Word: hiss
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cold-war confrontation, as unforgettable for its personal drama as for its historical significance. When, in 1951, Alger Hiss went off to prison for 44 months and Whittaker Chambers retired to a Maryland farm, the question still nagged: Who had lied? Today, in the minds of many people, doubts remain. But last week Hiss, 71, still denying Chambers' charges that he passed secret State Department documents to Soviet spies, suffered a damaging setback from a most unexpected source-the files of his own defense attorneys...
...controversy flared anew when Allen Weinstein, a respected historian from Smith College who had tended to believe Hiss innocent, did a complete turnabout. After examining 15,376 pages of FBI files that he had pried loose in a Freedom of Information suit last year and additional papers that Hiss instructed his lawyers to make available, Weinstein declared: "Hiss has been lying about his relations with Chambers for nearly 30 years . . . Others who once believed in Alger Hiss may now be persuaded that he stole the documents in question and that Whittaker Chambers told the truth...
Obscure Congressman. Hiss was well-launched on a brilliant career when scandal struck. He had been a student of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks conference that laid the foundation for the United Nations. He went to Yalta with F.D.R. in 1945, specialized in Far Eastern affairs at State, and was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when his world collapsed...
...vivant, dashing in tweeds, with wavy hair and eyes as soulful as a bandleader's. Kluger also provides a contrapuntal portrait of John W. Davis, who ran for the Democrats against Calvin Coolidge in 1924. A brilliant lawyer who served as counsel to Eugene Debs, Alger Hiss and Robert Oppenheimer, Davis was also what Kluger calls a "gentleman racist." At 80, wearing a cutaway, he appeared before the Supreme Court defending segregation by ingenious psychological and legal arguments...
Irons is involved in other activities outside the Law School besides the Hiss case. He is director of a university without walls program in Boston, part of UMass-Amherst. He teaches a course on the American socialist movement there, but plans to resign in January to become more of a full-time law student. He is also the chairman of the New England branch of the Committee to Repeal Repressive Legislation...