Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHENEVER I AM TOLD that if only we had the White House tapes or a Liddy confession or a rigorous impeachment trial, we could determine the truth about Watergate and sift the guilty from the innocent, I think of reports of the Alger Hiss case, 25 years ago. I remember his accusers and defenders, his typewriter, his Ford and his Petersboro trip, the apartment he subletted and the carpet he received. I think of the facts and the denials, the interpretations and the reexaminations, the two trials and the endless press speculation. It has been almost a quarter century since...
...announced recently that it was releasing its files on the Hiss case for scholarly use, so the pursuers of that fleeting mystery will soon have a new store of ammunition. Hopefully they will make better use of it than Texan professor Anthony Kubek made of a batch of dispatches from wartime China that the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to publish three years ago. That committee, which is not in the habit of collecting scholarly information on the Far East, obtained this material in 1945 in a rather spectacular fashion. After an agent of the OSS (wartime precursor...
...scampering off to make a different point. He notes that no one accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz or Whitaker Chambers "was ever convicted of spying," without bothering to add that the statue of limitation for espionage protected most of the accused. He never mentions that Alger Hiss, for example, was convicted of perjury for lying about his involvement with Chambers and that this verdict was delivered at the end of a trial which, the judge declared, centered on whether Chambers was telling the truth. Belfrage is too busy rushing on to spout another unsupported statement: "With respect...
...Belfrage's book resembles Kubek's not only in its vituperative writing style, but more importantly, in the questions it chooses to ask and the way it chooses to remain within the intellectual context of the fifties. Was Owen Lattimore the number-one Soviet espionage agent in America? Did Hiss maneuver the Yalta sell-out? Did the denial of a passport to W.E.B. DuBois uphold the principles or security of this nation? No. Granted. But...so what...
...Hiss case (1948), the fund furor and Checkers speech (1952), Ike's heart attach (1955), the Latin American tour (1958), the Kitchen Debate with Kruschev (1959), the 1960 presidential campaign...