Hiss-Chambers Chapter 21: Prosecution's Documents

Robert Stripling & Richard Nixon  Everyone always asks about the topic of this Podcast #21: “What was in the secret State Department documents?”  These are the 126 pages that Chambers introduced as the last documents that Hiss gave him.  State Department men authenticated them as copies (or summaries or excerpts) of actual State Department documents, many marked CONFIDENTIAL and all dated between December 31, 1937, and April 1, 1938.  The documents concern many subjects, but they generally share two characteristics.  First, they had little or nothing to do with Hiss’s job, which was trade between the US and other countries.  Second, they had a lot to do with two subjects about which the US knew a lot and about which the Soviet Union knew little through its own efforts but was intensely interested in at that time.  Those subjects were what was going on in Germany and Japan, two aggressively expansionist countries bordering the Soviet Union and sworn to its destruction.  Get ready for a deep dive into what mattered to the Soviet Union in those years; and into The Robinson-Reubens Affair, an “international incident” between the US and the Soviets in early 1938 that provoked what may be the “smoking gun” document in this Case.