![\"Jeff](\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Jeff-Kisseloff-642x1024.avif\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nJeff Kisseloff \u201977 was doing what he loved most: burrowing into the arcana of old newspapers and magazines inside the Goddard Library\u2019s microfilm room. On this particular day, the Clark junior was hunting down the August 1948 obituary of Babe Ruth in The<\/em> New York Times <\/em>when he noticed an article from a few days before about a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing into the case of Alger Hiss, the State Department official who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union in the 1930s and who later served 44 months in prison for perjury. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kisseloff was so fascinated by the Hiss story that he convinced the head of Clark\u2019s history department, Robert Campbell, to allow him to do an independent study of the case. The year was 1976.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI had all the hubris in the world that I could solve this,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI proceeded to read everything that was ever written about the case, but only about three or four weeks into it I was sure Hiss was innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nearly five decades later, Kisseloff, a journalist and historian, not only hasn\u2019t wavered from his original conviction, but has written a book filled with detailed evidence to support his assertion that Hiss was the victim of one of the most egregious and unjust character assassinations in U.S. political history. In April, the University Press of Kansas published Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, <\/em>which is both a deep analysis of the Hiss case and a memoir of his longtime quest to exonerate the man at the center of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kisseloff came by his obsession honestly. While still a Clark student, he convinced the head of the Government Department, John Blydenburgh, to let him to spend a semester on an independent study\u2014working for Hiss in New York City. \u201cThink about it\u2014if Clark didn\u2019t encourage independent study, who knows what history would be saying about the most important political trial of the 20th century,\u201d says Kisseloff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Already, he had managed to talk his way onto a New York-based legal team that, if a bit rag-tag, was also singularly devoted to proving Hiss\u2019 innocence years after he\u2019d been branded a traitor in the public square. Hiss, aging yet courtly and sharp-witted, was a presence in the office, and Kisseloff came to know him well. \u201cHe was a very decent man,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d never worked with or for anybody else who I respected so much, or anybody else I enjoyed so much.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hiss needed all the help he could muster. While some talented lawyers and researchers entered his orbit to sort through boxes of files and compose briefs, there were other times when the personnel pool was exceedingly thin. \u201cIn those moments, I was the best that he had, and that wasn\u2019t a good thing,\u201d Kisseloff recalls with a laugh. \u201cThe pressure was on me to be better than I was, or at least as good as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his book, Kisseloff contends Hiss was targeted in plain sight by a cabal of political and government operatives, including then-congressman Richard Nixon, who were aided by J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s FBI in an effort to dismantle New Deal liberalism. An army of accusers\u2014whose mendacity Kisseloff picks apart with sniper-like precision\u2014was fronted by star witness Whittaker Chambers, a journalist and self-confessed former agent with the Soviet intelligence services, who alleged Hiss was himself a Soviet spy. Through exhaustive connect-the-dots research, Kisseloff exposes Whittaker as almost pathologically incapable of delivering a truthful narrative, and as someone so intent on bringing down Hiss that he resorted to embellished \u201cfacts\u201d and outright fabrications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cChambers was extremely malleable, and he was fixated on being the guy who was going to save Western democracy,\u201d Kisseloff says. The conspirators against Hiss had found someone \u201cwho suited their purpose, so they had to believe him, because if they didn\u2019t, their whole narrative goes out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was only after the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Rewriting Hisstory<\/em> and algerhiss.com are the culmination of Kisseloff\u2019s crusade on behalf of Alger Hiss. To get there, he secured documents from collections across the country, and successfully sued the FBI for files related to the case\u2014for which he was rewarded with 120,000 pages of unredacted documents, three times the number of files that Hiss had obtained in the 1970s. The files are clear on the FBI\u2019s role in the case, he notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey intimidated witnesses; they hid exculpatory evidence,\u201d Kisseloff says of the FBI. There was also a theory, which Kisseloff disputes, that the agency forged the Woodstock typewriter on which Hiss\u2019 then-wife, Priscilla, was said to have typed out classified communications to the Russians. Kisseloff secured the typewriter (he\u2019s pictured with it on the preceding page) from the Hiss family and conducted a forensic analysis of the keys, showing it couldn\u2019t have been the machine in question (Kisseloff presents copious additional evidence exonerating Priscilla). \u201cBut the FBI didn\u2019t do it; others did. The FBI lab wasn\u2019t that good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While in the thick of researching and writing the book, Kisseloff regularly logged 14- and 15-hour days, seven days a week and his body bore the brunt of it. He suffered two heart attacks and a series of small strokes, the worst of them occurring when he was on the verge of completing the last chapter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was sitting at my desk and things started jumping up and down,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI have this little test where I name the presidents in order, and I got stuck after five. It was then I knew I was in trouble, but I had to finish that chapter, so I sent it in\u2014and it was all gibberish. I had to redo it all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Long Island native who began his journalism career as sports editor of The Scarlet<\/em> earned a master\u2019s in journalism from Columbia and went to work for two New Jersey newspapers, reporting on the Yankees (\u201cI\u2019ve seen Yogi Berra naked\u201d) and uncovering political corruption (\u201cWe were constantly sending mayors to jail\u201d). He then turned to books after being blacklisted for organizing a union. He\u2019s written oral histories about Manhattan (You Must Remember This<\/em>), television (The Box<\/em>), and 1960s protests (Generation on Fire<\/em>), as well as two books for young audiences, Who is Baseball\u2019s Greatest Hitter?<\/em> and Who is Baseball\u2019s Greatest Pitcher?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n While working on the Hiss book, he undertook a number of other projects, including launching an education program in collaboration with The Nation<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His guiding principle for Rewriting Hisstory<\/em> was simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was about using basic reporting to figure this thing out,\u201d he says. \u201cI said early on that if I thought Alger was guilty, I would say so\u2014I was only after the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The years of research, the long hours at the keyboard\u2014even the strokes\u2014were worth it to salvage the reputation of a wrongly maligned figure of American history, he insists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf I didn\u2019t do this, nobody would have,\u201d he says. \u201cMy folks taught me about the importance of doing right by people, and I just wasn\u2019t going to let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photograph courtesy of Jeff Kisseloff <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Clarkie completes a 50-year odyssey to solve the mystery of the Alger Hiss case By Jim Keogh Jeff Kisseloff \u201977 was doing what he loved most: burrowing into the arcana of old newspapers and magazines inside the Goddard Library\u2019s microfilm room. On this particular day, the Clark junior was hunting down the August 1948 obituary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"departments":[13],"issues":[3],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","departments-alma-mater","issues-fall-winter-2025"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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