Thirty years ago I was watching the PBS panel show the The
McLaughlin Group one lazy Sunday morning. A gleeful Pat Buchanan mentioned on
air that a recently declassified decrypt of an old Soviet communication had
finally proven that US State Department employee Alger Hiss was guilty of being
a Soviet spy in the 1930s. Buchanan had worked in the Nixon White House.
Richard Nixon had become prominent while still a young Congressman partially as
a result of his dogged pursuit of the case against Alger Hiss.
Some background. In 1948, American journalist Whitaker Chambers testified
before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a Soviet spy
in 1930s. While doing no useful work for Russia, he was glad to take their
money. Chambers made the explosive charge that a prominent State Department
official named Alger Hiss was also part of Chambers' spy ring. Hiss admitted being briefly acquainted with Chambers in the 1930s but denied charges of espionage before Congress. Hiss was ultimately convicted of perjury on the basis
that he had lied to Congress about the nature of his relationship with
Chambers.
Many books have been written about the Hiss case in the past
seven decades attempting to convince the public that Hiss really was guilty of
spying. These books, such as Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein,
Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason by Christina Shelton and Alger Hiss's
Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy by G. Edward White all use
the same approach of guilt by association. They can all be summarized as
follows: “Alger Hiss was kind of a lefty in his politics, so you should be
convinced he was guilty of being a Soviet spy.”
Now at last after 77 years we have a book about Hiss worth reading: Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss by Jeff
Kisseloff. The author was part of Alger Hiss’ legal team as far back as the
1970s when Hiss was seeking to clear his name. After fifty years (!) of dogged
pursuit of the evidence in the Hiss case, Kisseloff has brought to light a
great deal of new material including previously unreleased FBI files and what
might be called the case’s “smoking gun”: Woodstock 230099, the typewriter that
the government claimed was used to type the copies of State Department
documents placed in evidence against Hiss.
In Hisstory, Kisseloff dismantles the case against Hiss
piece by piece:
He first reminds the reader that Whitaker Chambers was a man who could not tell
the truth if his life depended on it. He lied constantly. He perpetually
contradicted his own lies with other lies. He made easily disprovable claims
about his own life, the lives of others and objective reality in general. He
cheerfully admitted lying under oath to Congress.
So why did the Hiss case ever gain momentum in the first place?
Whitaker Chambers produced a trove of documents to bolster
the case against Hiss. These included:
1. Public domain government documents regarding (for example) various countries’
tariff payments.
2. Some 35mm camera film containing US Navy instructions on painting fire
extinguishers and handling life rafts.
3. Some undecipherable notes in shorthand written by Hiss.
These documents were not anything that any sane spy would think might be useful to a foreign government. Despite the fact that any reasonable person could see that Chambers’ charges against Hiss were a lot of nonsense, and despite the fact that (as Kisseloff demonstrates through newly revealed documents) the FBI didn’t believe Hiss was a spy, the Justice Department, with a lot of encouragement from congressman Richard Nixon, pressed forward with the case against Hiss any way.
On the government’s second attempt to convict Hiss of perjury, it got the guilty verdict it wanted. The case turned on a typewriter. Woodstock 230099 was entered into evidence at the trial as the typewriter that had once been owned by Hiss family and that had been used to type copies of some of the documents Chambers had allegedly received from Hiss. But as Kisseloff explains the Woodstock in evidence was manufactured too late to be the Hiss machine.
So what really happened? During the trial, the Hiss family went looking for their old typewriter which they no longer owned as they believed they could demonstrate that it was not the machine used to type the documents in evidence. Kisseloff suggests that Hiss’ enemies found or modified a typewriter that the prosecution could use to convince a jury that it was the Hiss machine. They then made sure that this was the machine that the Hiss team found and entered into evidence themselves hoping that it would exonerate Hiss.
Hisstory also does a fine job debunking the “revelations” of the Soviet decrypts of the 1990s that Hiss detractors would have the public believe convicted Hiss once and for all. The most famous of these decrypts described (in a third-hand conversation) an American spying for the USSR who attended the 1945 Yalta Conference and who went by the code name ALES. Although what is known about Hiss and ALES eliminates the possibility that they were the same person, that hasn’t stopped many people (remember Pat Buchanan) from declaring case closed on Hiss’ guilt. Kisseloff also discusses the authors who have unconvincingly attempted to further convict Hiss in the court of public opinion through other Soviet records by arbitrarily declaring that the agents discussed in those records were Hiss going by still other code names beside ALES.
In summary, the “forgery by typewriter” conspiracy suggested in Hisstory seems bit outlandish (as I think even the author admits). But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Alger Hiss was innocent and Jeff Kisseloff has done history a great service in writing a book that closes the case.
