Weinstein, Allen 1937-

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WEINSTEIN, Allen 1937-

PERSONAL: Born September 1, 1937, in New York, NY; son of Samuel (a storekeeper) and Sarah (Popkoff) Weinstein; married Adrienne Dominguez, June 14, 1995; children: Andrew Samuel, David Meyer, Alex. Education: College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1960; Yale University, M.A., 1962, Ph.D., 1967. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Center for Democracy, 1155 15th St. N.W., Washington, DC 20005.

CAREER: Educator and author. University of Maryland, College Park, lecturer in history, 1964-66; Smith College, Northampton, MA, began as assistant professor, professor of history, 1966-81, director of the American studies program, 1972-77; Georgetown University, Washington, DC, professor of history, 1981-83; Boston University, Boston, MA, professor of history, 1985-89. The Democracy Program, executive director, 1982-83; National Endowment for Democracy, acting president, 1983-84; R.M. Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, CA, president, 1984; Center for Democracy, Washington, DC, founding president and CEO, 1985—. Massachusetts Council on the Arts, member of humanities advisory council, 1975-77; Twentieth-Century Fund, director of project on access and privacy, 1977-78; U.S. Institute for Peace, founding member of the board of directors, 1985-2001; International Institute of Democracy (Strasbourg, France), officer, 1989-2001; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, non-voting chairman, 1996—. Also served as coordinator and vice-chairman of the U.S. delegation to the 1982 UNESCO World Conference on Culture and vice-chairman of the U.S. delegation to the 1983 UNESCO-sponsored International Program for the Development of Communication meeting.

MEMBER: Society of American Historians, American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Columbia University Seminar in American Civilization (associate), Cosmos Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities research grant, 1968; Binkley-Stephenson Prize for best article in Journal of American History, 1968; Senior Fulbright lectureship at Australian universities, 1971; American Council of Learned Societies fellow, 1975; Harry S. Truman Library Institute award, 1975; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, Hoover Institution, 1977-78; American Book Award nomination, 1980, for Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case; Woodrow Wilson Center fellow, 1981; United Nations Peace Medal, 1986; Council of Europe Silver Medal, 1990, 1996; award from the government of President Violeta Chamorro (for efforts in democratization of Nicaragua), 1991; University of London Commonwealth Fund Lectureship in U.S. history.

WRITINGS:

(Editor with Frank Otto Gatell) American Themes: Essays in Historiography, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1968.

(Editor with Gatell) American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1968, 3rd revised edition, 1979.

(Editor with Gatell) The Segregation Era 1863-1954: A Modern Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1970.

Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1970.

(General editor) Random House Readings in American History, six volumes, Random House (New York, NY), 1970.

Origins of Modern America, 1865-1900, Random House (New York, NY), 1970.

(Editor with Gatell and Paul Goodman) The Growth of American Politics: A Modern Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1972.

(Editor with Gatell and Goodman) Readings in American Political History: A Modern Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1972.

(With R.J. Wilson) Freedom and Crisis: An American History, Random House (New York, NY), 1974, 3rd edition with Gatell, 1981.

Between the Wars: American Foreign Policy from Versailles to Pearl Harbor, Berkley (New York, NY), 1978.

Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Knopf (New York, NY), 1978, Random House (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor with Moshe Ma'Oz) Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, Hebrew University Press (Jerusalem, Israel), 1981.

(Editor with Ma'Oz) Truman and the American Commitment to Israel: A Thirtieth Anniversary Conference, Magnes Press, Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel), 1981.

(Lecturer with others) Evolution and Revolutions: The World in Change, edited by Mel G. Simpson, Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), 1990.

(Editor with Pamela Reeves and Stefanie Sobol) The Status of Human Rights under the Helsinki Accords: An Agenda for the Future, Center for Democracy (Washington, DC), 1990.

(With Alexander Vassiliev) The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

(With David Rubel) The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower, DK Pub Co. (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of articles to numerous publications, including American Historical Review, American Scholar, Commentary, Journal of American History, Journal of American Studies, Nation, New York Times Book Review, TransAction, Business History Review, Esquire, New York Times, and New Republic. Member of editorial board, Washington Post, 1981. Executive editor, Washington Quarterly, 1981-83. Member of editorial board, Foreign Policy Association, 1982. Editor, The Center Magazine (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), 1984.

SIDELIGHTS: In 1950, Alger Hiss, former U.S. State Department aide, was convicted on two counts of perjury: one for denying that he met with Time editor Whittaker Chambers in February or March of 1938, and the second for testifying that he did not provide Chambers, an admitted Communist spy, with classified documents. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death in 1996. He insisted that Chambers was a pathological liar, that he was an early victim of Communist witch-hunt tactics, and that his case was used by certain ruthless politicians to further their own careers. Hiss' grand jury testimony and the outcome of the trial came to represent far more than the guilt or innocence of an individual. As Commonweal contributor Peter Steinfels put it, "A lot of symbolism was pumped into the Hiss case. Hiss represented the New Deal. Hiss represented the 'best people,' the Ivy League crowd with pin-stripes and pinko sympathies. Hiss represented the victim of anti-Communist hysteria, of HUAC [House Unamerican Activities Committee] and McCarthyism."

