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The documents prove, instead, that they were more than likely guilty.
While the documents found by Klehr and Haynes do not mention Alger
Hiss - their research was restricted to Comintern files, and they had no
access to secret KGB records - they do bear out the essential story told
by Whittaker Chambers and thereby indirectly add to his credibility re–
garding the charges he made against Alger Hiss. Document 32, for exam–
ple, contains the text of a copy of a confidential letter from Ambassador
William Bullitt to Judge R. W. Moore of the State Department. Doc–
ument 33, comprised of the contents of a typed copy of a letter sent to
President Roosevelt by William Dodd from Berlin in 1936, contains sen–
sitive diplomatic information. These copied paragraphs were found in
CPUSA files turned over to the Comintern for safekeeping. Who sent
the files? There is no clue, but both letters were diplomatic correspon–
dence generated by the office of Assistant Secretary Francis B. Sayre. As
Klehr and Haynes point out, the letters are evidence that the activities of
the CPUSA extended to much more than "abstract discussion of Marx-
ism."
The Secret World of American Communism,
therefore, is one of those
seminal works of scholarship with important political considerations, and
it has consequently obtained a great deal of attention and scores of re–
views. Yet, it is apparent that much of the material that was uncovered is
still considered controversial. As Hilton Kramer pointed out in a series of
articles for
The New York Post,
although the volume was written up in a
series of major articles by most newspapers in the country, it was almost
totally ignored by
The New York Times,
probably because its editors did
not want to endorse anti-Communism, lest they lend credence to a new
round of red-baiting.
The Times's
non-treatment of the Klehr-Haynes
book contrasted dramatically with its front-page story in 1993, reporting
that General Dmitri Volkogonov believed Alger Hiss had never been an
agent of the Soviet Union. When General Volkogonov repudiated the
original story, his retraction was buried deep inside the pages of
The
Times .
Similarly, Klehr and Haynes establish that
J.
Peters, whom
Whittaker Chambers had identified as head of the secret Party
underground, was indeed precisely what Chambers said he was. But in
1978, when
The Nation
was engaged in its never- ending attempt to
prove the innocence of Alger Hiss, it sought to undermine Chambers by
writing about the notorious Peters. The magazine sent a reporter,
Donald Kirk, to interview Peters, who was then still alive and living in
exile in Communist Hungary. Peters dismissed the charges. "This is so
stupid," he told Kirk, "the 'secret' Communist and the 'not-secret'
Communist." Kirk left his short visit feeling badly for having "intruded
