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Whittaker Chambers leveled his accusations at Alger Hiss. While Nixon has been vindicated by history for backing Chambers, he did not back him in any knee-jerk way. He started off biased in favor of Hiss, even traveling to New York to grill Chambers in an executive session over the inconsistencies in his story. But if Nixon emerged as a hero from the affair, it is because there was a logic to his anti-Communism that eluded most politicians of both parties. Hard-line Republicans wanted vigorous anti-Communist action at home but worried little about a strengthening Soviet position abroad. Most Democrats—and President Truman was typical in this respect—were willing to fight Communism militarily but cavalier about responding to grassroots worries about subversion. (Gellman holds this nonchalance at least partly to blame for McCarthyism.) Nixon, by contrast, sought to “fight Communism in the United States,” as he said, “on the same realistic basis that we are already committed to fighting it abroad.”

Such balance made Nixon, even at age 39, a logical choice as running mate for the internationalist moderate Dwight Eisenhower. What’s more, he had pulled the nifty electoral trick of uniting California’s semi-partisan moderates and its hard rightists— exactly the conflict that threatened to split the national GOP between Eisenhower’s backers and supporters of Ohio senator Robert Taft. Nixon, at the close of the Truman administration, looked very much like the future of American politics.

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Andrew J. Bacevich

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Whittaker Chambers leveled his accusations at Alger Hiss. While Nixon has been vindicated by history for backing Chambers, he did not back him in any knee-jerk way. He started off biased in favor of Hiss, even traveling to New York to grill Chambers in an executive session over the inconsistencies in his story. But if Nixon emerged as a hero from the affair, it is because there was a logic to his anti-Communism that eluded most politicians of both parties. Hard-line Republicans wanted vigorous anti-Communist action at home but worried little about a strengthening Soviet position abroad. Most Democrats—and President Truman was typical in this respect—were willing to fight Communism militarily but cavalier about responding to grassroots worries about subversion. (Gellman holds this nonchalance at least partly to blame for McCarthyism.) Nixon, by contrast, sought to “fight Communism in the United States,” as he said, “on the same realistic basis that we are already committed to fighting it abroad.”

Such balance made Nixon, even at age 39, a logical choice as running mate for the internationalist moderate Dwight Eisenhower. What’s more, he had pulled the nifty electoral trick of uniting California’s semi-partisan moderates and its hard rightists— exactly the conflict that threatened to split the national GOP between Eisenhower’s backers and supporters of Ohio senator Robert Taft. Nixon, at the close of the Truman administration, looked very much like the future of American politics.