I don’t know whether to be honored or horrified by John W. Berresford’s astounding 131-page diatribe against Rewriting Hisstory. His heels are dug in so deeply, that he refuses to accept a single new finding in RH’s 392 pages as damaging to allegations by Whittaker Chambers that Alger Hiss was a secret Russian spy while working for the Roosevelt Administration. 

As it turns out, psychologists have a term for a person who claims to be a historian but who uses ad hominem attacks and dogmatic denial “in a defensive, irrational rejection of credible evidence that contradicts existing beliefs, frequently accompanied by insults to protect one’s worldview.”

It is called the Ostrich Effect because the person writes like an ostrich with its head in the sand.       

Throughout the piece, Berresford also abandons any attempt at inquiry in favor of a voice of confident authority, with final say over the Hiss-Chambers dispute. Both human and feathered ostriches will recognize the pattern, in Berresford’s case of rejecting all challenges to the orthodoxy that has predominated ever since 1978 when Allen Weinstein’s “Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Case” was published to great fanfare throughout the mainstream press. Berresford appears to take any challenge to Weinstein personally; the same goes for any book that claims Hiss was not guilty. 

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Berresford makes his points the way Weinstein did — by omitting key facts and massaging others until they are malleable enough to fit his story. That’s not history, it’s propaganda. Berresford does almost no basic reporting of his own. In fact, at one point, he complains that among the documents on rewritinghisstory.com, I omitted one about the circumstances of Chambers’ negotiating his departure from Time prior to the HUAC  hearings, prompting him to suggest the story was false, even though the document’s location is listed in the book’s footnotes. Apparently it was too much work to dig it out himself. 

Berresford leans heavily on Weinstein, excusing and exposing Weinstein’s most egregious errors while doing so. Weinstein’s not the only unintended victim. Berresford also uses citations to G. Edward White, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr to such an extent he uncovers fault lines in their research too. 

That appears to be another rule of Berresford’s piece: if the event didn’t appear in the works of his usual sources, then it didn’t happen. RH is the result of over 100,000 pages of new information. Many of those documents introduce new elements into the story but oddly Berresford repeatedly writes, “The author insists” instead of “The FBI reports” or something similar. When he does mention my reporting, he’ll say I “sneer” at something when I am simply reporting on what I found. And that’s only if he acknowledges them. For example, the crucial finding that Hiss not Chambers was telling the truth about whether Chambers used the name George Crosley when they were introduced (meaning Alger met him as a journalist named George Crosley as opposed to “Carl,” the Russian operative) doesn’t merit a mention. 

At the same time, people like the document examiners hired by the defense that he says go unmentioned, are noted. It’s just that as I point out in the book, they were constantly contradicting each other, rendering their different opinions useless. 

For all these reasons and many more, the word “review” is encased in quotations because what Berresford has written is not in any way a review as it is an attempt at a takedown of not just the book but the credibility of its author who happens to be me. At times he seems to be protecting something, maybe the credibility of his YouTube videos on the case. It’s as if he is repeatedly declaring, “I know more about the case than you do.” He may or may not but that doesn’t appear to be the case from this piece. You would think — and even hope — that in such an extraordinary number of pages, Berresford, would have something important to say about   the most salient points in Rewriting History. But Berresford, is not here to review Rewriting History as much as he is to bury it. As a result, nothing here is a surprise except that in the end Rewriting Hisstory survives quite nicely. Berresford does find a few minor errors (every book of history has them) , and when he is accurate, that error will be corrected and Mr. Berresford properly thanked by me for his efforts on my behalf.

But for someone who so triumphantly calls out the few inconsequential errors in Rewriting Hisstory, Berresford is awfully casual with facts and assertions that are more revealing about his own anger toward me or Hiss than anything else. Take for example these two sentences Berresford writes about Hiss after his release from prison:

“He got time off for good behavior and was released on November 27, 1954. He emerged from prison with a defunct marriage and so disgraced that he lived in a seedy apartment within smelling distance of Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market and worked as a salesman, first for a line of women’s combs and then for an office stationery company.”

Hiss was released by statute not for good behavior. His marriage was not defunct. The Hisses didn’t separate for several years. Nor was he disgraced. He retained his friends and made many new ones, whose companionship he enjoyed for the rest of his life. He was also well-liked and respected at his jobs. If he lived under difficult circumstances, it was because he was denied the opportunity to make a living in his field. He also chose to live near his son in Greenwich Village and could have lived under better circumstances in other parts of the city. 

Berresford goes on to say on the same page that the “forgery by typewriter theory lacked any supporting evidence and was so unlikely that it was almost laughed out of court. It has always appeared to Hiss fans who like conspiracy theories, however, and Hiss dined out on it for years.”

