Perjury By Allen Weinstein

The 1978 publication of Allen Weinstein's "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," was seen by many members of the press and other reviewers as the final word on the case, that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged. However, when Victor Navasky of The Nation checked Weinstein's sources, he found inconsistencies, historical inaccuracies, and quoted sources who said Weinstein had misquoted them.

• Victor Navasky vs. Weinstein in The Nation
  
  
• Letters to The Nation challenge Weinstein's sources
  
  
• Victor Navasky's review in The Nation of the 1997 revised edition of "Perjury" - includes new information about Noel Field
  
  
• Hiss-case researcher Jeff Kisseloff looks at some of the evidence Weinstein found in the files of the FBI and the Hiss defense.
  
  
• Oklahoma City attorney Stephen Jones, a former member of the Nixon administration, and a former Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, analyzes Weinstein's scholarship in an article that appeared in the Oklahoma Law Review.
  
  
• David Levin looks at some of the documents that Weinstein claims show Alger Hiss to be guilty and finds they point to the opposite conclusion. Click here to read Levin's "Gaps in Narratives of the Hiss Case."
  
  

Miriam and Walter Schneir explain the history behind the Venona files. Click here for their account.

David Levin was a leading scholar of American literature and history, a biographer and a poet. He approached the Hiss case skeptically, convinced at first that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged. Levin offers a critical analysis of Sam Tanenhaus's "Whittaker Chambers" and admonishes the author for accepting Chambers' own story at face value. Click here to read his review.

In 1973, then President Richard M. Nixon hired Charles Alan Wright, then a professor at the University of Texas Law School, to represent him in his battle to keep the Watergate tapes from the public. Twenty two years before, Wright wrote an article in the University of Minnesota Law Review, in which he declared that the conviction of Alger Hiss was a miscarriage of justice. In 1952, he again took issue with the verdict, this time in a review of "Witness" that appeared in the Saturday Review. Click here to read the review.

William A. Reuben comments on "The Secret World of American Communism" and its claims that Soviet spies permeated the American Communist Party.

Amy Knight argues that the new literature on Soviet espionage may be less revealing than it appears. 

Back to The Bookshelf