Excerpt from The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers

An excerpt from The Arrogance of Power, a biography of Richard Nixon, by Anthony Summers; the excerpt pertains to Nixon, the FBI, the Alger Hiss case, and Father John Cronin:

Nixon was to claim later that the first he heard of Hiss was in August 1948, when Whittaker Chambers testified before the Un-American Activities Committee. “The FBI,” he insisted, “played no role whatever in the Hiss case. . . .”

The facts suggest otherwise. Within a month of taking office, Nixon had accompanied a fellow congressman to a meeting with Father John Cronin, a Catholic priest who had informed on Communists while working with labor unions during the war. The bureau now used him as a conduit for deliberate leaks. In a report prepared for the Catholic hierarchy, drawing on what the FBI had told him, Cronin had named Hiss as the most influential Communist in the State Department. He later recalled having shown Nixon that report and having discussed Hiss with him. “Nixon,” Cronin claimed, “was playing with a stacked deck in the Hiss case.”

This excerpt has the following footnote:

In his 1993 biography Jonathan Aitken claimed Nixon denied having discussed the Hiss case with Cronin or having received information from the FBI until after mid-August 1948. Aitken claimed too that in a 1990 interview Cronin conceded that Nixon was right and that his “stacked deck” remark was unfair. Was Cronin capable of making any such remark in 1990? In January 1991, when approached for an interview, the elderly Cronin was in a home for the aged, deaf, and in a wheelchair and unable to hold a cogent conversation. In addition, Cronin said in 1959—and in subsequent interviews—that he discussed Hiss with Nixon as early as February 1947. Cronin’s FBI file, released in 1999, reportedly shows that Director Hoover was concerned in 1946 because Cronin “talks too much.” It may later have suited the FBI to feed him information precisely because he was a talker. Certainly he had an on-going relationship with the bureau. (Aitken claimed: JA, p. 155 and see Gellman, op. cit., p. 234; Parmet, Nixon, op. cit., p. 166–; 1991 approach: visit to Cronin by Robbyn Swan for this author, Jan. 10, 1991; perjurer: Irish Times, Jan. 20, 1999; 1959: int. Cronin in Kornitzer, op. cit., p. 172, and see Mazo, op. cit., p. 51; subsequent ints.: Lowenthal script, supra., p. 39–; Esquire, Nov. 1975; FBI file: New England Journal of History, Vol. 56, Winter 1999/Spring 2000, p. 24.)