Jeff Kisseloff: Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss

Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss – Jeff Kisseloff – 9780700638338 – Hardcover – 392 pages – University of Kansas Press – April 19th, 2025 – $34.99 -ebook versions available at lower prices

I’ve known about the Alger Hiss case since I was a kid,  growing up in the early post-McCarthy era. And in my own family we had two close relatives, both writers, who were blacklisted, and many friends of my parents had been blacklisted at some point as well. So it was a milieu that made the Hiss story living history for me well into my adulthood. Hiss never gave up publicly claiming he was innocent of the spying he had been accused of by the infamous Whittaker Chambers, and well into the early seventies, his supporters included public intellectuals who both believed him and publicized the effort to clear his name.

Jeff Kisseloff’s Rewriting Hisstory is a firsthand account of his fifty years investigating the facts of Alger Hiss’s life and travails. He started out researching the story for a college paper, then worked for Hiss and finally was able to determine the truth about the entire Hiss saga. It is truly an amazing memoir, and is never boring. Jeff uncovered troves of original material, including 150,000 pages of mostly unredacted previously unreleased FBI files he sued the FBI to get. He collected many documents from government and library collections around the country. And amazingly, Jeff acquired the typewriter known as Woodstock 230099, that the government claimed was used to type copies of State Department documents that were used as the crucial documentary evidence against Hiss.

If you are not familiar with this part of American history – Alger Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948 of being a secret Communist spy in the 1930s and the subsequent perjury trial against Hiss was a major political event in the early fifties, a key part of the effort to “prove” that communists had infiltrated the federal government during the FDR administration – which was used by right wing figures to both discredit the “liberal” Democrats and to establish the groundwork for the Cold War and an ironically authoritarian approach to keeping democracy free. Hiss was convicted but always proclaimed his innocence until his death. Historians have taken sides and up to now, no one has proved Hiss to have told the truth. Kisseloff’s incredible tenacity brings real clarity to a complicated storyline. Almost in crime novel fashion, Jeff puts together the pieces that enable him name the only people who could have framed Alger Hiss.

As the publisher accurately says “Rewriting Hisstory is a thrilling political page-turner about an accused spy that is itself a work of scholarly espionage, built on decades of painstaking research. This is an iconoclastic work that should rewrite history books.”

Jeff and I had a terrific conversation about his work and I am certain that you will enjoy hearing what he has to say here.

Buy the book from Bookshop.org (and support local bookstores)
Kisseloff’s book website here

“Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers. It was the most politically explosive trial of the twentieth century. And while many historians believe the case is settled history, now comes Jeff Kisseloff with an indictment against the conventional wisdom. Kisseloff presents meticulous evidence to portray Chambers as a serial fabulist. Die-hard believers in Hiss’s guilt will be outraged. But clearly, they have not had the last word. This book is sure to stir a hornet’s nest of controversy.”–Kai Bird, coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Jeff’s bio: Jeff Kisseloff is a former newspaper reporter and editor whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. He is also the author of five books, including Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s–An Oral History, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920 to 1961, and You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II.

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Lew Paper: Perfect-Don Larsen’s Miraculous World Series Game and the Men who made it Happen

978-0451228192 – Hardcover – New American Library – $24.95

An entire book about one baseball game is probably unimaginable to many people.  Even diehard fans, even those who feel they have heard the story of Don Larsen’s unique feat more than enough times, will be surprised at how easy this book is to (avidly) consume.  Lew Paper manages to keep our attention, even though we know how the story comes out, even though we may know the game, the players, the era so well.  And there are plenty of surprises in these pages.

Paper is a very good writer, almost effortless, and a he is a natural storyteller who plainly loves the material he is writing about.  He uses the game as the structure for telling much more than the story of a single game, of course.  He portrays many of the players in this game, Dodger greats like Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and hard-luck pitcher Sal Maglie, the powerful Yankee team of the fifties, which sported Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin, Gil McDougal, Moose Skowron and Hank Bauer, all in the prime of their careers.  He brings to life the story of this great team rivalry between two boroughs of the greatest city on earth in the middle of the 1950s, an era that still can fascinate and enthrall us.  And of course baseball is the constant through time, whose essence does not change at all.

It does help to be a baseball fan to like this book, I am sure, and maybe having grown up in or near this great era of intra-New York City competition adds to one’s interest as well.  It was definitely a different time than today, when even star players held real jobs during the off season, and the amount of money won in a World Series could be just enough to give a player some modest luxuries and fleeting financial security.  And of course many of these players had grown up during the Depression, lived through or even fought in World War II or the Korean War.  That may account for some of the different attitudes and behaviors they exhibited on the field and among friends.

But there can be no doubt that Lew Paper has brought this game, these players, this era, vividly to life in a beautiful and brilliant manner.  Talking to him about this book, the research he did to write it, and some of his experiences in talking to surviving players, relatives and witnesses to Don Larsen’s spectacular (and still unique) feat , was a great pleasure for me.  I do love baseball, the game and its history have a terrific pull on me, as it does on many others, but baseball is also just a wonderful lens through which to see human beings, our culture, our foibles, our strengths and our desires.  Thanks to Lew Paper for this book and a terrific interview about it.

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