Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Secrecy & Mystery. But the effect of the Chambers-Hiss case was not confined to the sentencing of one man and the vindication of another. During the hearings, President Harry Truman charged that the whole affair was a Republican-plotted "red herring"-and his quip became a political boomerang, evidence that the Democrats were "soft on Communism." Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, insisted stubbornly that he would not "turn his back on Alger Hiss"-and came under political attack that seriously curbed his effectiveness. A young California Congressman named Richard Nixon became a national figure by prying information...
...Chambers later told his story, he soon met Communist Alger Hiss and his wife, and the two men began a friendship as close "as a man ever makes in his life." At one point the Chamberses even shared a house with the Hisses on P Street. In 1936, on party orders, Hiss began feeding classified material to Chambers. "He would bring home a briefcase containing documents from the State Department," explained Chambers. "I would then take the documents to Baltimore to be photographed, returning them to Alger Hiss late the same night or the next morning...
...Jump. In 1938 Chambers quit the party because, he explained, his Communist faith in mankind had been replaced by a religious faith in God as the only force that could reform society. Ever the careful conspirator hedging against the future, Chambers gathered together documents, memos in Hiss's handwriting and microfilm, and gave them to his wife's nephew for safekeeping. Then he and his family fled in terror from Washington and the Communist Party. In 1939, moved by the Russo-German pact that opened the floodgates of World War II, Chambers disclosed the existence...
...party's machinations drove him on. Public revelation of Chambers' past broke almost by chance: in 1948 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after investigators kept stumbling across his name in the statements of other wit nesses. Chambers testified freely that Alger Hiss had been a Communist, but said nothing at first about his past involvement in espionage. As the whirlwind began to howl over the Hiss Case, Chambers resigned from TIME in December...
...Hiss's flat denial that he had ever known Chambers began the long series of dramatic hearings and trials that could hardly have been better cast by Hollywood. Chambers, the emotional brooder, who claimed among his friends a New Orleans whore named One-Eyed Annie, v. Hiss, the cool, well-bred Harvard Law School graduate who had been secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the famed "confrontation scene" in Room 1400 of Manhattan's Commodore Hotel, Hiss peered at Chambers' teeth as though examining a horse, listened to his accuser's low-pitched voice...