Actually, Hiss’s motion for a new trial contained considerable evidence that the documents were forged. The government, of course, disputed the findings, but it still took them very seriously because it had to. The defense expert Daniel P. Norman, who ran a successful spectrochemical laboratory outside of Boston, cut small squares of paper from the documents that Chambers said Priscilla Hiss typed for him and from the envelope the documents were allegedly stored in for ten years. He found uneven aging in the papers and other irregularities between the papers and the envelope. Another forensic expert found that the typing and corrections on the pages indicated they weren’t done by the Hisses; a widely recognized typewriter expert, Martin Tytell demonstrated that a typewriter could be altered to match the type produced by another machine, while evidence was also introduced indicating that the type bars on Woodstock typewriter No. 230,099 had been altered. At the same time, the Woodstock Company’s own records cast doubt on the validity of the typewriter because its serial number indicated it was manufactured too late to be the machine purchased by Priscilla Hiss’s father in 1927 and later given to her.  There was also considerable evidence that Chambers had left the Party earlier than he had claimed (this was supported years later by FBI files released to us under the FOIA. Who was laughing? Certainly not the FBI which felt the need to level personal attacks in order to respond to Hiss’s petition. Berresford might disagree with the arguments made by the defense but to say there was no evidence is frankly rather silly. 

How it was “almost laughed out of court” is also news to me, so was the notion that the theory only appealed to conspiracy theorists.  

Take Fred Cook, for example. In 1957, he was a politically conservative crime reporter for the New York World-Telegram and certain of Hiss’s guilt. When Carey McWilliams, the editor of The Nation, asked him to look into the case, Cook turned him down, saying there was no point since he was convinced Hiss was guilty. Only when McWilliams  promised that Cook’s piece would be published no matter what conclusion he reached, did Cook agree to take on the project. His report took up nearly the entire September 21, 1957 issue. Cook was now convinced that Hiss was innocent. The story changed Cook’s entire life. He became one of the nation’s most respected investigative reporters. 

Berresford concludes with one of many non sequiturs when he writes that “Hiss dined out on” the forgery by typewriter theory for years.

Like other writers who have attacked the conclusions of Rewriting Hisstory, Berresford must have felt after a while that he was getting nowhere, so it was time to make it personal. This does not make him look any better or his arguments any stronger. Quite the opposite, he sounds desperate. For example, at one point he accuses me of being a “mindreader,” but at the same time central to his point is  that when I worked for Hiss in the 1970s and 1980s, I was hypnotized by him into accepting his every word. And while doing my own independent research into the case, since then, Hiss, even in death,  maintained that control so that my work had a pre-ordained outcome that Hiss was not a spy. The results, Berresford writes, were so twisted and ignorant of the truth that it would on occasion cause him to burst out in laughter. All of this prompts Berresford to issue a backhanded compliment that at the least I make no pretense of neutrality. If true, I suppose I wasted all that time digging through thousands of new documents when I could have written the same back in 1983 and be done with the case. 

What Berresford and other Hiss detractors don’t realize (or refuse to acknowledge) is that working with Alger for several years gave me ample time to watch and listen. He sat for interviews in our office. I watched him answer tough questions. I also asked plenty of my own, and since I was surrounded by the defense and the FBI files, I could check his answers. I never saw him duck a single questions, and everything he told me checked out when it could be. Had that not been the case, I would have left.  

As for Mr. Berresford, he is, of course, unbiased. That he chooses not to weigh positively a single fact in Rewriting Hisstory pointing to Hiss’s innocence can be attributed only to my own poor judgement and errors in reporting that leaves me with a batting average of  .000

This kind of writing, seemingly authoritative but which falls apart under examination is typical of the work of the ostriches who simply can’t accept the idea that they could possibly be wrong, even when facts demonstrating Hiss’s innocence are clear from both the testimony and documentation. That they must then slant the story in order to make their narrative more convincing is encouraging in a way, because it’s an indication that they suspect their story won’t stand up without messing with the facts.  

What separates Berresford’s effort from the others though is the sheer quantity of the verbiage, if not the quality of it. Stretched to 131 pages, it feels like an attempt to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. It also feels like literary stalking. If we kept a pet rabbit outside, I’d be worried. 

At the very least, it’s an indication that Rewriting Hisstory represents a danger to the pro-Chambers side. Indeed, the book has gotten much more attention from the right than it has from the so-called liberal media. On the conservative side, Commentary published Harvey Klehr’s reaction (negative) while the Washington Examiner weighed in with two, one by Chambers’ grandson (negative). None of the pieces reads like an actual review, and by refusing to concede a single point they’re not. 

Berresford has also done us a favor by assembling all the arguments against Hiss in one essay, making them easier to address. Having said that, I promise this won’t be a 131-page response. There is no way to respond to all of Berresford’s points; the best I can do is to pick out a few as warning signs as the intrepid reader works his/her way through the rest of the article. Since many of the documents in question are already posted on the Rewriting Hisstory web site, you can also see for yourself who is telling the more accurate Hisstory. 

Onto some more specifics:

What the First Page Tells Us About Berresford’s Work

It takes less than one paragraph to show that Berresford has a healthy imagination when it comes to facts. In those opening lines, Berresford claims to know something I don’t when he writes that I am now retired. He then adds that Rewriting History is a book “chronicling his daily life as a Hiss supporter.” It does? Maybe he is confusing another book with mine. I spent a good part of 50 years on the case. If Rewriting History was a daily chronicle, it would be about 15,000 pages. Not that that wouldn’t be fascinating. On the other hand, it would risk generating a Berresfordian response of 7,500 pages.

