Word: hissing
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...Department of Justice, under Attorney General Tom Clark, there was strong sentiment for the indictment of Chambers; two Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court-Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed-testified as character witnesses for Defendant Hiss at the first trial. And many of the leading lights of the Washington press corps made no secret of their liking for Hiss (a longstanding news source at the State Department) and their dislike of phlegmatic, pipe-smoking ex-Communist Chambers...
...Great Deception. Hiss winds up his literary case in precisely the same place where his legal case foundered: the charge that he was ultimately a victim of "forgery by typewriter." During the trials, the case against Hiss was nailed down by documents which included typewritten pages of secret information that Chambers said Hiss had given him. In an effort to deal with this part of the Chambers case, the defense traced Hiss's old Woodstock typewriter to its new owner and brought it into court during the trial. It turned out to be, indeed, the typewriter that had typed...
...their motion for a new trial, Hiss's attorneys in effect charged: during a brief interval in 1935-36 when Hiss had befriended Chambers, Chambers had stolen some samples of typing from Hiss's old Woodstock; at some time over the ensuing dozen years (for reasons totally unexplained) Chambers had somehow got someone to build a machine that would type exactly like the old Woodstock, had typed the sheets of espionage material, and then planted the fake machine where Hiss's own investigators would find it and bring it into court. This argument was effectively demolished...
Deploring the fact that the motion for a new trial based on this theory was denied in 1952, Hiss writes: "Like so many other events in the case, even the disposition of this motion had a political setting. The case had begun four years earlier in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Judge Goddard denied the motion for a new trial on July 22, during the sessions of the Democratic Convention that was to nominate Adlai E. Stevenson, who had been one of my character witnesses...
...Alger Hiss's book adds little that is new to a case that ran the full course of American justice...