Immediately following the Second World War, the federal government fought what it considered to be a growing communist menace within the United States. In part as a reaction to President Harry Truman’s strong anti-communist rhetoric, Congress developed its own program to fight internal subversion, stepping up the hearings and investigations of the existing House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC). The hearings gave Richard Nixon his first taste of national recognition, when Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss, a long-time Democrat and close aide to Roosevelt during the New Deal and the War, of passing classified documents to the Soviets in the late 1930s.