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Pumpkin center pieces12/28/2023 ![]() ![]() One roll was blank and the other two were almost illegible. Hiss told the press that no one had ever had a chance to examine three of the five microfilms until “the Government turned them over to me last summer under the Freedom of Information Act.” Hiss held it to answer Professor Weinstein’s article, an attack on Hiss that made page 1 headlines. I live in Washington and was not at Alger Hiss’s news conference of March 18 in New York. It now appears that there were surprises of quite another sort to be found on two of those five rolls of microfilm had they been made available at the time. Nixon, then a leading member of the committee, hailed the microfilms, with a hyperbole to which the whole country was to grow familiar, as “conclusive” proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation’s history. He did so first at a pre-trial deposition hearing in Baltimore and then, more dramatically, two weeks later from the pumpkin. Hiss denied it and filed a $75,000 slander suit against Chambers.Ĭhambers produced documents he claimed had been turned over to him by Hiss. Chambers had accused Hiss, a State Department official, before the committee of having been a member of the Communist “apparatus” in Washington. This was the bombshell of the famous Hiss case. Chambers claimed he had obtained them as a Soviet espionage agent. These were said to contain copies of secret State War and Navy Department documents. From it he extracted five rolls of microfilm. Chambers, an ex-Communist, led House Un-American Activities Committee investigators across his Maryland farm to a hollow pumpkin. They turned up in a masterly bit of choreography one dark December night in 1948. The Pumpkin Papers, as everyone knows, were the centerpiece and symbol of the postwar witch hunt. Firmly pulled, it might unravel the melodramatic web woven a quarter century ago around the notorious Pumpkin Papers. That document has been overlooked, though it represents a tantalizing loose thread. Alongside the Weinstein article, it printed the text of Hiss’s reply, and a photostat of a document to which Hiss tried to call public attention. But The Star did what few if any other papers have done. Allen Weinstein’s attack on Alger Hiss in The New York Review of Books, in which Weinstein accused Hiss of lying about his relations with Whittaker Chambers. On March 28, The Washington Star reprinted Prof. But first I would like to explain how I came across it. WASHINGTON – I have a new scrap of evidence to contribute to the renewed controversy over the Hiss case. Stone (The New York Times, April 1, 1976) Stone “The ‘Flimflam’ in the Pumpkin Papers”īy I. ![]()
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