Overview
On August 3, 1948, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers made a stunning allegation before the House Un-American Activities Committee: Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former high-ranking State Department official, had served with him in the Communist underground. Hiss's defense was the most gripping story of its day, and the question of his guilt has remained an American enigma. Now, historian Allen Weinstein finally solves, once and for all, one of the great American mysteries. Weinstein also, for the first time ever, draws upon previously inaccessible information from Soviet archives. The result is an extraordinary book that leaves anyone who reads it with one inescapable conclusion: Alger Hiss was guilty.Editorials
From the Publisher
"So far as any one book can dispel a large historical mystery, this book does it, magnificently."-- Garry Wills, New York Review of Books
"Lucidly written, impressively researched, closely argued... The result is formidable."
-- Irving Howe, New York Times Sunday Book Review
"A historic event... Stunningly meticulous, a monument to the intellectual ideal of truth stalked to its hiding place."
-- George Will, Newsweek
"The definitive account."
-- Reader's Catalog
"The most exciting piece of history in recent memory."
-- William F. Buckley
"The most objective and convincing account we have of the most dramatic court case of the century."
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
"[Weinstein] has gone as far as any historian could to establish the formal validity of the verdict... His treatment of the resulting material strikes one as both judicious and properly skeptical; he writes of it with clarity and restraint. ...Weinstein's contribution, then, is major and I would say definitive."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Impressive... [Weinstein] makes persuasive use of this material in a narrative that is lucid, dramatic and even handed."
-- Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review