Word: hiss
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Before his first term was out, he had become a national figure for his role in the investigation of the attractive, patrician Alger Hiss as a former Communist courier. The House Un-American Activities Committee was ready to abandon its probe, but Nixon persevered until a plainly damaging case had been made against Hiss, largely on the witness of Whittaker Chambers, a brilliant and enigmatic writer and editor who, before he joined TIME in 1939, had been a Communist for 15 years...
...nation and earned Nixon the enduring enmity of large segments of the U.S. intelligentsia. Emotional revisionists now argue that if Nixon lied in the Watergate affair, his role in the Hiss case was suspect as well. There is no evidence to support that logic. While the country undoubtedly overreacted to the Communist threat, Nixon cannot be faulted for his persistence in the Hiss case, which he pursued with the same investigative doggedness that his own accusers were to demonstrate in Watergate. Later, Nixon wrote in his autobiographical Six Crises that what had hurt Hiss most was not what...
...anxious to [unintelligible] sign that stuff [unintelligible] I suppose most of our staff [unintelligible] but that Six Crises is a damned good book, and the [unintelligible] story reads like a novel--the Hiss case--Caracas was fascinating. The campaign of course for anybody in politics should be a must because it had a lot in there of how politicians are like. [Unintelligible] elections, and how you do things. [Unintelligible] as of that time. I think part of the problem as an example, for example, I'm just thinking--research people something they really missed [unintelligible] Burns...
...Washington for generations, and the Nixon Administration uses them too. The President knows the drill well. Martin Hayden, who as a correspondent met Nixon in 1949, recalls that the young Congressman was a generous, reliable ?and anonymous?source for a few reporters covering the investigation of Alger Hiss...
PERHAPS WE STILL can't answer the important questions, perhaps we will never be able to answer them. They are nonetheless worth asking. It doesn't matter to history whether Alger Hiss actually passed those documents. What matters is that people believed that he could have; that, in fact, they were right--he' could have; and the unanswered question is why. And why, at his trial 15 years later, trying to explain or at least to understand what had happened to the world, Hiss could say only, "It was quite a different atmosphere in Washington then than today...