Alger Hiss: The True Story
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
One of the most sensational espionage cases of the twentieth century is laid bare in John Chabot Smith's meticulously researched account of Alger Hiss — the Harvard-educated State Department official whose conviction for perjury in 1950 sent shockwaves through American political life and defined the era of McCarthyite paranoia. Alger Hiss: The True Story chronicles what the House Un-American Activities Committee, two trial juries, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the American public were never fully told about the infamous Whittaker Chambers pumpkin papers, constructing a forensic and compelling argument that the official narrative surrounding one of America's most controversial Cold War figures was deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. Smith, a seasoned journalist who covered the Hiss trials firsthand, writes with the authority of a witness and the rigour of a scholar, presenting a counter-narrative that challenges decades of received wisdom about guilt, loyalty, and political persecution. The book illuminates how Cold War hysteria warped the machinery of American justice, and raises urgent, still-unanswered questions about the true nature of the evidence that destroyed a man's life — leaving the reader to wonder whether the full truth has ever really been told.
Author: John Chabot Smith
Format: Hardback
Published: 1976, Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Genre: American history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
One of the most sensational espionage cases of the twentieth century is laid bare in John Chabot Smith's meticulously researched account of Alger Hiss — the Harvard-educated State Department official whose conviction for perjury in 1950 sent shockwaves through American political life and defined the era of McCarthyite paranoia. Alger Hiss: The True Story chronicles what the House Un-American Activities Committee, two trial juries, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the American public were never fully told about the infamous Whittaker Chambers pumpkin papers, constructing a forensic and compelling argument that the official narrative surrounding one of America's most controversial Cold War figures was deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. Smith, a seasoned journalist who covered the Hiss trials firsthand, writes with the authority of a witness and the rigour of a scholar, presenting a counter-narrative that challenges decades of received wisdom about guilt, loyalty, and political persecution. The book illuminates how Cold War hysteria warped the machinery of American justice, and raises urgent, still-unanswered questions about the true nature of the evidence that destroyed a man's life — leaving the reader to wonder whether the full truth has ever really been told.