now (see: "The CIA Democrats" series from a few years ago by a left-wing dissident news-site).

PS: Mr. Hail, regarding Watergate. The press played a big part in taking down Nixon. I don't know if they hated him as much as they do Trump - they'd have never been able to use the "got to get rid of this Fascist, like shooting Hitler before he came to power" stuff on the still mostly Conservative American population back then.

Was the CIA involved with the press effort too, or was that just organic, with the usual people involved? Hounding the President for one break-in and subsequent lying cover-up seems like nothing today when we read about the Clintons and then, worse yet, Bai Dien with his very son being involved in corruption with foreign powers and subject to blackmail.

Is there a good book up there summing up both the Bai Dien corruption and the morally "suspect" business of he and his daughter showering together when she was 10 y/o, other readings from her diary, then Hunter's similar behavior with his niece (was it?) in which the family was adamant that, no, Hunter was absolutely NOT allowed to babysit!

You'd think all those tabloids would be all over this stuff.

Sorry, way O/T here. Nixon was a piker when it came to dishonesty, I would say.

PS: Mr. Smith, I never got around to addressing your comment on Trump and bitcoin. A lot of people have a hard time wrapping their minds around that "mining" thing. So long as the blockchain algorithm cannot be hacked (and I'm sure the 1st mathematician to do so wouldn't tell anyone for a while - or $10 Billion, whichever comes first) I can see the question of "what's the difference between crypto and gold? That is, unless you get to a SHTF situation in which we can't all log in and "see" our bitcoins.

I don't blame Trump for not understanding all this. Lots of times I don't know what to think of the crypto stuff. However, if Trump can't see that the $1 Trillion can't cover that $35 Trillion, then yeah... As for getting into debt and the accompanying problems, with his businesses, I would think Trump inherently understands money in that sense. Kamala, like a lot of women, but worse, has no clue.

I just read your link. I like "Smartness Is Not Greatness". That was an interesting short article.

PS: Sorry, I had that comment ready to write hours ago, so I wrote it before the last 3 were posted. Great discussion!

PS: Thanks for the comments, all, and for that new book addition, Mr. Smith. That time in American history is very interesting to me. All I've read so far was the book "Blacklisted by History" about Sen. Joe McCarthy, but it gives one a feel for the political times.

I have a friend who has an encyclopedic knowledge of those years '51-52. That's because he's been reading through the Encyclopedias for those years, hah! Truly, and not the Britannica but the Americana.

I hope to have time to read "Witness".

One thing about Alger HIss for me is that I'd heard that name for a long time in passing reference. Just as with McCarthy, I believe that he was thought to be innocent by so many people (or they lied) for so long that it became a historic lie. The internet can be pretty helpful to clear these things up.

I enjoyed that detailed comment, Mr. Hail. Very interesting human element with the wife.

PS

Peak Stupidity has written a lot about Joseph McCarthy. But in fact he was a late-comer to the matter.

From what I understand, McCarthy was not a major personality in U.S. politics or news before mid-1950, I think. His "I have in my hand a list of communists in the U.S. government" speech was i nearly 1950, around the time Alger Hiss was sentenced to prison in early 1950. But McCarthy didn't really dig into the anti-communist campaign until much later in 1950 after the quagmire in Korea had begun.

McCarthy was also never some one-man show, but more like a showman. Many others had been trying to publicize Soviet and pro-communist penetration of government for years, but had never gotten headway in quite the way that conditions aligned, in 1950-51, and for a few years thereafter, to elevate a man like McCarthy from really making hay. And that opening was allowed, in no small part, by the Alger Hiss case, and the revelations about the extent of communist espionage cells and Soviet influence-operations in the U.S. government throughout the 1930s and 1940s. It was not as much as Israeli penetration of the U.S. government in our time, but that is taboo. ("Capitol Hill is Israel occupied territory" -- Pat Buchanan, 1990s), and perhaps also other lobby-groups. More and more talk of pro-PRC efforts of similar kind, and certainly they have had lots of active spies, some even caught.

General Dean, the U.S. Army general captured by North Korea in July 1950 during a misfortune on the battle-field, spent three years in captivity with extremely limited access to the outside world, except for two pro-communist journalists visiting North Korea to report for the likes of the London Daily Worker. (One of these was from Australia, one from England, I think. He liked one of two, and this one helped lobby for better conditions for a fellow White man; the other, General Dean found to be a ridiculous character in the mold of Godfrey Roberts, and that man mocked and teased the captured genera l-- so General Dean wrote in his memoir.)