The back end of that phrase is where Berresford misrepresents my motives. It is only the first of several attempts to damage my credibility by saying the book is an account of my life as a “Hiss supporter.” 

Both my work for Alger and the subsequent work on the book and the Web site were about seeking out the truth, wherever it took us. The more FBI and defense files I read, the more apparent it became that he was innocent. Even the FBI acknowledged that despite its best efforts, it was unable to prove Hiss was a Communist. 

Still, Berresford cites what he calls my “black and white” politics as a main reason why I can’t accept Hiss’s guilt. What are my black and white politics? I’ve met Berresford once, and we had a brief chat about nothing that had anything to do with politics. But in his essay, he says that I have been “an absolute progressive Democrat since childhood,” a statement that I can only attribute to the first story in the book about when I was standing on a line with my mother who was waiting to vote in the 1960 presidential election. I was five years old at the time, and since this wasn’t Chicago I wasn’t yet registered to vote.  I doubt that my pro-Kennedy feelings were the product of much research. 

Berresford really has no idea how I think, and most veteran journalists have written about people all over the political spectrum. The point is everyone, no matter their politics, is entitled to equal and fair treatment under the law. 

Actually, it’s Berresford who allows his politics to get in the way. Chambers stole from his co-workers and from the Party. That’s ok, he says, because, you know, they were Communists. When several of those accused by Chambers took the Fifth Amendment, Berresford doesn’t believe ex-communists should have the right to do so. He doesn’t differentiate between former Communists and those merely accused of being Communists. Regarding my politics, that so affects my judgement, he has three footnotes and then half the book:  xi to xii, 3, 85-87, 103-185. That’s when I realized that Mr. Berresford was not only a bit over sensitive but he seemed to take every criticism of Chambers personally. Hence, a big reason why we are forced to deal with a 131-page article: Mr. Berresford’s feelings were hurt. 

You see this in a petulant chapter (yes, this “review” has chapters!) called, “The Hisses and Their Witnesses Changed Their Story as Much as Chambers,” which, according to its title alone is unfairly weighted against Hiss. So how does Berresford make his comparison? With cement shoes for Hiss. We know Chambers changed his story dramatically on several key matters, such as when he left the Communist Party or whether Hiss participated in espionage. What are the comparable changes to Alger’s account, according to Berresford? Here’s one: he met a State Department colleague, Laurence Duggan, in 1934 or 1935.   

He also devotes space to proving that Alger was not perfect. Needless to say, this was devastating news.

On an Historian’s Obligations to Seek out the Truth                                                                     

Beyond that however, is Berresford’s astounding suggestion that Weinstein was under no obligation to give several of his sources, who he later accused of all kinds of malfeasance, a chance to respond to the allegation. This is just basic stuff. But Weinstein didn’t want to deal with any account that negatively impacted his narrative. In regard to Sam Krieger, his behavior was especially indefensible. Yet Berresford does his best, revealing in the process as much about his reliability as it does about Weinstein’s. First, though, let’s consider the following:

Weinstein scored a scoop of sorts when he managed to convince Priscilla Hiss to sit for two interviews by promising her that unlike other biographers he would be fair to her. In “Perjury,” he would accuse her of lying when she denied being associated with the Socialist Party in the 1930s. He also received a tip from a sketchy source that during lunch with family friends in the 1950s she had confessed to lying to protect Alger, adding that she was tired of doing so. 

Weinstein’s notes don’t indicate he asked her about either. She was shocked when the story of that conversation was published in “Perjury,” without giving her a chance to respond. She wrote a letter to The New York Times denying it. Random House was so concerned that it delayed the book’s publication so it could excise the story.  

Weinstein also accused Donald Hiss of orchestrating an extensive coverup to keep the prosecution from knowing that the defense was closing in on the Woodstock typewriter it had believed was the family machine back in the 1930s. 

Weinstein saw him for an interview that took all of 15 minutes. During that time, Weinstein didn’t ask him a single question about the alleged coverup. Yet, there it was laid out in a chapter called “The Woodstock Coverup,” the most persuasive chapter in Perjury, according to the historian Garry Wills. 

As an aside and with typical bad form, Berresford chastises me for not writing the book he thinks I should have written, when I didn’t compliment the late priest John Cronin for his work after the McCarthy era on behalf of labor. This is pretty funny since he simply calls Donald a secret Communist without acknowledging his heroic work during World War II, saving hundreds if not thousands of Romanian Jews. Nor has anyone ever shown any tendencies of Donald Hiss toward Communism, how he became radicalized or any behavior or activities that indicate he was.  

Weinstein also  accused Malcolm Cowley of lying about his interview with Chambers in 1940 in which Chambers told him he left the Communist Party in 1937. According to Cowley’s notes of the interview, Chambers also identified Hiss’s boss, Francis Sayre, as an espionage agent. Cowley wrote Hiss in 1978 that he was living a short distance from Weinstein, but Weinstein never bothered to call him. In all of these examples, the allegations were hostile to Hiss.

