Word: algerisms
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...summer of 1948, a squat, rumpled man took the witness stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee and made a series of accusations that changed the temper of his times. The accuser was a journalist named Whittaker Chambers. The accused was Alger Hiss, a longtime high-ranking State Department official who had been at Franklin Roosevelt's side at Yalta and had helped to write the Charter of the United Nations...
...Cordell Hull, Edward Stettinius and James Byrnes. Most of the U.S. was still reluctant to believe that Communism could have penetrated the Federal Government. Then, bit by bit-as if hesitating to reveal the extent of the conspiracy and his own involvement-Chambers produced the evidence that finally sent Alger Hiss to jail for lying, when he said that he had not given official documents to the Communist Party...
...hearings, President Harry Truman charged that the whole affair was a Republican-plotted "red herring"-and his quip became a political boomerang, evidence that the Democrats were "soft on Communism." Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, insisted stubbornly that he would not "turn his back on Alger Hiss"-and came under political attack that seriously curbed his effectiveness. A young California Congressman named Richard Nixon became a national figure by prying information out of the reluctant witness...
...Chambers later told his story, he soon met Communist Alger Hiss and his wife, and the two men began a friendship as close "as a man ever makes in his life." At one point the Chamberses even shared a house with the Hisses on P Street. In 1936, on party orders, Hiss began feeding classified material to Chambers. "He would bring home a briefcase containing documents from the State Department," explained Chambers. "I would then take the documents to Baltimore to be photographed, returning them to Alger Hiss late the same night or the next morning...
...party's machinations drove him on. Public revelation of Chambers' past broke almost by chance: in 1948 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after investigators kept stumbling across his name in the statements of other wit nesses. Chambers testified freely that Alger Hiss had been a Communist, but said nothing at first about his past involvement in espionage. As the whirlwind began to howl over the Hiss Case, Chambers resigned from TIME in December...