Word: hissing
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...Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, China fell to the Communists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was trumpeting after subversives. The year was 1949 and the Red Scare was spreading when Alger Hiss went on trial. The confrontation between Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, his accuser, was to become a haunting symbol of the era's fears and suspicions. Conservatives tended to trust Chambers' claims that Hiss had passed secrets to the Soviets; many liberals believed that the poised State Department official with the splendid record of service had been wrongfully and villainously attacked...
...this week's Nation section, TIME re-examines the verdict of guilty reached against Hiss nearly three decades ago. The occasion: the coming publication of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, a book by Historian Allen Weinstein that skillfully and diligently re-creates the struggle between the two contrasting men and brings revealing new insights and documentation to the case...
Appropriately, the reporter who interviewed Weinstein for this week's story was Senior Correspondent James Bell, who covered the Hiss trials for TIME. "I had spent all of 1948 on the campaign trail with Harold Stassen, Harry Truman, Earl Warren and Tom Dewey," recalls Bell. "I was the only member of the Washington bureau who was totally ignorant of the case, and I felt none of the emotion that appeared to grip my colleagues who had covered the Hiss story on Capitol Hill. It was precisely for that reason that I was picked to report the trial." For TIME...
Though Bell maintained his evenhandedness in his files, he remembers: "I became convinced during the cross-examination of Hiss in the second trial that he had committed perjury. He quibbled incessantly on irrelevant matters and skimmed quickly over what was relevant - that, plus the typewriter, the documents and the expert analyses. My perceptions haven't changed over the years; they were reinforced by Weinstein 's book...
Short Eyes Shot at "the Tombs" house of detention in New York City, this film offers a brutally honest slice of prison life, and it is completely devoid of the mawkish hand wringing that has characterized most other American jailhouse movies. There are no bad-guy guards to hiss at, no latter-day Birdmen of Alcatraz to root for. Writer Miguel Pinero, who served five years at Sing Sing for armed robbery and is currently under indictment for other crimes, asks the audience to see his characters for exactly what they...