Allen Weinstein began research on the Hiss-Chambers case in 1969, convinced, he said, that Alger Hiss was innocent. "My first article on the case," he told a Publishers Weekly interviewer, "indicates my sympathy for Hiss." In 1972, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union convinced him to sue, under the Freedom of Information Act, for access to the FBI files on the case. In November, 1973, Weinstein was given the files which were to change his opinion of Hiss. He said, "I thought the suit would go on for years. But then came Watergate and then Elliot Richardson as Attorney General, and suddenly there were the Hiss files." Weinstein and several research assistants studied 40,000 pages of documents; he traveled 125,000 miles and interviewed hundreds of people who had been involved with the case, including forty who supposedly had never been questioned before; he interviewed Alger Hiss and his wife. The book that resulted from this extensive research, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, concluded that the jury "made no mistake in finding Alger Hiss guilty as charged."

Weinstein's work on the controversial case provoked immediate and intense controversy itself. The book was hailed by conservatives as the definitive treatise on the subject and denounced by liberals as one more card in a deck stacked against Alger Hiss. George F. Will wrote in Newsweek, "Occasionally a work of history is a historic event. This is one such. It is stunningly meticulous, and a monument to the intellectual ideal of truth stalked to its hiding place." He continued, "It is based on 40,000 pages of previously classified material, and meetings with forty people involved but never before interviewed, including retired Soviet agents who confirm Whittaker Chambers' testimony. The myth of Hiss' innocence suffers the death of a thousand cuts, delicate destruction by a scholar's scalpel."

One of Weinstein's earliest and most vocal critics was Victor Navasky. Navasky stated in the Nation that a review of Weinstein's writings "reveals no commitment to the innocence of Alger Hiss. Whatever his original motives and aspirations, Professor Weinstein is now an embattled partisan, hopelessly mired in the perspective of one side," the reviewer continued. "[Weinstein's] conversion from scholar to partisan, along with a rhetoric and methodology that confuse his beliefs with his data, make it impossible for the nonspecialist to render an honest verdict on the case. This condition, however, should not inhibit us from rendering a necessarily negative verdict on the scholarship itself."

Victor Navasky checked with seven of Weinstein's key sources to confirm the accuracy of statements attributed to them. Six of them claimed that Weinstein had distorted some or all of their quotes. According to a Newsweek article, Weinstein replied by showing reporters "a mass of tape recordings and interview transcripts that he said confirmed his account. The reasons for the attack on his research, he asserted, was simply that liberals felt 'betrayed' by his affirmation of Hiss' guilt." Navasky concluded that, "Whatever new data Weinstein may have gathered are fatally tainted by his unprofessionalism, his apparent intolerance for ambiguity, especially when it gets in the way of his thesis." Finally, Navasky stated, "The target of Perjury is Alger Hiss and his claim of innocence, but its temporary victim is historical truth."

John Chabot Smith, author of Alger Hiss: The True Story, in which he asserted Hiss' innocence, and reporter at the trial in 1949-50, also questions the seriousness of Weinstein's scholarship in Perjury. He called the book in a Harper's review "a sadly disjointed work, in which research reports seem to have been pasted together without sufficient context or interpretation on the professor's part to make them useful. There is little or no critical analysis of the validity of the material quoted or the reliability of the sources; Weinstein's technique is to argue with every statement that seems to support Hiss, and accept every pro-Chambers statement without question." Believing that Weinstein relies too heavily on interviews with prejudicial parties rather than concentrating on the newly released FBI files, Smith wrote, "Weinstein pays less attention to these documents than to other material he got from former associates of Whittaker Chambers and alleged members of various Communist underground groups and Soviet spy organizations, though none of these people had anything useful to tell him about Hiss, and only one of them even claimed to have met him."

Smith's own study of the documents revealed that "it was not only Chambers the perjurer and Nixon the popularity-seeker who contrived the miscarriage of justice by which Hiss was convicted. Groundwork had been laid for them by the self-serving actions of J. Edgar Hoover and James F. Byrnes, not to mention the personal resentments of the respected 'adviser to Presidents,' Bernard Baruch. By condemning Hiss unheard, without revealing his accuser or the accusations against him, they sealed his fate before he or the public knew anything about it. This is not a 'conspiracy theory,' as Weinstein likes to say; it is an observation of the way this bit of history happened. It is based on documents Weinstein evidently overlooked, part of a huge volume of new documentation that deserves further study, from scholars less committed to their own theory of the Hiss-Chambers case, and better qualified to study it."

