Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hair neatly trimmed; there is a casual elegance about his dress. But the dominant features are the eyes: alert, mischievous, wary, playful, like those of an actor savoring the potential of a new role, a fresh persona. Despite the thousands of words written by and about him, Alger Hiss, who died last week at 92, remains one of the most tantalizing figures of the cold war. His 1949 trial and retrial in a Soviet-espionage case personified the explosive political and class conflicts of the time, serving as the first morality play of the red-baiting era. And the case...
...dwindling band of zealous believers, Hiss was one of the first victims of anticommunist hysteria, an American Dreyfus. Yet the weight of historical evidence indicates that Hiss was what he steadfastly denied ever being: a member of the communist underground and a Soviet spy. What made his case so intriguing was that his profile seemed at odds with the stereotypical idea of a grubby turncoat. His patrician grace had somehow survived a family life streaked with tragedy. His father, a wholesale grocer, committed suicide when Alger was two; a sister, Mary, also killed herself. Yet Hiss's advancement in life...
...those who sought them, there were signs that Hiss was more than just a bright young bureaucrat. While working by day on Wall Street, he was active by night in the International Juridical Association, an alleged communist-front lawyers' organization. As early as 1942, the FBI received warnings that Hiss was probably a Soviet agent. The stories became so persistent that late in 1946 officials at State quietly arranged for him to assume the largely ceremonial presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss was serving as head of the Endowment on Aug. 3, 1948, when Whittaker Chambers...
...story of the time--a strange, defining piece of cold war Kabuki--has remained a mystery intact. The matter of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, and which of them was telling the truth, became a litmus test for several generations, a marker not only of political sympathies but also of intellectual class and sensibility. Hiss and Chambers were the cold war's Mozart and Salieri, and their mysteries were multilayered. If you went below the murk of espionage and infiltration and double lives--a subject fascinating in itself--you penetrated to the deeper strangeness of the two men's psychologies...
...physical type, and in superficialities of temperament, Hiss and Chambers could not have been more different. Hiss on first inspection looked like the Fred Astaire of the mandarin left, lithe and well bred, the Establishment's own darling prothonotary warbler. Chambers, sad-sack Dostoyevskian pudge, more Slavic than American in mind, with terrible teeth and an air of doom, seemed to inhabit a flinching shadow world. He dodged through the '30s packing a revolver and hugging the walls of dark corridors. A paranoid smudge, the mandarins thought, whose amorphous bulk concealed a damaged child given to imagining grandiose conspiracies...