Word: algerisms
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...handsome, the hair neatly trimmed; there is a casual elegance about his dress. But the dominant features are the eyes: alert, mischievous, wary, playful, like those of an actor savoring the potential of a new role, a fresh persona. Despite the thousands of words written by and about him, Alger Hiss, who died last week at 92, remains one of the most tantalizing figures of the cold war. His 1949 trial and retrial in a Soviet-espionage case personified the explosive political and class conflicts of the time, serving as the first morality play of the red-baiting...
...communist underground and a Soviet spy. What made his case so intriguing was that his profile seemed at odds with the stereotypical idea of a grubby turncoat. His patrician grace had somehow survived a family life streaked with tragedy. His father, a wholesale grocer, committed suicide when Alger was two; a sister, Mary, also killed herself. Yet Hiss's advancement in life seemed blessed. After graduating with honors from Johns Hopkins University, Hiss at Harvard Law School was befriended by Professor Felix Frankfurter, who arranged for his protege to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hiss worked...
...story of the time--a strange, defining piece of cold war Kabuki--has remained a mystery intact. The matter of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, and which of them was telling the truth, became a litmus test for several generations, a marker not only of political sympathies but also of intellectual class and sensibility. Hiss and Chambers were the cold war's Mozart and Salieri, and their mysteries were multilayered. If you went below the murk of espionage and infiltration and double lives--a subject fascinating in itself--you penetrated to the deeper strangeness of the two men's psychologies...
...sadly interesting motif of parallel dysfunctions ran through the Hiss family as well. Alger Hiss's father committed suicide rather savagely, slashing his throat with his own razor. Alger's sister Mary Ann also killed herself, by swallowing a bottle of caustic household cleanser...
...Alger Hiss made almost a fetish of his unflappable objectivity. Presumptuously, no doubt, one imagines that there were shadows in his mind so disturbing (his father's betrayal-suicide, a black hole of grief and abandonment and shame) that cauterized objectivity became the only salvation. I have always believed the Chambers rather than the Hiss version of events, just as I think Chambers was the more gifted and interesting of the two men; there seemed less to Hiss than first appeared and more to Chambers. But I wonder if their lives did not intersect at some subterranean level, some hidden...