At some point around 1952, in captivity, some North Koran political officer arrived for the latest round of talks with General Dean, and began berating him about someone named Joe McCarthy, and something called McCarthyism. Dean had not known the name "Joe McCarthy" as of the time of his capture in July 1950. And this was a U.S. general, not some low-info bozo out there who doesn't know or care about anything. The the North Korean political-officer's rant about "McCarthyism" was as if the man had started speaking to him about the canals of Mars, for all it meant to him. But the political-officer insisted that McCarthyism was a sinister conspiracy against world peace.

PS

Thanks, Mr. Smith

Google finds that Fred The Gator and Mr. Ganderson have posted comments about the Alger Hiss case in these pages in the past years.

PS: Good evening, everyone...

Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy by G. Edgar White (1.8mb .pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/22uy88w9

Cheers! ☮️

PS

Alarmist wrote: "political leaders of the West have grown increasingly dumber in the last 50 years (speaking of that, see the Tucker episode where he interviews Geoff Shepard re Watergate)"

What is the relation between political leaders getting dumber and the recent Tucker Carlson 'Watergate' interview?

The interviewee suggests the plot to take down Nixon was, above anything else, run by the CIA. This would not be so surprising to hear from Tucker in his current incarnation, but it actually comes from his guest, Nixon White House veteran Geoff Shepard, who said he'd spent "12,000 hours" or something like that in the archives and doing FOIA requests and other things, piecing together what happened.

One interesting thing to come up: Every member of the "Plumbers" team was a CIA asset except one: the sole non-CIA man was the over-enthusiastic leader, G. Gordon Liddy. It seems Geoff Shepard retains a resentment against Liddy from back in those days, for the latter's cavalier "tough guy" ways that hurt and didn't help (the entire "break in at the DNC" was a ridiculous plot that had no real point, Liddy was a rogue actor. But the bigger point seemed to be that Liddy may have been used in a plot orchestrated by the CIA, whose fingerprints were all over much of the "Watergate" saga from summer 1972 until the denouement in August 1974 (resignation).

PS

-- Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, the "Good Guys vs. Bad Guys" thread of U.S. political history --

Thank you, Pastor Gator, for the brief remarks in the Alger Hiss case.

Not long ago I read some of one of the many books about Alger Hiss. It was a book not so much about the 1948-50 legal cases against him (where young Congressman Richard Nixon's star rose for the first time). It was really about his whole life. But it wasn't even a biography as such. Its main purpose was to ask, and seek in every nook and cranny to come up with answers 'why': Why did he insist on his innocence so stridently, for decades? Why did so many people believe Alger Hiss, believed that he was framed, or treated the whole thing as too difficult to get final answers on, an unknowable mystery, despite the evidence against Hiss being just as solid as any used to convict anyone of anything in court, indeed overwhelming.

The accounts of the Soviet-intelligence and Communist Party cells with which Alger Hiss was involved take up only a lesser portion of the book, and are breezed through. The account suggests he only became involved in Communist politics and espionage through his left-wing and promiscuous wife, with whom he had been infatuated since college some years prior, but when they reconnected around the late 1920s she was a divorced single mother and had had an abortion in the 1920s by another man. When she showed herself open this time to his courting, after a few weeks she demanding a swift wedding and he went along with it; she was political, at first he was not.

Hiss and many others in the 1930s engaged in pro-Soviet espionage (the names of ancillary personalities are Jewish about half the time Alger Hiss and wife were both White-Protestants of the old type, but even Whittaker Chambers wife was also Jewish, as were several of Hiss' "handlers" and associates in their espionage cells). It lasted over about their 13 years. They were associated with Whittaker Chambers in the same Communist cell for a few years before he 'turned'.

Poor Whittaker Chambers, he spent years off-and-on, starting in about 1939, trying to get anyone to listen to him than the high-ranking Alger Hiss was a prolific spy for the USSR. He was blown off as some resentful nut and possibly unbalanced, deranged; even though he had proof. By 1945 Alger Hiss and others are managing U.S.-Soviet relations and half of Europe was turned over to Stalin with no real pushback. Alger Hiss is said to have personally managed the "Yalta Conference," I believe, of early 1945.

A few people here and there realized Alger Hiss was a spy, but also never got followed up on. Whittaker Chambers continued to be dismissed; he was by then working at Time magazine and carried this big secret of himself having been in Communist pro-Soviet espionage cells for some time in the 1930s or possibly starting even earlier. Not until finally the mood went the right way with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.

