Word: hissing
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Sitting in the jammed, floodlighted congressional committee room last summer, he made his enormous, softly worded accusation-that Alger Hiss, a former high State Department official, had also been a Communist. The nation was shocked. Hiss shocked it again. He vehemently denied every accusation and filed a $75,000 libel action against his detractor. Chambers, who thought that his own word as an ex-Communist was enough, produced no more evidence to back his charge...
Sixty-five Documents. Last month Chambers was called for deposition hearings by Hiss's attorney, William Marbury of Baltimore. He was subjected to questioning in connection with the slander suit which made him believe "that Hiss was determined to destroy me-and my wife, if possible." He went to his farm at Westminster, Md., waited for two days for his anger to cool...
...quiet, book-lined law office. There, from the package which he had brought back from Brooklyn, he handed over 65 copies of confidential State Department documents. Some were typewritten; three were memoranda in handwriting (later identified by California's Congressman Richard Nixon as that of Alger Hiss...
Lawyer Marbury and Federal Judge W. Calvin Chesnut took an appalled look, secretly turned the documents over to the Department of Justice. Suddenly, Chambers was engulfed in something far bigger and infinitely uglier than his original controversy with Alger Hiss...
When Alger Hiss challenged ,Whittaker Chambers to repeat in public his accusation that Hiss had been a Communist, Chambers took him up on it. Two nights later, on the radio, he repeated the charge, in effect challenging Hiss to sue him for libel or slander (TIME, Sept. 6). Last week Hiss took Chambers' dare, filed a $50,000 suit in Baltimore's Federal Court, charged that Chambers' statements were "untrue, false and defamatory." Said Chambers: "I welcome Mr. Hiss's daring suit . . . But I do not believe that Mr. Hiss or anybody else...