Word: alger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crisp day in January 1950, Alger and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhattan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A federal jury was ready to pass judgment on whether he had lied in denying that he had given secret State Department documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. Intoned the forewoman: "We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second." Showing almost no emotion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out of the room, surrounded by a pack of lawyers and spectators...
...them little more than briefs for one side or the other, the question has not been answered conclusively. Now Allen Weinstein, a respected historian at Smith College, has turned up previously undisclosed evidence that inexorably led him to this unqualified verdict: "The jurors made no mistake in finding Alger Hiss guilty as charged...
...interview with Bell, Weinstein said simply: "In the end, Chambers' version turned out to be truthful, and Hiss's version did not. Alger Hiss is a victim of the facts...
...authorities. Two months later, Hiss's lawyer, Edward McLean, made a search of his own, found the machine and told the FBI that he had it." Thus, adds Weinstein, if the typewriter obtained by McLean was a fake, as Hiss later claimed, "the only two people, other than Alger Hiss, in a position to make a switch were Donald Hiss and the maid...
Richard Nixon regarded the Alger Hiss case as his first major crisis, and one that he handled masterfully. As President, he frequently urged his aides to read the account of it in his autobiographical Six Crises. "Warm up to it, and it makes fascinating reading," he told H.R. Haldeman. Charles Colson claimed to have read the book 14 times. "The fact is," says Historian Allen Weinstein, "Nixon didn't behave very courageously during the Hiss case. He buckled under pressure...