Berresford defends Weinstein by saying he had no time to check with these people to see if these huge allegations, such as the one where Priscilla acknowledged that the case was essentially true and  that she and her husband were spies. In this case, I guess Berresford is saying, Weinstein had more important things to do than you know, unravel the entire case!

What really happened was Weinstein refused to let the truth ruin a good story, especially one he could use against Alger. In refusing to contact them, he was not only violating basic rules of reporting but also of basic decency. But it was Weinstein’s behavior toward Sam Krieger that was particularly indefensible yet Berresford goes in swinging on Weinstein’s behalf. The end result is they both come out looking pretty bad.

Sam Krieger brought Chambers into the Communist Party in 1925. Krieger, who went by the name of Clarence Miller, when he was in the Party, was an important source for Weinstein’s book, not only for the information he imparted but also because he introduced Weinstein to other former and current Party members and others the well-liked Krieger knew.  

Krieger told Weinstein there was a second Clarence Miller in the Party. This Clarence Miller was an organizer in Gastonia, North Carolina. During a major textile strike, Miller played a role in the shooting death of the police chief. He was arrested, charged and convicted of second degree murder. After being sentenced to 17 to 20 years, he skipped bail and went to live in the Soviet Union. Berresford tries to correct me, by saying that contrary to what I wrote, Miller was not a convicted murder; that while on bail before trial he left for the Soviet Union. It’s Berresford who made the error. An excellent account of the trial can be found in Vera Buch Weisbord’s memoir, “A Radical Life.”

Krieger later said the story didn’t interest Weinstein much until he mentioned it to Isaac Don levine. Levine immediately confused the two Millers and wrote Krieger a letter, saying his daughter Natasha was in the US and eager to meet him. Krieger sent a response to Levine, telling him he was mistaken but never heard back. 

Weinstein, however, accepted Levine’s version. When the interviewing process was over, Weinstein paid Krieger back by writing him a note, saying, “You may not appreciate everything I say but at least give me the benefit of the doubt.”

Imagine Krieger’s surprise when he opened up his copy of “Perjury” to learn that Weinstein had identified him as the other Clarence Miller. After Krieger sued him for libel, Weinstein confessed in a deposition that he didn’t bother to ask Krieger whether he was the other Miller. He said he did so deliberately because of the chance of Krieger reuniting with Natasha. He was lying. As Krieger pointed out, his interview with Weinstein was a month before Levine’s conversation with Weinstein. Weinstein just piled a lie on top of a lie. 

Facing a long deposition process and major legal expenses, Krieger settled for a very low sum. Ten days after settling, the FBI issued a statement that Krieger and the Clarence Miller from Gastonia were not the same. Krieger was sure the FBI delayed it to protect Weinstein. He became even more sure when an article in The New York Times magazine called for amending the FOIA to make things easier for the FBI.

In his article, Berresford actually defends Weinstein’s behavior, basically calling it a simple mistake, except it wasn’t a mistake. He was told otherwise and didn’t listen. Then Berresford adds that in a lengthy conversation with Weinstein, he was told the real story, which was quite different from the one told by Hiss’s supporters. So what was it? He doesn’t say but it makes for some great innuendo. 

The funny thing is, in an interview with Krieger, the interlocutor has this to say, “It seems clear on the basis of what we do know that there is very little evidence, if any, that he (Chambers) was sent to Washington specifically to engage in espionage…one of the main clues to the falsity of Chambers’ claim that he was, incidentally, a Soviet agent, too, was that, again, he doesn’t take any pains to separate his function as a money raiser and contract man for the CP with his function as a Soviet military agent who said he was helping to set up apparatuses in foreign countries.” 

The speaker was Allen Weinstein. 

I think Krieger’s attorney, Doris Brin Walker, summed his work up well, when she said, “If the standard of investigation and research applied by Weinstein in his misidentification of Sam Krieger is typical of the work that went into the balance of the Hiss book, there is nothing on which a reader can rely on as fact.”

Geoffrey May and the Walls of 30th Street

Whittaker Chambers claimed that beginning in early 1937, Alger would take documents home from the State Department, and give them to Priscilla who would type up copies or summaries of them. The batch of copies would be picked up by Chambers once a week or so for transmission to the Russians. 

From the start there were all sorts of problems with Chambers’ story, not the least of which was his testimony that sometimes Alger typed them up. Alger couldn’t type.

Aside from there being a lack of a motive, the biggest problem involved the story of Priscilla secretly typing the documents. The Hisses lived in a building that was surrounded by two others, all built to house nurses during the Civil War. The walls of the buildings were notoriously thin, and each building was barely13 feet wide. They were all situated on a quiet Georgetown Street. All of the neighbors would have heard her type but none did. 