The battle over the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss is being fought as vigorously today as it was in 1950 when the verdict was handed down. And, if the reaction to Perjury is any indication, the battle will continue. The lines were drawn at the time of the trial and sides are still being chosen: liberals, New Dealers, anti-McCarthyites, anti-Nixonites, and "anti-anti-Communists" on the left; and conservatives, anti-Communists, anti-Liberal Press, "witch-hunters" on the right. According to Smith, the controversy revolves around two men, "one convicted of perjury and the other a confessed perjurer whose testimony helped convict the other." Weinstein, in a Time interview, stated his case simply: "In the end, Chambers' version turned out to be truthful, and Hiss' version did not. Alger Hiss is a victim of the facts." In truth, the case may be so complicated and the arguments so involved and so far removed from what actually occurred, that nothing short of a monumental revelation could hope to resolve the debate.

Weinstein teamed up with former KGB agent-turned-journalist Alexander Vassiliev to write an exposing account of Soviet espionage in America beginning in the 1930s and stretching through World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. They called it The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the book's publisher made a monetary and contractual deal with both the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)—a descendant agency of the KGB—and the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers—an organization of former KGB agents—giving the authors permission to read and transcribe (but not remove or photocopy, and only at the discretion of Russia's then prime minister Yevgeny Primakov) previously classified Soviet intelligence documents. The authors discovered vast amounts of top-secret American military and diplomatic information divulged to the USSR during their more than twenty visits to Russia between 1994 and 1996. Weinstein and Vassiliev studied thousands of Soviet intelligence documents, including translated transcripts of the cables of the U.S.'s Venona Project, which dealt with the disclosure of atomic information that ultimately led to the speedy development of Russian atomic warfare. After two years of research by Weinstein and Vassiliev, however, the stream of information was dammed by the Russian government, who decided to end its contract with the writers and their publisher.

In The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev expose the details surrounding the espionage, treason, and ultimate betrayal of several top-ranking American figures, including Elizabeth Bentley, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Laurence Duggan, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alfred and Martha Dodd Stern, Michael Straight, Samuel Dickstein, and again, Alger Hiss. While it is not new information that these figures were involved in the divulgence of classified information to Russia, the great expanse of these networks as revealed in this book was previously unknown to both specialists and nonspecialists. The authors also divulge the dramatic human relations involved in these deceptions and relate personal tales of those involved, including an impressive telling of how Bentley's defection caused the cessation of the entire Soviet espionage operation in the United States. The book also relates how a few years after this eye-opening event, the Soviet Union attempted to reestablish contacts with American spies, but failed because their status as suspected spies had been divulged and they were all under close scrutiny, though none revealed by Bentley were ever prosecuted. Attempts to find new spies also failed, and just as the threat of espionage was realized, in reality, it became almost nonexistent.

Many critics questioned the validity of the information provided to Weinstein and Vassiliev. "Who is to say that papers produced by a counter-intelligence program that operated during a time of occasionally paranoid (but also generally well-founded) suspicion of the Soviet Union are not tainted?" asked Sam Tanenhaus in a review of The Haunted Wood for New Republic. Tanenhaus continued by pointing out that Weinstein "simply leaves it to the reader to accept his conclusions on good faith," and ultimately concluded, "This is a book marred by sensationalism." Nation contributor Ellen Schrecker also found it difficult to accept the book's information on faith alone. "This sort of research is not the kind that inspires confidence within the scholarly community," Schrecker wrote. "Besides the ethical questions that buying exclusive access to official archives raises, it will be impossible to replicate—and thus check up on the authors' research. Since they were not allowed to see finding aids for the files, they were (and we are) completely at the mercy of the KGB's gatekeepers, whose principles of selection are unknown. In addition," she continued, "because no photocopying was permitted, other scholars cannot verify how accurately the documents were transcribed and interpreted." Schrecker suggested that Weinstein's work may have been "the product of a massive disinformation scheme involving thousands of forged documents created by a seamless and leak-less network of Russian and American agents dedicated to historical fabrication." She does point out, however, that "it is hard to imagine why such a project would have been undertaken and much easier to assume that Weinstein's material is probably the real thing."

Even those reviewers who made negative remarks about the book's style ultimately recognized its value. Though Salon.com reviewer Jerome Perzigian felt that the book's information was "haphazard and difficult to track" because "names, dates, facts, and figures are all sprayed at the reader like a sneeze," Perzigian pointed out that the book "contains nuggets of raw information unobtainable anywhere else." Similarly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviewer Bob Hoover wrote that the book's "plodding style, overuse of exclamation marks, and heavy dependence on frequently boring correspondence" make it "tough to wade through." Hoover concluded the review by stating, "Still, this is not a book to be forgotten. Reaping the benefits of the brief Russian-American thaw, The Haunted Wood gives us a rare look at some of the twentieth century's most critical and virtually unknown episodes."

