Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [26]
My Princeton scholarship covered tuition and fees but not books, or the cost of the dorm, food, or transportation. I soon learned about a naval ROTC program that paid for almost all expenses and also provided fifty dollars a month in spending money. Along with it came a commitment to serve a minimum of three years upon being commissioned an ensign in the regular Navy at graduation.
As part of that NROTC program, I spent six weeks every summer on training duty. In 1952, after completing my Navy training aboard the USS Wisconsin, my roommate, Sid Wentz, and I caught a space available on a free military flight to Frankfurt, Germany, and traveled around Europe for two weeks. These were countries I had read about as a youngster during the war. Seven years after World War II had ended, I was struck by its lingering impact. Some bombed areas hadn’t been repaired. Even the stalwart British were still contending with rationing.
Meanwhile, the world had entered a new war—the Cold War. It featured clashes between surrogates and espionage rather than outright military confrontation between the two superpowers. Then war broke out on the Korean peninsula. In 1953, when I was again on a summer Navy training cruise, I received a letter from my folks telling me that my close friend and wrestling teammate from high school, Dick O’Keefe, had been killed in the conflict. Even more painful was the knowledge that Dick died when the war was all but over. Some seventeen thousand UN casualties, mostly American, occurred during the final twenty days of the conflict, as each side made every effort to advance their positions while a cease-fire was being negotiated.
One of the major fears during the Cold War’s early days was that Communists would infiltrate Western governments. Indeed, one of the reasons the Truman administration stepped up to assist Western Europe economically through the Marshall Plan was out of concern that desperate countries might be ripe for a communist takeover. There were reports of Communists in high-ranking posts in the U.S. government. By far the most engrossing, even transformative, episode during this period involved an admitted former Communist named Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had decided to defect to the American side and was cooperating with our government. It must not have been an easy choice for him, because he still believed that the Soviets would ultimately prevail in the Cold War.
As part of Chambers’ effort to supply information to the United States government, he volunteered the information that Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, was a Communist spy. Hiss angrily denied the charges, and nearly everyone in the correct circles supported him. Polished, well dressed, and articulate, Hiss had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and attended the Yalta Conference with President Roosevelt as part of the State Department delegation. Chambers did not compare well to Alger Hiss in newspaper photographs or newsreels: He was an overweight, unkempt figure with bad teeth who admitted to having aided the Soviet cause. Far fewer people seemed to believe him than Hiss.
In congressional hearings, Hiss contended he had never known Chambers. He was convincing. It seemed that if Chambers turned out to be telling the truth, Hiss would have to be the best liar in the world. Apparently he was. The connection between them seemed to be confirmed when Chambers testified in a secret session that Hiss had once mentioned to him about seeing a rare bird called a prothonotary warbler, which Hiss later independently acknowledged, completely unaware of the implication of his admission. To the surprise—and continued disbelief—of some, Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury.
I was fascinated by the case for many reasons, and its lessons stuck with me. When Hiss was convicted, I saw how completely wrong the conventional wisdom—as well as first impressions