Video: '1948 Hiss Case, Richard Nixon, Microfilm | Kinolibrary'

(Monday, December 6, 1948; during the Second Red Scare and the Cold War) — U.S. Rep. Richard Nixon, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and staff investigator Robert Stripling, posed today for photographers with the “Pumpkin Papers.”

The “Pumpkin Papers,” microfilm discovered four days before in a hollowed-out pumpkin on the Maryland farm of Whittaker Chambers, allegedly implicated former U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss as one of Chambers’ communist contacts.

Video: 'Nixon 'Tricky Dicky' Part 1 of 3' (Dec. 6, 1948, at 23:15)

Hiss had denied under oath that he had ever been a communist and denied knowing anybody by the name of Whittaker Chambers, the Time magazine editor who had testified in August 1948 that he had been part of a communist underground organization prior to his leaving the movement in 1937.