Berresford has to go through hoops in an effort to poke holes in that story. First, he says she could have typed in the basement, but the basement was really just a closet surrounded by a kitchen and dining room, both of which had decent sized windows, facing front and back. I know because I visited the house. It was ridiculously small, barely enough space for two people but not really three, which meant that Tim Hobson was squeezed into a bedroom above the front door. 

Chambers said he visited the apartment twice a week for nearly a year. Before HUAC, he called it his “headquarters.” By the time the trials came around the next year, he said he hardly stayed there at all. There was good reason for that, there was nowhere to stay. It was during that year that Tim was in a horrific bike accident that nearly cost him his leg. Yet, Chambers had no recollection of it. Neither did Tim have any recollection of Chambers. 

One of the neighbors was Geoffrey May, who along with his wife Elizabeth, occupied the house to the south. He testified at the second trial that they heard all kinds of sounds emanating from Hiss’s house but never a typewriter until after the Hisses left and a newspaper columnist moved in. 

Berresford offers up a baseless response: May could have lied to protect a fellow New Dealer. In that era, with the penalties for perjury, May would have risked his livelihood for a former neighbor because both of them worked for New Deal just like thousands of other Washingtonians? Considering that Berresford repeatedly accuses me of engaging in wild speculation, you’d think he’d be a little more careful here. 

The Hisses and the Left

Berresford writes about Alger’s involvement with the International Juridical Association as an example of his having a taste for the left, but the FBI’s interview with Shad Polier, who hired Alger and said he did so because of Alger’s moderate politics, gets a passing mention as an example of my trying to cover up Alger’s radicalism. 

 Berresford then goes on to state as a fact that due to their “leftward tendencies” the Hisses “spent time at the Socialist Rand school. He said the couple met at the School. They actually met on a boat to Europe. 

Berresford includes a long passage by reporter Murray Kempton regarding the alleged radical activities of the Hisses. The selection comes from Kempton’s book on the 1930s, “Part of Our Time,” in which Kempton imagines the Hisses at the school, describing them in classes and atop the steps, hanging with the scruffy radicals. Kempton, who was widely respected as a reporter, bought this fiction that the Hisses attended the school. Before copying Kempton’s words verbatim, did Berresford check into any of this to see whether it was accurate? Or like Weinstein did he figure, why ruin a good story with facts?  

Curious as to where the story originated, I looked through several books and Chambers’ testimony until I found it on page 1262 of his HUAC testimony from August 7, 1948, testimony that was aimed to show how well the two knew each other but in reality proved that Chambers knew Hiss hardly at all. This was a prime example. To protect himself Chambers attributed to Hiss the statement that he and Priscilla met at the Rand School. 

Berresford, of course, accepts Chambers version even though the radicalism attributed to Alger and Priscilla just didn’t exist. Berresford says I tried to “explain away” all these examples, but the explanations mostly came from the FBI. That the Hisses weren’t in any way radical (and one should note that nearly 900,000 Americans besides Priscilla voted for the Socialist Party leader  Norman Thomas, in the 1932 presidential election), destroys the motive attributed to the Hisses for cooperating with Chambers.

Kid’s Stuff

The stretching of a fact or statement from virtually nothing to a point where it seems more important than it is, is what I’ll call Gumbyism. Gumbyism runs rampant throughout “Perjury” and so it does the same through Berresford’s essay. This is especially true regarding testimony by Chambers that Hiss turned over to him a 1929 Ford so that it could be used by “a poor organizer out West.” Per Hiss’s wishes, Chambers said,  he then gave it to a Communist owned used car lot in Washington. 

Hiss denied the story. He said he said the car was worth around $25, and he threw it in for Chambers’ to use when he sublet his apartment to Chambers. (Berresford doesn’t mention that Hiss tried to sell the car to Michael and Perry Catlett, the sons of the family maid, for $25 but they turned him down.) The problem, however, was HUAC had obtained all the records regarding the registration and sale of the car and wouldn’t let Hiss see them, so he was operating from memory which wasn’t very good on the subject. If that sounds suspicious, try to remember a $25 transaction from about twelve years ago . 

Berresford doesn’t turn up anything new. There was no direct connection through the car to Hiss and the Party then, and there isn’t now.   He simply presents the old arguments that Hiss’s lack of memory indicated somehow that he was lying. The problem is that nothing that Chambers said originally held up: the car wasn’t turned over to a used car lot, it went to one of the largest Ford dealerships in the city. There was a transfer issued to a William Rosen who signed the document, only it was determined that the signature was a forgery. Rosen had been a Communist Party member but had been tossed out of the Party years before. Nor had he been a poor organizer out West. He owned a dry cleaning establishment in DC. None of above makes it into Berresford’s summary.

There’s more, too but there’s no point in going over the details. If any reader wants to know more about this, they should read George Eddy’s research into it. The pages on the Ford in his unpublished book can be found among Eddy’s papers at the Harvard Law School library. 

Chambers’ Sexuality

             

Berresford writes that Hiss tried to silence Chambers by suggesting he was gay. He describes the defense’s actions toward Chambers as “despicable.” Actually, the first person who tried to inject the question of sexuality into the story was Chambers who told HUAC inaccurately on August 7th 1948 that Alger walked with a mince.

