The University Press of Kansas has published Jeff Kisseloff’s Rewriting History: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (with a foreword by Tony Hiss). You may be thinking, what a perfect title for a book seeking to vindicate Alger Hiss! Or you may be thinking, that’s not a journey I am ever going to take in this lifetime! Or you may be thinking, you have got to be kidding me!
Professor Harvey Klehr is the preeminent historian of American Communism. He has read Kisseloff’s book so that we don’t have to. In the current issue of Commentary he reviews it in “The big Kisseloff.” Thank you, Professor Klehr.
Professor Klehr has explored the Hiss case in several of his books. I wrote Professor Klehr a few years ago to ask him which of his books he would recommend to readers interested in the case. Citing the book he wrote with John Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev, Professor Klehr responded: “The best, I think, is Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. It’s based on the the most complete and latest information from KGB archives. We titled the chapter on Hiss ‘Case Closed,’ since we quote from KGB documents that use his real name and identify him as a Soviet agent.” In fact, he discusses Spies in the linked Commentary review of Kisseloff’s book.
The Hiss case is of interest in several respects. One of these is its power to illustrate the left’s relentless resistance to the truth. It is also of interest for the books of genuine merit to which it has given rise. Here are a few of them that would serve as good companions to Professor Klehr’s:
• Witness is Chambers’s autobiography. It has remained in print continuously since it was published in 1952. The linked paperback edition with new forewords by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Robert Novak derives from Regnery’s fiftieth anniversary edition of the book. Several conservatives including a friend or two of mine have mentioned the impact this book had on them. The book figures prominently, for example, in Andrew Ferguson’s 2011 Weekly Standard cover story on David Mamet.
• Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961, edited with notes by Buckley: Privately printed by National Review in 1969 and subsequently republished, the book conveys Chambers’s “Dostoyevskan temperament” (as Terry Teachout put it) and weary voice reflecting on the case. Buckley writes in the introduction “it was I who opened the envelopes that brought these communications, finding in them a sublimity which I most frankly acknowledge as having been as much influential as the goddamn Woodstock typewriter in convincing me of the credentials of Whittaker Chambers.”
• Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein. As a liberal historian who was given access to the files of Hiss’s lawyers, Weinstein sought to write the definitive account of the case. I thought he did all that and more in this meticulous work of reconstruction originally published in 1978 and now kept in print by the Hoover Institution Press in an updated edition published in 2013. Weinstein takes the reader inside the Communist espionage ring that infiltrated the Roosevelt administration. In the introduction to the updated 1997 edition of the book, Weinstein wrote: “With the new evidence blended into the ‘old,’ most of the troubling questions about the Hiss-Chambers case can be answered.”
• Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus. Theodore Draper wrote of this book in the New York Review of Books: “Tanenhaus had the ingenious idea of filling out what Chambers wrote by going to the memoirs, letters, papers, FBI interrogations, and testimony of all the others in the story. As a result, he rounds out Chambers’s account from different angles, drawing on the accounts of many people who knew Chambers.”
• The Anti-Communist Manifestos, by John V. Fleming. The author is a retired English professor who spent his career at Princeton teaching Chaucer. Pursuing his bookbinding avocation in retirement, he came upon a book that sent him on a voyage of discovery to the other three books that he takes up here along with the one he was about to pulp. Witness is the fourth; Professor Fleming writes that “by any just canon of literary history [it] should claim its place within the great tradition of American autobiography.” Professor Fleming’s aptly named blog is Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche, derived from Chaucer’s description of the Oxford philosophy student in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. “Gladly lerne, gladly teche” is the spirit that suffuses Fleming’s — in my opinion, great — book.
