Word: hissing
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Irony -- for which he has perfect pitch -- is his weapon of choice: "Alger Hiss always made his debut escorted by the Gods: He came to Washington with a reference from Felix Frankfurter and he went to Lewisburg ((prison)) with a reference to Frank Costello." In the sentence that opens an essay about one of his favorite subjects, the tragedy (or comedy) of the self-deluded rebel, Kempton dryly sums up another progressive hero: "Paul Robeson's was a career whose rise and fall were both tethered to his identity as a man of conspicuous color." Kempton's asperity...
...columnist of the left, Kempton is anything but doctrinaire. He sympathizes as easily with Richard Nixon during his troubles over the buying of a Manhattan co-op as he excoriates Alger Hiss for failing to offer State Department protection to an American victim of Stalin. His prescience is often uncanny. Writing of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California in 1968, he could have been summing up Reagan's presidency 20 years later: "For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself...
...experts on communist influence in labor unions. This led him to a Maryknoll priest whose report on the subject included the fact that a TIME senior editor named Whittaker Chambers had told the FBI that he had belonged to a communist cell in Washington, and that it included Alger Hiss. It seemed incredible. A lawyer who had once clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hiss had served as a State Department adviser at the Yalta conference, had helped organize the United Nations and was being touted as perhaps its first Secretary-General...
...Hiss, then president of the Carnegie Endowment, denied ever having met anyone named Whittaker Chambers. Nixon had both men summoned before the committee to confront each other. Hiss finally admitted knowing Chambers slightly under a different name. Chambers insisted that they had been "close friends . . . caught in a tragedy of history." But nothing could be proved until Chambers produced the "pumpkin papers," microfilms of State Department documents that he said Hiss had given him for transmission to Moscow. Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, served 44 months in prison and has spent the rest of his long life...
...Hiss case made Nixon a national figure and launched him into a run for the Senate in 1950 against Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress who had served six years in the House as an ardent New Dealer. Since red hunting was a national mania in these Korean War days, Douglas foolishly tried to accuse Nixon of being soft on communism, and invented the name that haunted him for the rest of his life: Tricky Dick. But when it came to mudslinging, she was up against a champion. He called her the "pink lady" and declared that she was "pink...