Word: hissingly
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...party's machinations drove him on. Public revelation of Chambers' past broke almost by chance: in 1948 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after investigators kept stumbling across his name in the statements of other wit nesses. Chambers testified freely that Alger Hiss had been a Communist, but said nothing at first about his past involvement in espionage. As the whirlwind began to howl over the Hiss Case, Chambers resigned from TIME in December...
...Hiss's flat denial that he had ever known Chambers began the long series of dramatic hearings and trials that could hardly have been better cast by Hollywood. Chambers, the emotional brooder, who claimed among his friends a New Orleans whore named One-Eyed Annie, v. Hiss, the cool, well-bred Harvard Law School graduate who had been secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the famed "confrontation scene" in Room 1400 of Manhattan's Commodore Hotel, Hiss peered at Chambers' teeth as though examining a horse, listened to his accuser's low-pitched voice...
...When Hiss counterattacked with a libel suit, Chambers finally introduced the charge of espionage, and supported his case with the nearly forgotten documents that he retrieved from his wife's nephew, who had stored them inside an unused dumb-waiter shaft. But even then, Chambers did not produce the microfilm-later he explained that he was afraid it might contain material that would damage other people. With characteristic melodrama, Chambers hid the film roll in a hollowed-out pumpkin in a field on his Maryland farm, surrendered it only when he became convinced that a committee counsel suspected...
Last Judgments. The first Hiss trial ended in a hung jury. On Jan. 25, 1951, the second trial sentenced Hiss to jail for five years for committing perjury when he denied passing documents to Chambers. Still protesting his innocence, Hiss was freed in November 1954, landed a job at $100 a week with a Manhattan manufacturer of women's combs, and worked his way up to a salary of $20,000 a year. Last year he took a new job as a salesman for stationery and printing firms...
Whittaker Chambers' last word on the Hiss case was printed in 1959 by the right-wing National Review, for which he worked briefly as an editor. Alger Hiss, declared Chambers, had not paid his penalty "except in the shallowest legalistic sense. There is only one possible payment, as I see it, in his case. It is to speak the truth. Hiss's defiance perpetuates and keeps a fracture in the community as a whole...