I don’t know how anyone can read the defense files and come away with the impression that the defense was focused on smearing Chambers as a gay man. While there were surely homophobes on Hiss’s legal team, what they were clearly trying to do was figure out what might have been Chambers’ motives for leveling these false charges; was Chambers attracted to Alger and angry after Alger showed no interest; or was Chambers angry after Alger ended their brief friendship, thus putting the monthly stipend Chambers was supposedly receiving from the Communist Party at risk.  

They just had no idea. 

Once Chambers confessed, did the FBI use it against Chambers? We don’t know. We know they used it against Tim Hobson who was tossed out of the Navy for confessing to a gay affair with a superior officer. After the FBI let its intentions be known, Alger refused to let Tim testify. He supposedly said he’d rather have gone to prison than see his stepson’s private life dragged over public coals. 

Tim thought the defense was squeamish about his being gay but thinks he would have been an effective witness. Berresford doesn’t think so, and he’s entitled to his opinion but Tim’s testimony would have gone to two very important issues and he would have been the only one outside the Hisses to address them. Both poke huge holes in Chambers’ story. 

The first was Chambers’ testimony that Alger was his best friend in the underground. He called the Hisses’ home on 30th street his headquarters, but he simply had no idea that Tim was in a dreadful accident while riding his bike. He nearly lost his leg as a result and was bedridden for months. It wasn’t until six months laster that Chambers mentioned it while testifying in a deposition for Hiss’s libel suit. It was obvious that he had just been told about it, but he still got it wrong.  

Tim also said that Chambers never came around. On 30th Street, Tim’s bedroom was right above the front door, so he would have seen him or heard him but didn’t. Berresford writes that the testimony of a “loving son” wouldn’t have resonated with the jury. I can see Tim laughing out loud at that one. When I once asked Tim why anyone should believe him when it comes to Alger’s innocence, he responded by saying, “I didn’t love them enough to lie for them” That attitude comes through clearly in Tim’s 2002 oral history interview that has been posted online for more than a decade.               

“Gumbyism”Again

And here again is Berresford doing his Gumby routine. Chambers changing his story on such a memorable situation and changing it radically is a matter of no importance. If Hiss changes his story, it’s either an attempt at a coverup or a lie. He’s even taken to task for delineating his routine in handling the documents that came across his desk. To confirm Hiss’s shiftiness, Berresford cites an anecdote from a publisher named Hiram Haden who met Hiss for a couple of hours in the 1950s. He found Hiss to be guarded about what he said. Clearly, he was guilty. The algerhiss.com Web site has more than a dozen oral history interviews with Alger. Nearly everyone knew Hiss for years. Berresford thinks Haden’s couple of hours with him were more telling. It appears that anyone who had or has a positive response to Hiss was either acting strictly out of a political view or was hoodwinked. 

Edith Murray

Berresford also finds the testimony of the Chambers’ former maid, Edith Murray, to be credible.  Murray swore the Hisses visited the Chambers home when she was working there in 1936. The Hisses denied it, but Berresford says she was telling the truth. 

The FBI’s files say she wasn’t. In her interviews with the Bureau, she said that a lady from Washington came to visit. She said she thought she was associated with a slender gentleman who was nice. She wasn’t even sure they came to visit. It was possible though that they did before she left for the night. 

In her signed statement compiled from the interviews, she added these details: the agents showed her a photo of Alger and told her who it was. She said he “looked like” the man who was nice. They also showed her a photo of Priscilla and told her her name. She said she didn’t recall Esther Chambers introducing her to someone by that name. All she said was it looked like a photo of the lady.

 At trial the woman whose name she didn’t know in her FBI interviews was now Miss Priscilla. On cross examination, she said the FBI didn’t tell her their names. 

She also pointed her out in court as the lady who came, even though before the FBI Priscilla only looked like the lady. 

After she testified, prosecutor Tom Murphy called her the essence of honesty and simplicity. Twice after the trial, in what sounded like a threat, Murray hit the FBI up for money. Both times the Chambers’ paid her off. 

Berresford makes a point of saying how nicely they treated her when she worked for them. That’s nice. It’s also irrelevant.  Any lawyer would be concerned about the contradictions between what she told the FBI and what she told the jury. Not Berresford. 

Hede Massing

In a remarkably frank description, an FBI document called Hede Massing “a Viennese woman with a doubtful reputation.”  This extended no doubt to  her claim that she and Alger, as secret members of the CP, flirtatiously jousted  over who would get Noel Field’s services. As such, she was the only witness other than Chambers to testify that Alger was a member of the Communist underground. The many reasons why her story should be called into question are listed in Rewriting History and also here in an article I wrote for algerhiss.com. That article is more complete than the section in Rewriting Hisstory. 

There’s no use repeating it here. Berresford offers no new information. I suggest comparing the stories with an eye toward what Berresford omits from his piece.

The Rugs

I remember when the Hiss web site arranged to interview Vitaly Pavlov, the former head of the KGB in North America, beginning around 1939. He was asked to comment on Chambers’ story of giving hiss another’s a rug. “A carpet,” he said. “You give him something small that he could hide, not a carpet.”

