Word: hissing
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This week Alger Hiss will have his chance to sit in the witness chair...
Surprise Witness. Murphy politely refused the bait-he wanted to impress the jury, through sheer boredom if necessary, of the size and the import of the material which Chambers said he had received from Hiss, the onetime State Department bright young man, for transmission to Soviet Russia. He kept at his slow task for two days, while Stryker paced the corridor outside, clutching a chewed cigar and frowning with impatience...
Then Murphy brought on Amos C. Feehan, an FBI expert who testified that the great bulk of these exhibits had been copied on Hiss's typewriter. Feehan pointed professorially to enlargements of the documents, pointed out the "upthrust terminating stroke of the lower-case V " and other peculiarities as proof of his finding. It was effective evidence and it was also dull. But as the weekend drew near Murphy called a witness who restored the electric atmosphere in which the trial had begun...
...diction grew richer as he began examining documents handed him by Murphy (a move which Murphy evidently made to prevent any implication that Wadleigh, not Hiss, might have stolen the pumpkin papers from the State Department files). The witness said he had never seen them before. Of one, he said: -'. . . it is a sufficiently rich fountain . . . an unusually rich fountain that I would have been interested in had I seen...
...lose his temper once, and announcing twice for the jury's benefit that he, himself (unlike Wadleigh), had never gone to Oxford, he hardly seemed to warm up. He attempted unsuccessfully to get Wadleigh to say he had stolen documents from desks other than his own (including Hiss's) and turned the witness loose. At week's end the Government rested its case...