aith in the System: A Brief for Alger Hiss
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
The pre-ballet world is scrupulously presented by Mabel Dolmetsch in two volumes The Dances of Spain and Italy From 1400 to 1600 ($19.50, 174 pp.) and Dances of England and France 1450 to 1600...
...This is a classic "rags to riches" show business story, engaging because of its simplicity and genuineness...
...Its world is admittedly a small and very private one...
...Unlike Best Boy, whose power derives from the direct, spontaneous emotions people show in it, The Trials of Alger Hiss contains almost no visible emotion...
...Kfing rejects the notion that all individual verses of the New Testament are without theological error, but he asserts that shining through all these errors is the initial witness to the earthly Jesus expressed in the totality of the New Testament which constitutes the basic and infallible Gospel...
...Denis's husband) who was also one of those pioneers shows that world from the inside with his exuberant autobiography One Thousand and One Night Stands ($6.95, paper, 288 pp...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...One such item was a deposition in which Chambers admitted 9 May 1980:275 has the best judicial system in the world...
...In both the newsreel footage and the contemporary interviews, Hiss himself is calm, articulate, dispassionate...
...Read together, they furnish a lively and succinct comprehension of the controversial K/ing...
...Then during Hiss's trials the F.B.I...
...Beyond such declara- tions, though, the unshakability of Hiss's faith is implicit in the whole tone of this movie and in the very demeanor of the man who is its subject...
...These scripture experts can strip away from the New Testament text the post-resurrection layers of interpretation and get back to the solid rock of the real Jesus as he was seen by the original witnesses...
...is revealed to have had an especially villainous role in this conspiracy...
...As examples of fundamental truths which go to make up the Gospel Kting indicates (1) that in Jesus is found God's ultimate and decisive call, his definitive truth about himself...
...Before the credits are even over, John Lowenthal's The Trials of Alger Hiss gives us some evidence of just how rough it can be...
...Not their reasoning but their charism guarantees that everything hierarchical authorities say is trustworthy...
...Charter...
...Most of them are Hiss's old enemies, so we are a bit surprised and puzzled to notice that among their names that of Priscilla Hiss appears...
...2) studies and reactions to K/ing's major books by friendly critics and by K/ing himself...
...This was a sewer we were working in," HUAC's own chief investigator, Robert Stripling, tells Lowenthal, and he's clearly not refer- ring to the people on the witness's side'of the committee tables...
...the second indicates the specific views on infallibility which emerge from this context...
...This is a very powerful testimonial, one which virtually overrides all the evidence to the contrary in the film...
...If the verdict of acquittal, or at least of a temporary stay, is surprising to us, that's because we never anticipated that anyone as effective as Hiss himself would serve as the system's staunch defender, its key character witness...
...In the lrwst place, as Lowenthal well knows, no one will go to this movie who isn't already con- vineed of Hiss's innocence...
...Like Philly Wohl, Alger Hiss compels us to admit that the only thing which ever makes a system credible anyway is the humanity of the people in it, the movement of the spirit in the rock...
...He is even this way when he admits that one of the effects of his trials was to destroy his marriage...
...Books: GOSPEL, INFALLIBILITY, & KiiNG T HESE two works complement one another...
...But Chambers's accusations put an end to all that...
...To understand Kfing's own view on infallibility and the view he opposes is to understand the basic presupposition that undergirds his work and the focus of his battle with church authorities...
...Peter Chirico New Testament...
...The first, edited by two of Kfing's assistants, contains (1) a chronology of K/ing's life, work and times...
...Hiss is of course the man whom Whittaker Chambers named as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s...
...It is demonstrated by the bare fact that thirty years after the original injustice was done to him, this man who is now in his seventies patiently continues to persist with his appeals, and fully expects that the same system which abused him will also exonerate him in the end...
...recounts their disappointments and successes...
...Despite the title Lowenthal has given his film, it is not Alger Hiss who is on trial...
...THE CHURCR--NAINTAINED IN TRUTH Hans Kiing SesbuFy, $6.95, 78 pp...
...Hence, whenever the 9 May 1980:277...
...This means that, whenever the pope or the assembled bishops around the pope wish and decide to be infallible, the Holy Spirit automatically intervenes to preserve their subsequent doctriMl pronouncement from error...
...DON McDONAGH Screen |J I I I I FAITH IN THE SYSTEM A BRIEF FOR ALGER HISS I N THE previous issue I was discussing Ira Wohl's Best Boy, which is about the life of Wohl's 52-year-old cousin Philly who is mentally retarded...
...Ted Shawn (St...
...Drawing on meticulous research in old sources she makes the basse dance, bransle, gailliard, and pavan live with lively descriptions and accompanying musical quotations...
...3) a revealing 55-page interview of K/ing on his personal and theological evolution up to 1978...
...The Trials of Alger Hiss documents a case in which the system hasn't worked at all...
...and Merle Armitage's Martha Graham: the Early Years ($19.50, cloth, $5.95, paper, 133 pp...
...By going back and interviewing around a dozen of file principals involved in Hiss's trials, Lowenthal painstakingly builds a case showing howHiss was framed...
...It is a large and very public world, and a pretty rough one...
