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.