Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Alger Hiss' most personal comments appear in four short paragraphs at the end of his book. Summing up, Hiss writes...
Unfortunately for the layman, this is one of the few times in the book that Hiss expresses any of his inner thoughts. For the most part, In the Court of Public Opinion is another legal defense of Alger Hiss, witness and then defendent. It is as disappointing to those liberals who expected Hiss to write passionately about his generation of "bright young men," as it is to those who believed that Hiss would finally break down and admit that Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth after all. Hiss never swerves from his past testimony, denying all of Chambers' assertions, including...
...book begins with his first appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on April 5, 1948, and closes with the Supreme Court's refusal to review the case on April 27, 1953, and in between there are Hiss' interpretations of the hearings, trials, and fruitless appeals. He selects the testimony he discusses with great care to prove to the world that Whittaker Chambers lied about Alger Hiss. He blames his jail term on a succession of misfortues--a bad political climate. an irresponsible grand jury; an inefficient second judge (Henry W. Goddard); an unscrupulous prosecutor (Thomas Murphy...
Although almost all of Hiss' views have been printed at length in Alistair Cooke's A Generation on Trial, he does expound his lawyers' amazing thesis about the now-famous Woodstock typewriter Number 230099. Hiss devotes considerable space to discussing this typewriter, introduced at both trials by Hiss' lawyers as the machine on which the "Baltimore Documents," a series of sections from State Department papers, were typed. Chambers said that Hiss' wife had typed the documents on that machine, and that Hiss had given the papers to him. Hiss denied this, and this led to one of the perjury counts...
...Hiss' lawyers' thesis is that the Number 230099 was a fake, "a deliberately fabricated job . . . planted on the defense." Through a succession of analyses by document experts, metallurgists, and typewriter officials, Hiss' lawyers proposed that Number 230099 is actually an old Woodstock--too old to have been Hiss'--with a set of new typefaces similar in design to those on Hiss' model. The defense asserted that Chambers made this imitation typewriter between August and November of 1948, typed out these documents on them, and then planted the typewriter where the defense would find it later...