...As we might expect, the F.B.I...
...Lowenthal's nearly three-hour film is in effect a brief for the defense...
...BestBoy is an appealing film because it shows what a decent place the world can be sometimes...
...For Kfing the starting point of all theology and the criterion against which all theologizing must be judged is the Gospel...
...In the ballroom no couple has been more celebrated than Irene and Vernon Castle and her My Husband ($19,50, 275 pp...
...Yet it manages to give us just the same kind of lift...
...They loved one another, they danced beautifully, and they believed in each other's talent...
...He had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, been appointed to a post at the policy-making level in the New Deal, accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta, and helped draft the U.N...
...No, it's not Hiss who's on trial, but the American system...
...He thinks that its acceptance by the church has increasingly fostered the notion that any teaching by ecclesiastical authorities, including obviously non-infallible teaching, must be believed because it emanates from persons endowed with a special charism of truth...
...The pre-ballet world is scrupulously presented by Mabel Dolmetsch in two volumes The Dances of Spain and Italy From 1400 to 1600 ($19.50, 174 pp...
...The first work furnishes the general context within which Ktng theologizes...
...In short, for Ktng the only ultimate and infallibly known criterion for all theologizing is the real Jesus of the original eyewitnesses as this Jesus is determined by modern scripture scholars using the historical-critical method...
...suppressed, or allowed to be suppressed, information it had which might have cleared Hiss...
...4) a bibliography of K/ing' s productions...
...and Dances of England and France 1450 to 1600 ($19.50, 163 pp...
...This time I want to talk about another recent documentary whose subject is also the life of just one man, though a man about as different from Philly Wohl as is imaginable: Alger Hiss...
...The second, by Kfing himself, repeats and clarifies his views on infallibility...
...Denis, and Grete Wiesenthal of the emerging Central European school during the heat of their revolutionary activity...
...Now we understand why her name is on that list of people who wouldn't be interviewed...
...And besides, even Nixon would have a hard time today keeping a straight face while accusing Hiss of being a Communist or perjurer or anything else...
...The Gospel i~ the basic meaning imbedded in the earthly life and preaching of Jesus and expressed in the BANS KONm: HIS WORK AND BIS WAY Hermann HiirJng stud Ksrl-Josef Knschel, editors Doubleday, $4.50, 254 pp...
...Along with those credits Lowenthal includes a list of people who refused to be interviewed for this film...
...More than that, we understand, if only dimly, that behind the public world in which this film is set there has been a private one just as painful and poignant as that in which Philty Wohl lives...
...As I said in my last column, Best Boy is a film that gives us a lift because it documents a case in which the system--all the systems, in fact--worked...
...John Cronin so that Cronin could pass it on to Nixon for use in tripping up Hiss during his Congressional testimony...
...According to this view, these authorities have the power to call effectively upon the Holy Spirit to invest them with what K/ing calls a priori infallibility...
...is a landmark collection of essays that has yet to be bettered on that artist's creative greatness...
...His wife was by nature, he explains, a shy, private person who simply couldn't endure the public scrutiny and ridicule...
...Up until that time, Hiss had had the sort of career in govern- ment service which is usually described as "brilliant...
...Modem dance pioneers are celebrated through the eyes of sympathetic observers like Caroline and Charles H. Caffin in Dancing and Dancers of Today ($25, 301 pp...
...Chambers is the only person involved who se~ms to have displayed his emotions, which, because they are his, are theatrical and highly suspect...
...K/ing strongly objects to this view of a priori infallibility...
...They were men more than willing to ruin Hiss's life, waste his talents, and exploit the worst instincts and fears of the Ameri- can people in order to further their own careers...
...The view opposed by K/ing and which he has long traced back to Vatican I is this: the ultimate infallible criterion of Christian truth is the definitive teaching of church authorities...
...From the time that a young California congressman named Richard Nixon went after Hiss in the hearings until an equally zealous pro- secutor, Thomas Murphy, did so during the trials, Hiss was the victim of unscrupulous, desperately ambitious men...
...Further, K/ing affirms that this Gospel can be known not by biblical fundamentalists but by those who employ "an historical-critical interpretation at the highest level...
...At the second of these Hiss was convicted and given a five-year prison sentence...
...and (2) that the church as the community of believers in Jesus Christ is indestructible...
...Yet all the people in it from Philly's parents to his teachers to cousin Ira himself are so protective of Philly that we can't help being generally encouraged about things...
...Irene survived her husband by decades of retirement after he was killed instructing student flyers during World War I. The series promises to continue making these important documents available with an admirable catholicity of taste and should prove to be a boon both for the general reader and the more specialized dance scholar and historian...
...They ultimately led beyond the Congressional hearings to two trials for perjury in the federal courts...
...Maybe The Trials of Alger Hiss is not so different from Best Boy after all...
...The world in which Alger Hiss has spent his life is, to say the least, not so full ofsweet and good-natured people...
...which captures Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, Ruth St...
...It was singled out by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its declaration of December 15, 1979 which stripped Kting of his canonical teaching mission in the church...
...First the agency fed restricted information incriminating to Hiss to the Rev...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 9