Chambers originally told Alger that he got the rug as part of some kind of deal. According to the grand jury testimony of Abraham George Silverman’s, a government employee Chambers accused of being part of his group, Chambers told him virtually the same thing. When the DA expressed doubt and asked him if he wanted to change it, he said no, and he didn’t. Nor was he indicted for perjury. That the two stories coincided seems important to me.

Silverman went on to testify that he received two rugs. He gave one to his friend Harry White who had helped him through a separation from his wife.  Berresford says this part of his story is ridiculous. Why is it ridiculous? Because Berresford says it is. One problem with that is White’s daughter told me it was true.

There were so many aspects of Chambers’ story that didn’t make sense upon examination. Berresford’s only avenue for attacking the questions raised is to pronounce them to be ridiculous. Readers can see for themselves by comparing the signatures on the check and rug receipt that Meyer Schapiro and his wife lied.                                                                                                    

A Brief Note About the Conspiracy Chapter

While addressing my chapters on why and how Alger was targeted and then framed, Berresford makes errors that suggest he was reading the chapters too quickly to comprehend what was in them. Take for example, his guess that I am saying the conspiracy was led by James Byrnes, the former Governor of South Carolina who later succeeded Edward R. Stettinius as Secretary of State. While Byrnes and three other South Carolinians, including Bynes’s sister (who was the first to level allegations against Alger) were openly suspicious of Alger, he had nothing to do as far as I can tell with the conspiracy to frame him. Nor did I suggest it. Yet Berresford bizarrely says I do.

Then, on page 99, he again appears to have taken notes long after his bedtime. This time he writes that I contradict myself when I say I smacked myself aside the head when I realized who was behind the conspiracy and later when I suggest one way that it could have been carried out. 

These were two different actions entirely. It was clear that Isaac Don Levine  and Ben Mandel were the plotters but how they carried out the forgery remains a mystery. By taking a step by step assessment, I was surprised to learn that it would have been relatively simple to carry out  I then laid out one way that it could have happened. I have no idea where the contradiction is there.     

Berresford must have forgotten the first page of the book that says we don’t know for sure how they pulled it off. Hiss’s innocence is clear, someone had to produce the papers. And based on what we do know about typewriter forgery and the connections between the most likely participants, by applying logic to the process, it’s clear that it wouldn’t have been that difficult. This was no grand conspiracy involving a large number of participants. By keeping it small and keeping it secret, the plotters were able to do a relatively simple task while keeping a lid on it. 

Nothing in Berresford’s objections indicates it couldn’t happen. Just putting the word ridiculous in front of statements doesn’t hack it. While Berresford says that if Levine and Mandel had used a typewriter to create the documents, they would have subsequently destroyed it, how does he know? There were all sorts of logical reasons for why they would have held on to it. And how does he account for the typewriter, which was supposedly useless and kept outside in the bad weather, being in such perfect condition? He can’t. 

Etc.

Berresford’s piece is littered with errors, not the small errors of fact that he points out from Rewriting Hisstory but larger errors, mistaken assumptions, errors of omission, all of which are key to the various arguments that he raises. Here are just a few, and not even the most important ones:

* He claims I exaggerate character traits of Chambers even though they are all documented. For emphasis, he asks how could my description of his difficult high school years be accurate when he was chosen to be the valedictorian of his high school class. The answer is he wasn’t. He was chosen not by his classmates but by the superintendent to deliver what was called the class prophecy and while, not surprisingly Chambers was an excellent English student, according to Meyer Zeligs, he was a poor math and science student who also failed geometry. He was no valedictorian. 

 *Berresford denies that Francis Sayre, Hiss’s boss in the State Department  was so frightened by the FBI and of damage to his reputation from the case that he became a confidential informant for the Bureau, informing them of defense strategies. Berresford jumps through all kinds of hoops to explain away Sayre’s behavior, but again it’s all there in the FBI files, which make Sayre seem rather pathetic. While being repeatedly interviewed by the Bureau and Justice Department, he gave away a lot of useful information.

* Berresford writes that I “sneered” when I criticized ex-communist witnesses for making money. Again, he is simply demonstrating basic problems with reading comprehension. Regarding Hede Massing, I pointed out that she had a book and magazine deal that were contingent on a favorable jury verdict. That would give her some incentive to lie, and as Rewriting Hisstory points out, there was considerable evidence that she did so. That’s just reporting facts. Nobody is sneering except Berresford.

* Chambers was also writing a book at the time of the trials. I point out that Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine and Chambers were negotiating his out from the magazine before the HUAC hearings. As mentioned earlier Berresford expresses doubt that this is true because I neglected to post the documents online, but they are there in the footnotes, and he was free to find them himself. He just chose not to. Here’s one, for example:

* Berresford also says that Chambers had only one source of income in the early 1930s. Indeed, he testified before HUAC that he only translated one book in the early 1930s. According to Bill Reuben, Hiss’s investigators found that Chambers is listed as the translator of more than a dozen books in that period. They include (starting with Bambi in 1928) Bambi, The Sentimental Vagabond, The Passionate Rebel , Fifteen Rabbits Adventures of Mario, Collected Works of Pierre Louys, The Venetian Lover, Samson and Delilah, Mugel the Giant, The Scorpion, The City Jungle

Chambers also inherited money from his grandmother during that period.

