Word: hissingly
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...holiday party from the Disney studios. As usual, the villains take the day. Prince John, the regent, is a craven brat, a lion whose crown keeps falling down over his floppy ears and who, in times of stress, sucks his thumb and whimpers for his mother. His consort, Sir Hiss, is a snake in charge of the royal treasury and of soothing the prince...
Terry-Thomas supplies the voice for Sir Hiss, who is appropriately gap-toothed, much to the advantage of his forever-flickering tongue. Peter Ustinov makes a pleasingly florid prince, his voice full of empty threat and tenuous regality...
...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 statute 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. No, Belfrage is too busy rushing on to spout another unsupported statement: "With...
...writing style, but more importantly, in the questions it chooses to ask and not ask. By writing a narrative of the American purge trials, Belfrage has opted to remain within the intellectual context of the fifties. Was Owen Lattimore the number one Soviet espionage agent in America? Did Alger 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 fifteen 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...