Word: hissing
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...House Committee on Un-American Activities into a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm. From inside a hollowed-out pumpkin he produced several rolls of microfilm: copies of secret Government documents that, he claimed, had been passed to him in the 1930s by a State Department official named Alger Hiss, when both men were members of a Soviet espionage ring...
Such were the bizarre twists and turns of the notorious Hiss-Chambers case. In the decades since the case dominated the headlines, the facts have all but disappeared under the symbolic baggage piled on them. For liberals, the dapper, Harvard-educated Hiss-who left the State Department in 1947 and became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace-epitomized the best and brightest of Roosevelt's New Dealers. The accusations against him seemed an indictment of a whole political era, as well as a harbinger of McCarthyite anti-Red hysteria. For conservatives (among them President Reagan, who awarded...
...American Playhouse series, clears away much of that baggage and concentrates instead on one of the most fascinating political mystery stories of the century. The drama, with script by British Playwright Hugh Whitemore, begins on Aug. 3, 1948, the day that Chambers electrified a HUAC hearing by naming Hiss as a Communist. Chambers by then had been out of the Communist Party for ten years, and was working as a senior editor for TIME. The climax is set in a courtroom almost 18 months later, when Hiss-who denied all charges and has continued to do so to this...
...Hiss, Edward Herrmann (who played F.D.R. in Eleanor and Franklin) is the quintessence of Ivy League aplomb, but with a hint of arrogance and evasiveness. John Harkins, a close physical match for Chambers, is eerily effective as the tormented ex-Communist turned passionate antiCommunist. As Nixon, who built his political career on his role in the Hiss case, Peter Riegert (who starred in the film Local Hero) maintains a steady scowl but avoids facile parody...
...show's most serious flaw is the congenital problem of many docudramas dealing with controversial events: a dogged inscrutability. Remaining neutral on the issue of Hiss's guilt, the show presents a mass of incidents-some important, some irrelevant, some canceling others out-that are engrossing from moment to moment. But the end result is a sort of dramatic entropy that can be frustrating...