This article inspires thoughts at once bleakly despairing and sanguinely violent

Give me an effing break.

Here's my favorite part of the article:

Alger Hiss was a spy, many scholars say.

He was not, say many others.

But it has to be noted that he was never indicted for espionage.

I hear the Dreyfus affair, the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassination, and the "real" culprits of 9/11 are still heavily contested by "scholars," too. And while it "has to be noted that [Hiss] was never indicted for espionage," it apparently needn't be noted that he was indicted, and convicted, for perjury instead of espionage simply because the statute of limitations on espionage had run out. [See update below.]

That's an important omission, many journalists say.

It is not, say many others.

Sigh. I guess the issue of this Post staff writer's journalistic competence will forever be shrouded in the mists of time.

Recommended reading:

Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein

Venona, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America -- The Stalin Era, by by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus

UPDATE: I forgot to add that the whole perjury trial turned on the issue of whether Hiss had indeed committed espionage, notwithstanding his oaths to the contrary.