Word: huac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eighteen months later, Chambers (then a senior editor of TIME) told HUAC that Hiss was a Communist. Not so, said Hiss, who also insisted that he had never known Chambers. But Chambers knew so many details about Hiss's life?including the fact that Hiss, an amateur ornithologist, had once spotted a rare prothonotary warbler on the banks of the Potomac?that his adversary was finally forced to reverse himself. Then Chambers made a more serious accusation: that Hiss had passed State Department secrets to him in the late 1930s...
...House Un-American Activities Committee was seeking documentary evidence from Whittaker Chambers to revive the flagging case against Hiss-Nixon and his wife left Washington for a cruise to Panama. "I don't think he's got a damned thing," he told Robert Stripling, who was HUAC's chief investigator. Writes Weinstein: "If Chambers' bombshell fizzled, or if it exploded in Stripling's face, Nixon would be in Panama, far from the scene of carnage. He might be embarrassed but not discredited." The day Nixon left the country, Chambers turned over five rolls of film...
...next day, Nixon was confronted with another crisis: the manufacturer of three rolls reported that they had been made in 1945, meaning that Chambers' evidence was forged. By Nixon's account, he reacted coolly, almost stoically. But Stripling and other HUAC investigators told Weinstein that Nixon actually became almost hysterical, exclaiming: "Oh my God. This is the end of my political career." In abusive language, he blamed the investigators. He threatened to tell reporters that "we were sold a bill of goods." Minutes later the film manufacturer phoned to say that there had been a mistake: the film...
...inspired; Mitford describes the terror of the blacklist, and the sense that the FBI followed suspected party members everywhere. It has all been told before, of course, but rarely from such an honest, individual stance. Mitford has a way of engaging--and holding--the reader's sympathy, and the HUAC loses any legitimacy it might have held in the face of her good-humored description of its witchhunting...
...Mitford--unlike, say, Lillian Hellman--does not bother with name-calling or invective. She simply states what the C.P. did, and what it felt like to be constantly under FBI and HUAC observation; individual party members become much more sympathetic characters through her witty description of both their heroism and their flaws...