Word: weinstein
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...Weinstein: No, I have not--although I have given this question probably a more extended and more dispassionate scrutiny than anyone I can think of who has ever researched the case. I think there are conspiratorial dimensions to the case, rather surprising ones, which I'd rather not talk about now, but which will come out very soon in my book...
...Weinstein: What I have after three years of research is far more persuasive evidence to me that Hiss passed the documents, that Hiss knew Chambers extremely well, and a much more complex sense of the spectrum along which the loyalties of individuals to a radical faith might have led. I don't think it is a necessary part of the argument to require that Alger Hiss was, in that marvelous phrase of the 50s, a "card-carrying Communist." Whether or not Alger Hiss was indeed a member of the Communist Party, for all intents and purposes he behaved as either...
...Weinstein: For a historian it presents a problem I have no easy solution to--I know if I were a reader who had not done any work on the case and was told that Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover said one thing and Alger Hiss, or Defendant X, said another, I think instinctively perhaps my own attitude would be to be very skeptical about the accusations against Defendant X until I had proof to the contrary. For Mr. Nixon Alger Hiss remained a vital symbol throughout his public career. I think he probably dreamed about the Hiss case...
...Weinstein: I believe Mr. Hiss was charged with perjury and I believe perjury involves lying. If I had said Mr. Hiss was rightfully convicted of perjury perhaps I suspect a good deal of the emotional force and reaction to my article would have been blunted...
...Weinstein: Certainly. The perjury charge was quite clearly an appropriate legal fiction...