Word: hissing
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...President's struggle to uphold his fading reputation, an exiled party girl's scheme to re-enter her native England, a down-and-out reporter's comeback attempt. By a stretch of imagination no greater than Wallace's, Dwight Eisenhower, Christine Keeler, Alger Hiss and the entire journalistic profession could conceivably sue. But why should they? Nobody could accuse Plot's characters of resembling real people...
...depth and intricacy of Zeligs' treatment of Chambers contrast sharply with the superficial generalizations in which he talks of Hiss. Where Zeligs' vision of Whittaker Chambers never crosses the line from psychological commodity to human being, his appreciation of Alger Hiss stops well short of analysis...
Zeligs draws incomplete and consequently inaccurate portraits of both men. Chambers emerges as cold, sick, and vengeful. Hiss is dry, methodical, charming and generous. While we can understand what made Hiss an appealing person we can at no time comprehend what part of Chambers' character made him even remotely tolerable, to Hiss or anyone else...
Neither picture has much bearing on the issue of Hiss's guilt. Just as an angered, homosexual Chambers could have been telling the truth, so a calm, likeable, industrious Hiss could have been lying. Zeligs gives no credence at all to his incongruous but hardly indefensible possibility. Nor does he explore a number of other, more speculative theories about the Hiss case which might have lent themselves to psychoanalytic study. Several people suspected either Hiss's wife or stepson of being involved in the passing of documents to Chambers, but Zeligs, after mentioning these hypotheses, subtly changes the subject without...
...sense, Zeligs' analysis of Chambers -- the crux of his book -- is a solid contribution to an understanding of the McCarthy Era. In trials like Hiss's, there were inevitably three categories of participants: investigators, victims and informers. Chambers, for all his obvious peculiarities, had much in common with informers as a group: he was passionate, confused and fanciful, extreme both in his early devotion to Communism and in his later conversion to anti-Communism...