The veteran diplomat was a hard sell as a latter-day Bolshevik, especially given Chambers’s own confessed crimes. President Harry S. Truman, who despised HUAC, which he saw as a legacy of the original Red Scare, dismissed the charges against Hiss as “a red herring,” as did others.
But one HUAC member took the charges seriously.
Then in his first term, Nixon had joined the committee in 1947. In May 1948, Nixon had won favor with the right-wing crowd by sponsoring the Subversive Activities Control Act, known as the Mundt-Nixon Bill, which would have required Communist Party members to register with the government. The controversial bill passed the House but was defeated in the Senate.
During the Hiss-Chambers hearing that year, Nixon declared that he believed Chambers and pressed his colleagues to follow up on the former Soviet spy’s dramatic allegations, though Chambers lacked documentary proof to back them up. The outraged Hiss proceeded to file a slander suit against Chambers, who had claimed publicly on “Meet the Press” that Hiss “was a communist and may be [one] now.”
But by early December 1948, the episode had faded from view, as had the Justice Department’s parallel investigation. “The Justice Department’s investigation of the Hiss-Chambers affair is about to die for lack of evidence,” reported the New York Times on Dec. 2, adding, “unless something new turns up.”
In fact, something new had just turned up, in the form of Chambers’s pumpkin. Two HUAC investigators had accompanied Chambers to his Maryland farm in the early hours of that morning. There, he led them to his prized pumpkin patch and a hollowed-out specimen, from which they removed five cans of microfilm containing State Department and Navy photographs.
The committee leaped at the astonishing discovery, calling it “definite proof of one of the most extensive spy rings in the United States.” That was a gross exaggeration, but Hiss was clearly in trouble.
The question now was whether Hiss was a Soviet agent. Fortunately for the accused operative, the statute of limitations for espionage was five years, and the incriminating evidence all involved documents that Hiss had supposedly passed to Chambers a decade earlier.
The statute of limitations did not apply, however, on the issue of whether Hiss had committed perjury.
Meanwhile, Nixon — his doubts about Hiss’s credibility vindicated — seized the moment. The 35-year-old Republican was on a ship in the Caribbean when news of the pumpkin’s discovery broke, but a Coast Guard rescue plane brought him ashore and he was flown to Washington, the Times reported. In the days that followed, photos of Nixon triumphantly brandishing the instantly famous Pumpkin Papers were splashed across the press.