Despite issues of validity and organization, National Review contributor Peter W. Rodman maintained that "Weinstein is a brilliant historian" and that "The Haunted Wood deserves an honored place in literature." In a review for New Leader, Harvey Klehr called the book a "fascinating, detailed, and revealing portrait" of such activities in the era, stating that "The Haunted Wood is a valuable resource for understanding both the successes and failures of Soviet espionage in America. It presents dramatic and conclusive evidence, too, that most of the assertions about Soviet spies in the United States made during the 1940s were on the mark." One Publishers Weekly contributor pointed out, "The authors write as historians, not polemicists, eschewing both cheap moralism and apologetics." This same reviewer felt that "although the narrative occasionally bogs down in profuse detail, it is also packed with plenty of intriguing characters and cloak-and-dagger tales of secrecy, subversion, and betrayal."

Weinstein's next undertaking was an equally large but, at times, more light-hearted subject: a retelling of the major events in American history, from Columbus—voyage to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. With coauthor David Rubel, Weinstein's The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower is comprised of twenty-six accounts of historical events such as the Salem witch trials, the Civil War, slave revolt, and many other pieces of America's past, all supplemented with pictures and sidebar information on the people and places around which these events revolved. With the entire history of a country to cover in one book, Booklist's Gilbert Taylor commented that the prose is "ruthlessly economical, but it is also high quality, on target, and concise," concluding that The Story of America "opens the American historical panorama for new discoverers." Daniel Liemann, in a review of the book for Library Journal, stated that The Story of America is "a refreshing approach to narrative histories of the United States." Liemann maintained that the book's format "allows the authors to contextualize events by describing a period in greater detail than in a broad overview." One Publishers Weekly reviewer pointed out that seasoned readers may find the format "distracting," but found that "the book never becomes tiresome" and that "with its lively storytelling and thorough coverage of our nation's first five centuries, this truly is a treasury."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 1978; November 15, 1998, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 552; November 15, 2002, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower, p. 567.

Choice, June, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 1855.

Christian Science Monitor, April 19, 1978.

Commonweal, May 26, 1978, July 7, 1978.

Economist (US), August 28, 1999, "History of Espionage," review of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era, p. 67.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, May, 1999, Andrew J. Bacevich, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 53.

Foreign Affairs, May, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 129.

Harper's, June, 1978.

Insight on the News, July 20, 1998, Stephen Goode, "Allen Weinstein Writes an Epitaph for the Cold War," author interview, pp. 21-23.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1998, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 1590.

Labor History, November, 1999, Robert H. Ferrell, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 556.

Library Journal, November 15, 1998, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 78; November 15, 2002, Daniel Liestman, review of The Story of America, p. 85.

Modern Age, winter, 1998, review of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, p. 118; spring, 2001, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 146.

Nation, April 8, 1978, April 28, 1978; November 3, 1997, review of Perjury, p. 11; January 25, 1999, Peter W. Rodman, "The Spying Game," review of The Haunted Wood, p. 48; May 24, 1999, Ellen Schrecker, "The Spies Who Loved Us?," review of The Haunted Wood, p. 28.

National Review, April 28, 1978, May 12, 1978.

New Leader, December 14, 1998, Harvey Klehr, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 11.

New Republic, July 5, 1999, Sam Tanenhaus, "Tangled Treason—New Light on Old Spies," review of The Haunted Wood, p. 29.

Newsweek, March 20, 1978, April 3, 1978, April 17, 1978.

New Yorker, May 22, 1978.

New York Review of Books, April 20, 1978; November 20, 1997, review of Perjury, p. 13; December 4, 1997, review of Perjury, p. 22.

New York Times, April 7, 1978; (late edition) January 18, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. E9.

New York Times Book Review, April 9, 1978; September 21, 1997, review of Perjury, p. 40; January 3, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 6; June 6, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 39; December 5, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 90.

Publishers Weekly, February 20, 1978; November 16, 1998, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 59; September 16, 2002, review of The Story of America, p. 60.

Saturday Review, April 1, 1978.

Time, February 13, 1978.

Times Literary Supplement, April 30, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 10.

Village Voice, April 17, 1978.

Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1978; January 5, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. A20.

Washington Post Book World, April 16, 1978.

Wilson Quarterly, spring, 1999, review of The Haunted Wood, p. 130.

World Policy Journal, spring, 1999, Tim Weiner, review of The Haunted Wood, pp. 101-103.