Word: alger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Watergate tales of sin, the Fall, and redemption by the likes of Haldeman, Colson, Dean, Magruder and, eventually Nixon. So Tony Hiss '63 does us all a service with his bittersweet offering Laughing Last, a readable and engaging biography (if it can be classified as such) of his father, Alger Hiss. While the Nixon gang and assorted witnesses and prosecutors continue to churn out bestsellers, this slim volume may be lost in the flood tide of confessions, which is a shame, because Hiss brings a great deal of honest emotion and reflection to his subject, a claim his competitors hardly...
...younger Hiss gives us the fascinating story, in fragmented form, of his father's life; a story of bizarre twists of fate and lasting disappointments to be sure, but also one of some happiness. If the name Alger Hiss sounds familiar, but you can't really place it, he was the center of a national crisis of sorts in the late 1940s over whether Communists had penetrated into high levels of the government. In 1948, in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a man named Whittaker Chambers had accused Hiss, the head of the Carnegie Endowment...
...debate. His father is currently pushing for a complete vindication through the courts; Laughing Last, therefore, steers clear of extended technical discussions of the Woodstock typewriter and the Pumpkin Papers microfilm, the evidence dear to the scholars of the case, and instead concentrates on the personal side of Alger Hiss and with equal success, on Tony Hiss his son. This is not to suggest Tony Hiss has any doubts about his father's innocence; on the contrary, quite clearly he thinks a great injustice has been done. Rather than dredging up inconsistencies in the trial transcripts or excoriating the witchhunters...
...ALGER HISS has always been something of a mystery. His own book on the case, In the Court of Public Opinion, written after his prison term, is a dry, legal brief attempting to prove how Chambers had practiced "forgery by typewriter," but reveals little of the feelings and emotions expected of a man when he is forced to defend his character and honor in an increasingly hostile arena. The reviewers panned the book and the public didn...
Laughing Last is much closer to the book Alger Hiss should have written. If Tony Hiss errs, it is on account of a candor that at times is almost too blunt. We are told more about the sex lives of father and son than perhaps we want to know. But that flaw is understandable, the idea behind the book is to get us to see Alger Hiss as do those close to him, as "Al", the disciplined, kind, warm father and husband who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So we learn of Al's love...