Word: stryker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lawyer Lloyd Paul Stryker, who commands some of the highest fees in the business (up to $75,000 a case), was going into his big act: the summation for the defense in the perjury trial of Alger Hiss, onetime bright young man of the State Department...
...virtuoso performance. Stryker thundered and whispered. He banged the jury rail, sketched imaginary portraits, nourished a roll of microfilm until it snapped into a tangled mess. He invoked Almighty God, motherhood and the American flag. He accused the FBI of "impairing" defense witnesses. He pronounced the Government's star witness, Whittaker Chambers, a "traitor, thief, liar, perjurer, enemy of his country and a hypocrite," likened him to a coiled scorpion and a germ in a bottle of milk...
Orchestral Theme. At first Stryker talked almost into the jurors' faces until he was apparently warned off by his colleagues. They observed that the jurors were not warming up to the performance. After this Stryker stood back. There was only one witness in the whole world who said Hiss had transmitted State Department documents to Chambers in February and March of 1938, Stryker pointed out. That was Chambers. He quoted Prosecutor Tom Murphy's opening statement: "If you don't believe Chambers, then the Government has no case...
Only when Murphy began cross-examining Mrs. Hiss did her voice tighten. In contrast to Stryker's lashing attack on Esther Chambers, Murphy was a gentle, polite inquisitor. More than once Priscilla Hiss was on the edge of tears. She left the stand looking pale and tired-but with her story, like her husband's, not shaken in most of its details...
This week, Murphy, with his minutiae, Stryker, with his clients' stubborn avowal of innocence, faced the jury of two women, ten white-collar workers and businessmen. What Chambers had called a "tragedy of history" was near judgment and the bitter...