Leftist legends never die, as long as the liberal media keep promoting them. Thursday’s Washington Post carried a Lynne Duke article on the alleged innocence of Soviet spy Alger Hiss, based on the testimony of his stepson Timothy Hobson, who calls Hiss accuser Whittaker Chambers, “an unmitigated, pathological liar.” Duke writes sympathetically of the Hiss camp: “If you were to dismiss the Alger Hiss case as a thing of history, an iconic Cold War drama with little resonance today, you would be deeply, terribly wrong.”
Just last year, as Jonah Goldberg and even the MSM reported, the letters of socialist author Upton Sinclair revealed that he was told by a defense lawyer that Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists who were allegedly railroaded in a murder trial, were the real killers. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t die-hards on the left who disagree. In Variety, Ronnie Scheib hails a new documentary on the case: “Peter Miller’s labor-of-love docu on arguably the most notorious miscarriage of justice of the 20th century, the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti, does a superb job of condensing an overwhelming mass of documentation, archival imagery and artistic representation into a concise yet passionate history lesson whose relevance could not be timelier….
Miller, longtime producer for Ken Burns and several less mainstream documentarians, and helmer of “The Internationale,” spent four years researching Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and it shows in the trenchant clarity of his exposition. He efficiently delineates, in a few broad strokes, how the two men, from different backgrounds in Italy, were radicalized by the prejudice, exploitation and repression that were meted out to immigrant workers in America.”