Word: hissing
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...cold-war confrontation, as unforgettable for its personal drama as for its historical significance. When, in 1951, Alger Hiss went off to prison for 44 months and Whittaker Chambers retired to a Maryland farm, the question still nagged: Who had lied? Today, in the minds of many people, doubts remain. But last week Hiss, 71, still denying Chambers' charges that he passed secret State Department documents to Soviet spies, suffered a damaging setback from a most unexpected source-the files of his own defense attorneys...
...controversy flared anew when Allen Weinstein, a respected historian from Smith College who had tended to believe Hiss innocent, did a complete turnabout. After examining 15,376 pages of FBI files that he had pried loose in a Freedom of Information suit last year and additional papers that Hiss instructed his lawyers to make available, Weinstein declared: "Hiss has been lying about his relations with Chambers for nearly 30 years . . . Others who once believed in Alger Hiss may now be persuaded that he stole the documents in question and that Whittaker Chambers told the truth...
Obscure Congressman. Hiss was well-launched on a brilliant career when scandal struck. He had been a student of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks conference that laid the foundation for the United Nations. He went to Yalta with F.D.R. in 1945, specialized in Far Eastern affairs at State, and was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when his world collapsed...
Chambers, a recanted Communist and an admitted former member of a Soviet spy ring, publicly identified Hiss in 1948 as the State Department official who had passed documents to him in 1937 and 1938. Hiss admitted knowing Chambers only after an obscure Congressman, Richard Nixon, brought them face to face at a dramatic executive session of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 (at the time, Chambers was a Senior Editor of TIME). Claiming that he had known Chambers only in 1934 and 1935 as a freelance journalist using another name, Hiss denied the charges and sued for libel...
Weinstein, who has been writing a book on the Hiss case, found that evidence given to him by defense lawyers was more damaging to Hiss than the FBI files. The professor published his conclusions in the current New York Review of Books, in which he reviews Alger Hiss: The True Story, a strong defense of Hiss by John Chabot Smith, a former reporter who also had access to the Hiss defense files. Smith's book on Hiss deals largely with conspiracy theories. He argues implausibly that Chambers was not an ex-Communist but a Walter Mitty-type dreamer...