The Long Afterlife of Hiss–Chambers Smears

W hittaker Chambers famously shared with his family, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and readers of Witness that he had effectively traded himself from the winning to the losing side in defecting from communism.

To congressmen in 1948 and readers in 1952, he offered no immediate explanation for why he believed this. Possibly the context of the times rendered such an explanation superfluous. By the mid-20th century, the Soviets possessed the atomic bomb, Mao Zedong suddenly controlled mainland China, and about a dozen European countries not in the communist sphere prior to World War II found themselves behind an Iron Curtain shortly after it.

Cold War Hiroo Onodas who insist on the innocence of Alger Hiss, the State Department official whom Chambers reluctantly accused of serving as a Soviet spy, provide a possible explanation for why Chambers believed what he believed.

Fanatics never drop an idea. This fixation applies to communism as well as the innocence of Hiss. True believers operate as though impervious to reason. They do not weigh evidence but instead put their weight behind desired outcomes. Like Onoda, a Japanese soldier who surrendered nearly 29 years after Emperor Hirohito did, Hiss’s partisans hold out all these decades later despite overwhelming evidence against their icon. Thus does a matter of facts become a matter of faith.

One senses something like this at work in Jeff Kisseloff’s 2025 book Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss. Why in the mid-2020s should a case that captivated Americans in the late 1940s matter so much? “McCarthyism, Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and even certain acts of terrorism can be traced, directly or in part, back to Hiss’s conviction,” Kisseloff contends.

With prothonotary warblers, Bokhara rugs, a 1929 Ford Roadster, a dumbwaiter, a pumpkin patch, and a Woodstock typewriter, the not-easily-forgotten case eventually became ignored by reluctant rising generations understandably put off by the passage of time and complicated details. The reading public represents a mostly blank slate on Hiss–Chambers. Therefore, this would seem to be an ideal time for an agenda-driven author to offer revisionist history based on conspiracy theories.

Possibly because of this, historian John Earl Haynes opted to critique this rather ridiculous book. The Journal of Cold War Studies last week published online his book review, which at 57 pages seems to be as much a book itself as a review.

“The weakest section of Hisstory is its discussion of the Soviet archival documents that became public many decades after Hiss’s conviction,” Haynes writes. “There are 21 in total, spanning 1936 to 1950. Kisseloff discusses only a few of the 21 in detail. He ignores most of them and does not even acknowledge they exist.”

Some of the most compelling documents come from Russia, and they pertain to Chambers and not Hiss. Soviet intelligence, as Haynes points out, referred to “the traitor Chambers” and to Chambers and other witnesses as “these traitors.”

Why would Soviet intelligence refer to a liar who slandered innocent liberals as communist agents as a turncoat to their cause?

How does Hisstory rebut the mountain of documents that links Chambers with Hiss in espionage activities? Haynes points out that Kisseloff portrays Chambers as a greedy conman who had deceived his Soviet handlers that Hiss served the conspiracy in order to enhance the stipends and expense funds that flowed his way. What about the Hiss Woodstock typewriter that matched the government documents that Chambers had produced? Haynes notes the contention of a late-1940s-produced “fake Woodstock typewriter that replicated every jot and tittle mechanical peculiarity and imperfection of the Hisses’ Woodstock model of the mid-1930s while adding none of its own.”

It seems awfully late to relitigate this old, settled case. Long before any of the Soviet archives or the decrypted cables became available, simple facts — such as Hede Massing, Walter Weyl, and others beyond Chambers identifying Hiss as a communist and Hiss feigning to not know Chambers when he had shared a home with him for months — incriminated.

But in any ideological dispute of this magnitude — to midcentury leftists what Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the McNamara Brothers meant to earlier generations of radicals — changes of mind represent a sort of treason to one’s identity, to one’s cause, and to one’s friends. The reaction of Sydney Gurewitz, stepdaughter of atomic spy Morton Sobell, to his six-decades-after-the-fact confession proves instructive. She explained to the New York Times several decades ago that in fessing up, her stepfather had “complicated history and the personal histories of the many millions of people, all over the world, who gave time, energy, money and heart to the struggle to support his claims of innocence.”

One gathers from the Haynes review that Kisseloff wishes to not complicate history but rather vindicate Hiss’s supporters. To do this, Haynes notes, he mainly smears Chambers. This seems common enough in the strangely not-dead-yet genre, as Meyer Zeligs’s Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, John Cabot Smith’s Alger Hiss: The True Story, and Fred Cook’s The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss all demonstrate.

“Kisseloff claims that Chambers’s testimony was untrue,” Haynes writes, “because (1) Chambers was a Trotskyist, (2) it was gay revenge on Chambers’s part, (3) it was camouflage for Chambers’s gay inclinations, (4) Chambers made up his stories of espionage, and (5) Chambers was a financial scammer.”

Haynes vs. Kisseloff seems as fair a fight as Mike Tyson vs. Glass Joe. The 57 pages of the review may seem like overkill. But the alternative to a Cold War historian of the highest rank eviscerating a dabbler’s work in a scholarly journal amounts to ignoring a lie as it morphs into conventional wisdom.

Haynes’s lengthy review deserves a read for those looking for a refresher on the case. But for anyone merely seeking an abridged primer on the Kisseloff, Zeligs, Smith, and Cook titles, a few lines near the end of Witness will do.

“No depravity was too bizarre to ‘explain’ Chambers’ motives for calling Hiss a Communist,” Chambers wrote in 1952. “No hypothesis was too preposterous, no speculation too fantastic, to ‘explain’ how all those State Department documents came to be copied on Hiss’s Woodstock typewriter. Only the truth became too preposterous to entertain.”