Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hiss lately has been winning new sympathizers?some as a result of his son Tony's apologia, Laughing Last, and some who look on him as Richard Nixon's first victim. Ironically, Weinstein's book also discredits Nixon's performance, demonstrating that as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he actually fell apart at critical points during the investigation...
...Richard Nixon regarded the Alger Hiss case as his first major crisis, and one that he handled masterfully. As President, he frequently urged his aides to read the account of it in his autobiographical Six Crises. "Warm up to it, and it makes fascinating reading," he told H.R. Haldeman. Charles Colson claimed to have read the book 14 times. "The fact is," says Historian Allen Weinstein, "Nixon didn't behave very courageously during the Hiss case. He buckled under pressure...
...climactic point-when the 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...
...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...
...camera angle, he is shaping the facts to serve a personal point of view. The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, was scrupulously researched but managed to transform history into nonsense. Washington: Behind Closed Doors, for all its fictionalizations, presented a symbolically credible portrait of moral chaos in Nixon's White House. Both King and Ruby and Oswald claim to be based on fact -and contain obvious inaccuracies. But such things matter less than the grand design-the overall impression that the facts, both real and suspect, deliver...