* In his piece, he says that Hiss’s original attorney William Marbury came to believe that Hiss was guilty, because he thought Priscilla was more radical than he let on. But Marbury’s take was more subtle than that, according to John Chabot Smith who interviewed Marbury several times. Marbury believed mostly that Priscilla was hiding something and that Alger was coming to her rescue, something he believed Alger often did. Subtlety is not Berresford’s forte.     

* He writes that “Hisstory Claims” unethical coaching. Berresford pronounces this ridiculous. One example I cite: Esther Chambers describes the 30th Street house nearly to a “t”, except it’s the house next door, which is laid out to the opposite of the Hisses’ home. The colors she has right — of the house next door. 

And Last But Not Least I Omit Evidence of Hiss’s Guilt

Berresford cites four examples of this. 

1) Edouard Daladier. 

William C. Bullitt was the first ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was appointed by Roosevelt in 1933. The two later had a series of falling outs over policies and personal matters. By the late 1940s, he was a staunch right winger and a supporter of the China Lobby. 

In testimony  before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1952, Bullitt claimed that Edouard Daladier, the former prime minister of France, told him he had been told that the Hisses were Soviet agents. 

That’s when the story began to fall apart. Daladier told Associated Press he couldn’t remember any such conversation with Bullitt. Nor had he heard anything about the Hisses. 

According to The New York Times, Bullitt said he took the story to Hiss’s boss, Stanley K. Hornbeck and demanded an immediate investigation be made, but Hornbeck told the Times, that Bullitt had told him only that he had heard rumors that the Hisses were “fellow travelers” not Soviet agents. Nor did Bullitt say anything about his source or demand any kind of investigation.

Among the people that Isaac Don Levine told about his and Chambers’ 1939 meeting with Adolph Berle was Bullitt, who may have been confusing or forgetting his source. Either way, it’s a real stretch to consider such a vague story to be “evidence.”

2) The story Manny Bloch revealed to the defense

This is right out of Weinstein’s “Perjury.” Emmanuel “Manny” Bloch was a lawyer who represented several people accused of being Communists or spies. He told Hiss’s lawyer, that he was told that the Ford  controversy was the result of a favor someone did for the Party. 

That’s it. 

3) Hiss didn’t respond to a Maryland Communist Party official who was incarcerated in Lewisburg prison when Alger was, even when the person claimed he had inside knowledge about the Ford car. 

This is Berresford at his Gumbyist. I have no idea what to say about this story, which was originally told by Garry Wills. Berresford who criticizes me as a “mindreader” says if Hiss was innocent he would have collared the guy to find out all he knew. 

How does he know? 

Or maybe, Hiss didn’t trust talking with someone he hardly knew because who knows what motive the person would have had for talking to him. Or maybe he didn’t want to be seen talking to a known Communist because that could create problems for himself. Or both.

4) According to Hiss’s former lawyer, Claude Cross, a pediatrician said she saw Chambers at the Hiss home in 1937, thus proving that Hiss lied when he said he didn’t see Chambers after January 1 , 1937.

This is another regurgitation from Weinstein. The story has so many holes in it it’s not worth mentioning except that Berresford brings it up. On the one hand, I’m presuming that Berresford has heard the tape of Weinstein and Alden Whitman interviewing Claude Cross, Alger’s lead attorney in the second trial, three months before Cross died of throat cancer. On the other hand, I can’t make that presumption since he says that the doctor, Mary Margaret Nicholson saw Chambers at the house. That’s not what the tape says.

Cross says he heard it from Nicholson but she wasn’t sure at all that it was Chambers. As for Cross, he had no idea either. Nobody could confirm the story. Of the two other people who were at the house. Tim Hobson, who was being examined by Dr. Nicholson, said he never met Chambers. The other person who was there, Priscilla Hiss, sat for two interviews with Weinstein. There is nothing in his notes of those two interviews that indicates that he even asked her about it, which is odd, considering he said he would. 

Then there is Chambers himself who said nothing about it even though that would have helped the case tremendously, if Chambers had testified that there was a witness who saw him at the house in early 1937. Finally, Cross said he was hoping to represent Alger in his (successful) effort to get reinstated to the Massachusetts Bar later that year. If he had evidence that Alger was lying and said so publicly, why would he represent him before the Bar?

When considering the issues not mentioned in the rebuttal, the above four examples and the rest of the response, should reveal what a reader needs to know about how Berresford assembles his arguments and his reliability as a researcher. Since it ultimately adds nothing to the discussion about Hiss or my work, maybe at 131-pages, his piece’s ultimate message is that all writers, including those with their heads in the sand (or up somewhere else), need an editor. 

RewritingHisstory

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