The period of the trials, from August 1948 to about January 1950, take up an especially small portion of the book.

The lion's share of the book is really about a different mystery than the usual ones associated with the case. You had the patrician-looking Alger Hiss and the fat-and-disheveled accuser, Whittaker Chambers. And huge numbers of people sided with Alger Hiss. His fan-club in fact grew steadily, and Alger Hiss went onto a long stage of his career in which he constantly promoted himself as a victim of villainous Richard Nixon and vaguely of the boorish Joe McCarthy and others. A victim of over-zealous right-wingers and crazed anti-communism; an innocent man, crucified and sent to prison.

Most people believed in Innocent Alger Hill in the 1960s, 1970s. Even in later decades, after the biography of 1978 that strongly showed his guilt, it still remained strong, this "Alger Hiss Framed by a Right-Wing Conspiracy" mantra.

I think if you poll average people even today, and sort for those who know the name and something of the case (which is not many people), you'll still find lots of people who believe Hiss was framed. He was reinstated with fanfare, at some point, to the legal profession; and a college named an endowed chair after him. When one-liner accounts appear, they usually saw "Some say, others say..." (compare that with that stock headline of our time, "Trump falsely claims...").

Why did others, who could saw the evidence, continue to either believe Alger Hiss (in his second career of self-promotion as a victim of a right-wing conspiracy), or claim to believe him? What was going on with this phenomenon? Almost comparable to a mass-delusion. And with the man himself, willing to lie systematically and consistently about his life and so on. It was a psychological study, even an ideological study.

It seems relevant to the highly ideologized age of ours in these 2010s and 2020s. There are multiple answers: Alger Hiss was seen as an elite (having law-clerked for supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), and as a left-winger (but not Communist or disloyal, in his recreated self-identity), so opinion-shapers were naturally and by default on his side. How do you get out of a long-established historical lie, once it is established?

The book, for those interested, was:

_____________

"Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy," by G. Edgar White (2004)....
______________

The author was a Washington lawyer, with indirect connections to some of the players and general knowledge of the whole scene of the people in question (the pro-Alger Hiss people who believed his story he was framed by villains like Richard Nixon and fat and slovenly bitter wackos like Whittaker Chambers). The author learned, in mid-life, that his own father-in-law had been one of Alger Hiss' defense-counsels in one of the trials. His interest grew from there, and he reports that he even spent decades believing Hiss himself, before actually looking deeply into it.

The book often reads like a well-done legal document, but the scope is particularly interesting. An adaptation of the book for the political climate of the 2020s would be of great interest, a few thousand words of a "new introduction" or the like. Because clearly what kept the flame of Alger Hiss Was Framed burning so strong and so long was that his accusers and so forth were Bad Guys, including the fact that Whittaker Chambers later became close pals with William F. Buckley and wrote for the early National Review. But that's not quite the whole story and it would be a disservice to FULLY reduce it to "left-wingers wanted to 'signal' against right-wingers).

---

Whittaker Chambers once wrote these words: "It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within." The purpose of his later-life career as an anti-communist, he went on, was not for personal gain but merely to leave some traces that might outlast him, to await "the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth."

.

PS: Good morning, everyone...

Witness by Whittaker Chambers (6.4mb .pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/4fwjs43j

Happy Sunday! ☮️

PS Alarmist writes: "I always thought Nixon got a bad rap, pretty much as revenge for outing Communist Whittaker Chambers."

As one who went through the Nixon times, I always recall thinking, when I saw him on TV, that he was lying (and was ashamed of it). But I do think he was screwed over by the Democrats.

But it was Alger Hiss who was the spy. Nixon prosecuted him. Whittaker Chambers was the Soviet spy-runner who exposed Hiss. Chambers' book WITNESS is IMHO a classic---a real-life spy story.

PS: 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝'𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔...

Some people think he is a hypnotist...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2015/11/28/donald-trump-political-mass-hypnotist/
https://archive.ph/TV6oC

And maybe he is? (I don't know.) Maybe he is just dumbing down his message and peppering it with repetition because he is talking (largely) to literal morons.(?)

𝑊𝑒'𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑝𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑟 $35 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛.

In any case, I don't think he understands bitcoin. (It's going to be difficult to pay off a $35 trillion dollar debt with bitcoin when there are only $1.2 trillion dollar bucks worth of bitcoin in existence. I'm also not sure how he is going to acquire it. Is he planning on stealing all the bitcoins in the world? How would that work?)

