Word: hissingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first thing to say about Alistair Cooke's treatment of Alger Hiss is that it is honest and carefully, almost painfully, impartial. These days that is saying a good deal. A previously published book on the Hiss trial ("Seeds of Treason" by Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky) paints so black a picture of the defendant that probably even Thomas F. Murphy, the erstwhile prosecutor, would raise an occasional eyebrow over it. Mr. Cooke, then, is accurate. Whether he is more than that is another question...
...main body of the book is a minute, detailed description of the Hiss case as it developed before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and as it was argued before two juries. In an abstracted style Mr. Cooke notes the attitudes of the House Committee members, Mr. Murphy's failure to smile, the postures of Lloyd Paul Stryker, defense attorney in the first trial. He spends pages, with liberal quotations from the record, giving the arguments on both sides of the most minute points. And he estimates the reaction of spectators to each argument...
What Mr. Cooke was apparently trying to do was to match the standard of his countrywoman, Rebecca West, in her description of the trial of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. The difficulty is that the Joyce and Hiss trials are not comparable. By a detailing of the first you learn something about the defendant, but by a detailing of the Hiss trials you learn nothing about Mr. Hiss...
Lawyer Murphy, already famed as the federal prosecutor of the Hiss case, not only stands a reassuring 6 ft. 4 in. and weighs an impressive 245 Ibs., but is equipped with a luxuriant mustache. As a prosecutor in the courtroom, he invariably conjured up the image of a Victorian guardsman. Eyeing his new photographs, it was almost impossible not to visualize him in an old-fashioned cop's helmet, or to picture him as an honest bartender, white apron, gold watch chain and all, stepping out of the gaslit past, with a bung starter in one meaty hand...
...Mayor Bill O'Dwyer's police commissioner, William P. O'Brien. Out of thin air he produced a new commissioner who pleased the jurors just fine: hard-hitting, splendidly mustachioed Thomas F. Murphy, recently resigned federal prosecutor, who had won the conviction of Alger Hiss...