Lewis Hartshorn’s Alger Hiss

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Lewis Hartshorn

Although 4,800 pages of Hiss case grand-jury testimony were made public in 1999, Lewis Hartshorn’s Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case That Ignited McCarthyism, published in 2013 and years in the making, is the first Hiss-case book to make extensive use of these documents. In an immersive and exhaustive study of the evidence, from the pre-indictment phase of the case that unfolded over the summer and fall of 1948, Hartshorn, an independent scholar based in Texas, uses Chambers’ own words before the grand jury (and what he also told HUAC at that time) to suggest that the inconsistencies in his stories were so frequent and profound they render his testimony “completely fraudulent.” The Alger Hiss chapter about Chambers’ break from communism, “Saint Whittaker” – which also references Hartshorn’s ground-breaking discovery of key Hiss-case notes thought lost for years – has been included on this site with the author’s permission.

Martin Roberts’ Secret History

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Martin Roberts

Secret History, a book many years in the making, scrutinizes contested verdicts and miscarriages of justice, with special emphasis on the Hiss case. Martin Roberts, an archivist and British citizen living in Belgium, began his research while still in law school. His book, called “meticulous” and “compelling” by Kirkus Reviews, offers an in-depth analysis of Whittaker Chambers’ veracity, and the first extensive, critical reappraisal of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. That 1978 book by Allen Weinstein (1937-2015), a Smith College history professor later appointed Archivist of the United States by President George W. Bush, reaffirmed Alger Hiss’s guilt and was nominated for a National Book Award. Roberts characterizes it as so “biased in its treatment of evidence, particularly that provided by Chambers … that it needs to be rewritten.”

Interviewed about his book in 2015, Roberts said he was “inspired by the fact that due process of law had not been observed, and that someone should get the facts straight.” Secret History’s chapter about Weinstein’s scholarship, “The Professor’s Tale: An Analysis of Professor Weinstein’s Book, Perjury,” has been included on this site with the author’s permission. Roberts writes that he welcomes comments on the case, and would be happy to “answer any questions or debate issues arising from my text” addressed to secrethistory.debate@hotmail.com.

 

Joan Brady’s America’s Dreyfus

The Hiss case “is probably the biggest and longest-lasting cover-up in history,” Joan Brady told an interviewer from The Guardian shortly after her 2015 book, America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged, was published in England (an American edition, from Arcade Publishing, is scheduled for the fall of 2016).

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Joan Brady

People find the case “terrifyingly complex,” she notes elsewhere. “But if you start right at the beginning, you can see that it’s just a hunt. It’s one man tracking another down, cornering him, taking him out.” In fact, she says, “sometimes the lies and contradictions are so brash and naked that a reader’s jaw literally drops.”

Hailed by critics for her “extraordinary vision” and as “a writer of enormous ability and harrowing power,” Brady, an award-winning American novelist and thriller writer living in England, knew Alger Hiss for over 30 years – but only got interested in his case after his death. When she did, she found herself increasingly outraged by a “manhunt-cum-witchhunt” that transformed “the hero of the United Nations into America’s Judas Iscariot.”

Praised for a “compelling” and “convincing” narrative (as The Spectator put it), America’s Dreyfus, written with the flair of a thriller writer, presents prodigious research as a series of discoveries that, one after another, let her see how “facts had been twisted and distorted to link together chains of events conjured out of nowhere.” The Introduction and first pages of Chapter One of America’s Dreyfus have been included on this site with the author’s permission.