Word: algerisms
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After serving three years, eight months and five days in prison for perjury, Alger Hiss was paroled (until next September). Outside the prison a throng of more than 70 newsmen surged around him as he intoned his careful words: "I am very glad to use this chance-the first I have had in nearly four years-to reassert my complete innocence of the charges that were brought against me by Whittaker Chambers ... I have had to wait in silence while, in my absence, a myth has been developed. I hope that the return of the mere man will help...
...outlook for Hiss was the subject of some reflection by Whittaker Chambers. On his Maryland farm, where he is also doing some writing, Chambers, who is now much thinner than he was before his two major heart attacks in the last two years, observed: "Alger Hiss will be passing from the ordeal of prison to the ordeal of daily living, which may well prove more trying. Hiss is approaching the most difficult moment of his life." Next day, a reporter relayed this thought to Hiss as he arrived at his Greenwich Village home. Asked Hiss tersely: "Was that his hope...
...Esther Chambers sat him down in front of the kitchen fireplace to wait while Chambers went to his typewriter, put a piece of yellow paper in it, and wrote: "The saddest single factor about the Hiss case is that nobody can change the facts as they are known. Neither Alger Hiss nor I, however much we might wish to do so, can change these facts. They are there forever. That is the inherent tragedy of this case...
...ALGER HISS has paid his penalty under the law. Anybody else in the same circumstances is entitled to be accorded by his fellow men a chance to rehabilitate himself. But what will the public think about him? He never has publicly conceded that the jury was right in convicting him of perjury. In the eyes of many people therefore, he has not atoned for his sin. The jury's judgment was based to no small extent on the flat statement by Hiss that he never was a Communist. Since his trial, another witness-Nathaniel Weyl -who broke with...
There have been many ex-Communists who have been received into re spected circles of American life but primarily because they "turned state's evidence," so to speak, and aided their own government by furnishing all the information they had about the Communist infiltration movement. Alger Hiss should be left to make his volun tary atonement for his crime, but, if he chooses to remain silent altogether, he will not soon regain, even among his friends, some of the esteem he once...