Word: hissingly
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...crisp day in January 1950, Alger and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhattan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A federal jury was ready to pass judgment on whether he had lied in denying that he had given secret State Department documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. Intoned the forewoman: "We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second." Showing almost no emotion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out of the room, surrounded by a pack of lawyers and spectators...
...controversy over the trial has continued for nearly 30 years. Who was telling the truth? Was it the serene and unfailingly courteous Hiss, who went to Lewisburg prison for 44 months and today, at age 73, still professes innocence? Or was it his brooding, tormented accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who died on his Maryland farm in 1961? Despite a dozen books and hundreds of articles about the case, many of them little more than briefs for one side or the other, the question has not been answered conclusively. Now Allen Weinstein, a respected historian at Smith College, has turned up previously...
Weinstein carefully and persuasively documents his conclusion in an absorbing new book due to appear this spring, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case* a copy of which was made available to TIME. The historian set out convinced that Hiss was innocent. He changed his mind during five years of research into a mass of records that had never before been studied. Among them were more than 40,000 pages of FBI files, which Weinstein obtained by suing under the Freedom of Information Act. The files of Hiss's own attorneys, which Hiss opened to Weinstein, yielded other revealing facts that were...
...last meeting between them took place in March 1976 in the office of Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, 21 floors above Manhattan's East 50th Street. After a few minutes of uneasy conversation, Weinstein told Hiss: "When I began working on this book four years ago, I thought I would be able to demonstrate your innocence, but, unfortunately, I have to tell you that I cannot; that my assumption was wrong." Hiss shifted slightly, looked beyond Weinstein and said: "I'm not surprised." Later he added: "I've always known you were prejudiced against me." When the meeting ended, Weinstein told...
...interview with Bell, Weinstein said simply: "In the end, Chambers' version turned out to be truthful, and Hiss's version did not. Alger Hiss is a victim of the facts...