Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...history of the 20th century, he found a huge historical correlative, a macrocosm, to match--and to explain--his own biography and, he thought, to enlarge it with the prestige of destiny. Chambers' high school classmates voted him "Class Prophet." Many years later, in the '50s, after Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury and the cold war had hardened into a nuclear stalemate, Chambers wrote his summum, which he called Witness, meaning history's witness, a prophet looking backward...
...great litmus question of postwar politics--which of them was telling the truth?--Tanenhaus is clear. Walking again through all the familiar elements of the case (the Woodstock typewriter, the Bokhara rug, the prothonotary warbler, the famous Pumpkin Papers), Tanenhaus shows, if anyone still doubts it, that Alger Hiss was lying...
...timing, this authoritative reference book rides the espionage headlines exceedingly well. The Soviets' CIA mole Aldrich Ames is here, as is hot-off-the-press documentation gleaned from the long-secret U.S. "Venona" decrypts of Russian intelligence, which pretty much confirm the guilt of the late Alger Hiss. More than 2,000 entries deal with the history of spying, the complexities of cryptography and trade jargon (dry clean: to determine whether one is under surveillance; pianist: a clandestine radio operator; swallow: Russian term for a female agent assigned to seduce a target; raven: the male counterpart of a swallow). Beyond...
...sadly interesting motif of parallel dysfunctions ran through the Hiss family as well. Alger Hiss's father committed suicide rather savagely, slashing his throat with his own razor. Alger's sister Mary Ann also killed herself, by swallowing a bottle of caustic household cleanser...
...Alger Hiss made almost a fetish of his unflappable objectivity. Presumptuously, no doubt, one imagines that there were shadows in his mind so disturbing (his father's betrayal-suicide, a black hole of grief and abandonment and shame) that cauterized objectivity became the only salvation. I have always believed the Chambers rather than the Hiss version of events, just as I think Chambers was the more gifted and interesting of the two men; there seemed less to Hiss than first appeared and more to Chambers. But I wonder if their lives did not intersect at some subterranean level, some hidden...