Post #4053172
2026-07-24 03:32 UTC
Anyway, this Last Pumpkin Paper novel postulates that Richard Nixon never gave up on trying to exonerate himself of the persistent accusation that he and Whittaker Chambers had simply framed Alger Hiss as a political stunt. Nixon's still got a little gang of plumbers with him (much diminished but loyal and active) and the story goes in some wild directions culminating with one of Nixon's men pretending to be a top East German official and hollering out orders to breach the Berlin Wall.
Oh and the book does conjecture that Hiss was innocent but that Nixon was also innocent, deceived by Chambers for reasons I can't remember.
(cont'd)
Replies (1)
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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-24 03:35
I guess we'd love to know ourselves. There's so many little mysteries of U.S. and world history that remain unsolved, forever indeterminate most likely because there's just not enough information. History fades away into conjecture and hypothesizing on the basis of minute fragments of surviving evidence, but the same can be said of #astronomy and #cosmology. History isn't "soft" any more than physics. It's very material and substantial, the spine of humanity. It's not good that folks have been propagandized into regarding history as roughly equivalent with mythology, all equally conjectural and speculative and thus a free playground for rogues and tricksters. (cont'd)