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Comment by Less Prone on October 5, 2014 at 12:29pm

INTERVIEW WITH RALPH DE TOLEDANO

From NSA Archives,  NOTE: There was a time when they worked to protect the constitution and the American society.

Excerpt "De Toledano: I began covering the Hiss case as an editor on Newsweek and one of my fields was what they used to call the Subversive Beat and so I was covering the trial of the eleven Communists and so on. And suddenly the Hiss case broke with the testimony of Whitaker Chambers and this was on August third, 1948, in Washington, before the House and American Activities Committee and it was a big controversy. From my point of view, I was never dubious about the whole thing, it fitted in with everything I knew, everything I'd covered for many years and, but there was this, you know, who is guilty, who is telling the truth, Hiss or Chambers? And it was a big thing, of course. The press at the beginning was antagonistic to Chambers, and therefore antagonistic to Nixon, who was not known at the time, although he had a pretty good, pretty solid reputation in Washington. He was known as the hardest working Congressman, but the controversy built up and built up, until there was the confrontation of Hiss and Chambers and Hiss was so obviously guilty and so obviously lying, that it just broke the whole thing open. But then there was still doubt. The Truman administration didn't want to go after Hiss and so on, so it gave Nixon a chance to press for an indictment of Hiss and so on and as the case developed, it built Nixon up and it made him a national figure."

Comment by Less Prone on October 5, 2014 at 10:26am

Seeds of Treason, Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky

From a welter of sensational headlines, of charges and counter-charges which shook the country, two young newspapermen have woven the engrossing account of the events which brought Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss together as antagonists in a Congressional hearing room 1949.

The book was fifth on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list on July 1950.

Comment by Central Scrutinizer on October 4, 2014 at 10:57am