Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Great Deception. Hiss winds up his literary case in precisely the same place where his legal case foundered: the charge that he was ultimately a victim of "forgery by typewriter." During the trials, the case against Hiss was nailed down by documents which included typewritten pages of secret information that Chambers said Hiss had given him. In an effort to deal with this part of the Chambers case, the defense traced Hiss's old Woodstock typewriter to its new owner and brought it into court during the trial. It turned out to be, indeed, the typewriter that had typed...
...their motion for a new trial, Hiss's attorneys in effect charged: during a brief interval in 1935-36 when Hiss had befriended Chambers, Chambers had stolen some samples of typing from Hiss's old Woodstock; at some time over the ensuing dozen years (for reasons totally unexplained) Chambers had somehow got someone to build a machine that would type exactly like the old Woodstock, had typed the sheets of espionage material, and then planted the fake machine where Hiss's own investigators would find it and bring it into court. This argument was effectively demolished...
Deploring the fact that the motion for a new trial based on this theory was denied in 1952, Hiss writes: "Like so many other events in the case, even the disposition of this motion had a political setting. The case had begun four years earlier in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Judge Goddard denied the motion for a new trial on July 22, during the sessions of the Democratic Convention that was to nominate Adlai E. Stevenson, who had been one of my character witnesses...
...Alger Hiss's book adds little that is new to a case that ran the full course of American justice...
...found what he needed. Stories of Soviet espionage abounded; the long fingers of Communism had been caught all too convincingly in Washington ; the nation, only recently run through the shattering experience of the Alger Hiss trial, was nervous. In Wheeling, W. Va. Joe McCarthy stood before a Lincoln Day audience, waved a piece of paper and cried with melodramatic certainty that "I have here in my hand" a list of Government employees known by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to be members of the Communist Party. Later listeners said McCarthy put the total of the list at 205; Joe denied...