Dick at his trickiest

In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying as by his actual crimes related to Watergate — history has been relatively kind to him. Compared with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Nixon in retrospect can seem statesmanlike, thoughtful and liberal-minded. He established diplomatic relations with communist China, took the US off the gold standard, negotiated the wind-down of the Vietnam war, and created the Environmental Protection Agency — accomplishments that generally prompt even Nixon-haters to pause before they condemn Tricky Dick to perdition.

But now comes Joan Brady with a bracing reminder of what indeed was so hateful, so villainous about Nixon and his political ascent. For her outraged new book about his persecution of the internationalist lawyer and New Deal diplomat Alger Hiss is as much a reindictment of Nixon as it is an attempt, once and for all, to clear Hiss of the accusation that he betrayed his country in the service of Soviet Russia. Whether Hiss can ever be fully exonerated remains a vexed question that ultimately has little to do with the flimsy and compromised evidence brought against him.

Brady has done a convincing job of reading and reinvigorating the long trial and hearing transcripts, as well as a vast amount of published and unpublished literature about the case. To her credit, she has rendered the Hiss/Nixon duel more compelling for a younger audience unfamiliar with ‘the trial of the century’ by styling this cri de coeur as a memoir and relating chatty anecdotes about her complicated friendship with Hiss. Specialists may quibble with Brady’s reliance on her own life story to enliven the recounting of Hiss’s tragic fall. But her personal feelings about the red-baiting that engulfed America in the late 1940s and early 1950s, viewed through the intimidation of her father and husband by anti-communist hysteria, make America’s Dreyfus an absorbing read.