Maybe it's just some new line of bullshit for him(?) that he was trying out with the crowd. (Pay off the $35 Trillion debt with a little bitcoin cheque and make Mexico pay for it?) Maybe he actually believes this bullshit.(?)

But yeah. That hypnotic repetitive speech style is one of the reasons Mrs. Smith can't stand the guy. She thinks it makes him sound stupid and like he is talking to stupid people.

Maybe he's playing a character made for the TeeVee and he is acting like a dumber version of himself? (He wouldn't be the first politician to do so. Example, George W. Bush.) As The Alarmist notes...

𝑃𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑒𝑠𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑦 𝑑𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑎𝑠𝑡 50 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠.

I do believe this is true, but I also think that some of it is for show because the population is getting much dumber in general. Because literal morons and idiots get the privilege to voat anyone running for "office" has to win over a critical mass of these voaters. Because the majority of American voaters are not very intelligent (and getting less intelligent over time) we get exceedingly worse candidates and exceedingly worse outcomes.

https://www.aier.org/article/you-dont-really-want-smart-people-running-the-world/

Of course these exceedingly worse candidates and exceedingly worse outcomes are also largely due to corruption/evil and (what I will call) natural stupidity. (A never ending resource that will never be in short supply.)

So, yeah...

Happy Saturday! ☮️

PS: There are 2 paragraphs that illustrate so well Trump's repetitive style of talking - hey, if it works, I guess...

"If we don't do it, China's going to do it," Trump told Fox Business. "China's going to do it anyway. But if we don't do it, China's doing it. China is already doing it, and if we don't do it, other countries are going to do it. So we might as well be at the forefront."

That's how you get those long rallies. If Trump weren't like this, that dude would have gotten a chance to take a shot at him.

PS: Thanks for that Forbes article, Adam. "Send THEM a little crypto check", huh? Who exactly is THEM, in that sentence. (Never mind the humor in "a little crypto check") Is he thinking it's all the Chinese? If so, well, I stand by what the frat boys said to poor Flounder in "Animal House". "Listen, China, ya' fucked up. You trusted us." That's along with "If it weren't for America, you'd be speaking Japanese right now. Call it even."

The bonds that are used to borrow money for the US Gov't are held by people and institutions all over. You renege on one, you renege on all. Will cryto get a big boost from Trump's words, and, as per the article, possibly the Chinese, were they turn around on this as the article hints?

The funniest thing would be a debate on crypto-currencies v gold, between Kamakamala and Trump, rather than the intelligent one in the 2 hour clip Mr. Hail reminded me of.

I should include some mention of this article in that post coming. It's hard for anyone to wrap his mind around this stuff, but these 2 people? Haha. (That's not to say Trump doesn't understand some economics, when it affects HIM, of course, for the most part.)

PS

There’s only one way out of a black hole, and that is to go through it. ICYMI, political leaders of the West have grown increasingly dumber in the last 50 years (speaking of that, see the Tucker episode where he interviews Geoff Shepard re Watergate). This is by design. They must crash the system, and they need the dumbest politicians ever to make it happen.

I always thought Nixon got a bad rap, pretty much as revenge for outing Communist Whittaker Chambers.

https://youtu.be/CCnUHIGvDVY

🕉

PS: Greetings again, Achmed...

𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝, 𝑂𝑇𝑂𝐻, 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑓𝑓 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ...

Did you notice this?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/08/04/donald-trump-proposes-radical-plan-to-pay-off-35-trillion-in-national-debt-and-beat-china/

"𝐶𝑟𝑦𝑝𝑡𝑜 𝑖𝑠 𝑎 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔," 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝐹𝑜𝑥 𝐵𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠. "𝑀𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒 𝑤𝑒'𝑙𝑙 𝑝𝑎𝑦 𝑜𝑓𝑓 𝑜𝑢𝑟 $35 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑠, ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑐𝑟𝑦𝑝𝑡𝑜 𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑐𝑘, 𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡? 𝑊𝑒'𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑝𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑟 $35 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛."

☮️

PS: Could we mint a $31 trillion coin to pay the national debt?

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/05/12/could-we-mint-31-trillion-coin-pay-national-debt/

☮️

PS: Greetings, Achmed!

Just mint a few $35,000,000,000,000 plastic coins and deposit them in a box at the treasury.

Problem solved!


Moar seriously though...

I agree with Dr. Rock's comment. And yours too.

Average Americans are gonna be so f*ed when this sh*t hits the proverbial fan.

Interesting times and such. ☮️

PS: We are moving right along this year, Adam. Thanks.

PS: Happy 3100!