Etc.

From Harry Dexter White’s granddaughter:

Whittaker Chambers accused a many people of being secret Communists or b”eing aligned" with the Communist Party. One of those was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry White. 

White appeared before HUAC on August 13, 1948 and defended himself well. During the hearing, however, he repeatedly asked the members for a break, saying he had a heart condition and just needed to relax a bit. Nixon and other Republicans on the committee laughed at him and refused to grant his request. 

Two days later, White died of a heart attack. He was 55. Hiss loss to this government and to his family and friends was immeasurable. He was a great man. Three months later, Whittaker Chambers produced several scraps of notes on yellow legal paper. The notes were in White's handwriting. Chambers said White gave them to him for transmission to the Russians. White's family pointed out that the information on the paper was useless, and it was most logically fished out the garbage by Chambers or a confederate. He did the same thing with the so-called Pumpkin Papers that were used against Hiss. Of course, White couldn't defend himself by then. 

Two days ago, this arrived in my email box. It's the kind of thing every writer dreams of getting. 

Hello Jeff,

I’m late to the party on this, since Rewriting Hisstory has been out for a while, but I don’t really follow the subject and I only recently heard from Jim Boughton that you’d succeeded in having the book published.

When my copy arrived, I was, of course, happy to see that you included a thank-you to my mother, Joan Pinkham, who I think would have been very impressed with your work. But I was stunned to see my own name in the acknowledgements, because, if I helped at all, it was in such a tiny way that I’ve forgotten what I did. But thanks, just the same, for the thank-you.

I’m really impressed with the book. You are exceptionally thorough, fair-minded, and, perhaps best of all, add a bit of much-needed humor to the telling. You also do an excellent job, in the Epilogue, of saying how important it is to understand that history can (and often does) repeat itself. The past six months, unfortunately, show just how right you are.

On a happier note… how cool to have entered the FBI lexicon with your very own brand of file – the Kisseloff number! I also think it’s nifty that, having spent 50 years on the project, you’ve outlasted Hoover, who spent only 48 years at the Bureau.

When you describe the mountain of FBI material you went through, it reminds me of the two banker’s boxes my mother received in the 1980s, as part of the Freedom of Information Act, containing Harry White’s FBI file. The majority of the material – we’re talking a couple thousand sheets of paper – involved fan mail sent to Hoover, congratulating him on being such a wonderful defender of American values by targeting White. (There was one message, from a senior citizen in Florida, thanking Hoover for working to stem the red tide, since he missed eating local mussels.) Hoover, or his secretary, sent humble-bragging responses to many of those who wrote in, and those responses were part of the file, too. Every letter or postcard was, of course, investigated first, to be sure the send was, in fact, worthy of a response and didn’t merit a notation in another file somewhere. So much time and paper spent stroking Hoover’s ego and feeding his paranoia – and all of it irrelevant to White himself.

I like Tony Hiss’s intro and echo his appreciation for your hard work and stick-to-itiveness. What he doesn’t mention, though, is something I think needs to be said: books like yours do a lot to heal very deep family wounds. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to grow up with the Hiss name. In my own family, Harry White’s death was the defining tragedy in my mother’s life and an event she never really got over. I grew up in the shadow of that tragedy and have often heard, from relatives and people who were close to my grandparents, about the ways the McCarthy era, and the accusations against White, poisoned their own lives. When a historian like you or Jim Boughton publishes something that helps put the accusations in context, while highlighting the accomplishments of those accused, it feels like much-needed vindication, not just for the accused, but for their families and friends, too. So I thank you, not just for championing Hiss, but for helping to support the argument that all of McCarthy’s victims deserve a second look.

I would close by saying keep up the good work, but I think that, after 50 years hard at it, you deserve a rest. So I hope you’re putting your feet up, enjoying a bit of baseball, and basking in the glow of a job exceptionally well done.

Best wishes,

Claire