Word: hissingly
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...Washington for generations, and the Nixon Administration uses them too. The President knows the drill well. Martin Hayden, who as a correspondent met Nixon in 1949, recalls that the young Congressman was a generous, reliable ?and anonymous?source for a few reporters covering the investigation of Alger Hiss...
...announced recently that it was releasing its files on the Hiss case for scholarly use, so the pursuers of that fleeting mystery will soon have a new store of ammunition. Hopefully they will make better use of it than Texan professor Anthony Kubek made of a batch of dispatches from wartime China that the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to publish three years ago. That committee, which is not in the habit of collecting scholarly information on the Far East, obtained this material in 1945 in a rather spectacular fashion. After an agent of the OSS (wartime precursor...
...scampering off to make a different point. He notes that no one accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz or Whitaker Chambers "was ever convicted of spying," without bothering to add that the statue of limitation for espionage protected most of the accused. He never mentions that Alger Hiss, for example, was convicted of perjury for lying about his involvement with Chambers and that this verdict was delivered at the end of a trial which, the judge declared, centered on whether Chambers was telling the truth. Belfrage is too busy rushing on to spout another unsupported statement: "With respect...
...Belfrage's book resembles Kubek's not only in its vituperative writing style, but more importantly, in the questions it chooses to ask and the way it chooses to remain within the intellectual context of the fifties. Was Owen Lattimore the number-one Soviet espionage agent in America? Did Hiss maneuver the Yalta sell-out? Did the denial of a passport to W.E.B. DuBois uphold the principles or security of this nation? No. Granted. But...so what...
PERHAPS WE STILL can't answer the important questions, perhaps we will never be able to answer them. They are nonetheless worth asking. It doesn't matter to history whether Alger Hiss actually passed those documents. What matters is that people believed that he could have; that, in fact, they were right--he' could have; and the unanswered question is why. And why, at his trial 15 years later, trying to explain or at least to understand what had happened to the world, Hiss could say only, "It was quite a different atmosphere in Washington then than today...