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"I was trained as a lawyer. Almost all my friends are lawyers. The books I read are related to the law." And so it was with obvious satisfaction that UPI Alger Hiss, 70, became the first disbarred lawyer ever to be reinstated by the Massachusetts bar. Hiss, a former State Department official, had been drummed out of the legal profession in 1952 after a congressional anti-espionage investigation, spearheaded by California Congressman Richard Nixon, led to his conviction for perjury and more than three years in federal prison. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last week found that Hiss had shown "moral and intellectual fitness" and ordered his reinstatement in Boston. "I intend to start practicing law the minute I am sworn in," he announced, but added that he would hang on to his Manhattan job as a stationery salesman as well. "One cannot practice law in a vacuum," he said, "and so far there has not been a line of waiting clients."
He is still a couple of notches below his late father's four-star rank, but Major General George Patton III, 51, has surely been following in Daddy's tank tracks. At Fort Hood, Texas, Patton has just taken charge of the famed "hell-on-wheels" 2nd Armored Division, the 16,932-man command that earned the nickname while training under blood-and-guts General George Patton Jr. during the 1940s. "His reputation is not in any way a handicap," says III. "In fact, I enjoy the hell out of it." Maybe, but the major general, a veteran himself of the Korean and Viet Nam wars, may never completely escape the Patton legacy. Just 20 minutes before accepting his new command last week, he visited the base chapel for a few moments of reflection. "While there," Patton later recalled, "I not only felt the presence of God, I also felt the presence of my father. This happens to me from time to time. Every once in a while I see my father sitting at the corner of a building, sort of gazing at me."