Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Appropriately, the reporter who interviewed Weinstein for this week's story was Senior Correspondent James Bell, who covered the Hiss trials for TIME. "I had spent all of 1948 on the campaign trail with Harold Stassen, Harry Truman, Earl Warren and Tom Dewey," recalls Bell. "I was the only member of the Washington bureau who was totally ignorant of the case, and I felt none of the emotion that appeared to grip my colleagues who had covered the Hiss story on Capitol Hill. It was precisely for that reason that I was picked to report the trial." For TIME...
Though Bell maintained his evenhandedness in his files, he remembers: "I became convinced during the cross-examination of Hiss in the second trial that he had committed perjury. He quibbled incessantly on irrelevant matters and skimmed quickly over what was relevant - that, plus the typewriter, the documents and the expert analyses. My perceptions haven't changed over the years; they were reinforced by Weinstein 's book...
...crisp day in January 1950, Alger and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhattan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A federal jury was ready to pass judgment on whether he had lied in denying that he had given secret State Department documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. Intoned the forewoman: "We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second." Showing almost no emotion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out of the room, surrounded by a pack of lawyers and spectators...
...controversy over the trial has continued for nearly 30 years. Who was telling the truth? Was it the serene and unfailingly courteous Hiss, who went to Lewisburg prison for 44 months and today, at age 73, still professes innocence? Or was it his brooding, tormented accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who died on his Maryland farm in 1961? Despite a dozen books and hundreds of articles about the case, many of them little more than briefs for one side or the other, the question has not been answered conclusively. Now Allen Weinstein, a respected historian at Smith College, has turned up previously...
Weinstein carefully and persuasively documents his conclusion in an absorbing new book due to appear this spring, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case* a copy of which was made available to TIME. The historian set out convinced that Hiss was innocent. He changed his mind during five years of research into a mass of records that had never before been studied. Among them were more than 40,000 pages of FBI files, which Weinstein obtained by suing under the Freedom of Information Act. The files of Hiss's own attorneys, which Hiss opened to Weinstein, yielded other revealing facts that were...