Word: huac
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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...
...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...
...House Unamerican Activities Committee was an inexcusable aberration (rather than a legitimate response to the Communist threat) with a long series of attacks on Hellman's own conduct during the '50s. In a long and turgid footnote, Trilling implies over and over that Hellman was a communist, and that HUAC was therefore completely justified in its witchhunt. The logic is shaky, at best...