Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Published this week, Alger Hiss's In the Court of Public Opinion (Knopf; $5) turns out to be a heavily legalistic, dully written analysis of the Hiss case; lawyers will instantly recognize it as a rewrite of Hiss's motion for a new trial, which the courts denied. Hiss stoutly maintains his innocence of the charge that he committed perjury when he denied giving State Department secrets to Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers. His defense is essentially the same one that his lawyers used in his 1949 and 1950 trials. Author Alger Hiss seems remarkably devoid of personal outrage...
...Conspiring Era. As Hiss tells it, the case against him was a kind of conspiracy that began with one man and extended to the whole era. The man was Chambers-admitted longtime Communist who became a crusading anti-Communist (and senior editor of TIME), and denounced Hiss during the tumultuous hearings of the House Committee on un-American Activities in 1948. Chambers' performance, Hiss says, was a deliberate effort to frame an innocent man he had known only briefly and casually a dozen years before-for reasons that Hiss is still at a loss to explain. The House Committee...
Some jurors in his first trial, where the jury deadlocked 8-4 for conviction, dared to "go beyond the record and be their own witnesses" (by acting as their own experts on typewritten documents), Hiss writes. Some of the jurors in his second trial, at which he was convicted, were against him from the start and "lobbied" others over to their side. U.S. District Judge Henry W. Goddard, who presided at his second trial, was partial to the prosecution; the Appeals Court judge (Harrie B. Chase) who wrote the opinion denying his appeal failed to make a careful study...
...Friendly Climate. Lawyer Hiss wildly overstates the climate against him. The fact was that much of official Washington was solidly and politically on the side of Democrat Hiss at the time that Chambers challenged him. President Harry Truman called the hearings before the Republican-controlled House Committee a "red herring"; Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared he would "not turn my back on Alger Hiss...
...Department of Justice, under Attorney General Tom Clark, there was strong sentiment for the indictment of Chambers; two Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court-Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed-testified as character witnesses for Defendant Hiss at the first trial. And many of the leading lights of the Washington press corps made no secret of their liking for Hiss (a longstanding news source at the State Department) and their dislike of phlegmatic, pipe-smoking ex-Communist Chambers...