Word: hissing
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Nothing came of it, but still the story was not laid to rest. In 1946 Hiss was elected the $20,000-a-year president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a job held previously by only two men, Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler. The persistent whisper of Hiss's possible Communist affiliations prompted Carnegie Chairman John Foster Dulles to discuss the matter with him. But Hiss satisfied Dulles that there was nothing to it, and assumed office. A few months later, FBI agents called on Hiss. They asked him if he had ever heard of Whittaker Chambers...
...Hiss said. There the situation rested until...
Eventual Objective. In the spring of 1948 Thomas Donegan, a special assistant to the Attorney General, spread before a federal grand jury in New York an FBI report on Alger Hiss...
...Hiss was subpoenaed and questioned. He denied knowing Chambers. Before the grand jury could reach any conclusions, the House Un-American Activities Committee caught the scent and acted. The committee subpoenaed Elizabeth Bentley, graduate of Vassar and, like Chambers, an ex-Communist courier. She named Government officials who, she said, had passed secret documents to her. Then the committee subpoenaed Chambers. He generally corroborated Miss Bentley's story, testified that Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, whom she named, was at the least a dupe of the C.P., and repeated not all but a number...
Prothonotary Warbler. The House Committee probed deeper. In secret session, Chambers told them details of some of the Hisses' Washington apartments, of the Hisses' habits and hobbies. Alger Hiss was an amateur ornithologist, Chambers said, and once had told Chambers how he had seen a prothonotary warbler on the banks of the Potomac. In another session with Hiss the com mittee again pressed him. Did he still insist that he did not know Chambers? Would he recognize a man who once spent a week in his house? Hiss at length said that he might have known Chambers after...