My stubbornly uninformed view was that Hiss was probably at the very least a secret Communist–I’d come across enough of those myself, including Nathaniel Weyl, who claimed to have been in the same group as Hiss in the 1930s. Stone, I’d learned a great deal about the ambiguous history of American Communism. And after many years of working on a biography of I.F. I’d always thought there was something vaguely comical about our elders’ obsession with Alger Hiss. When Lowenthal called me and asked if I’d be interested in reporting on the dispute, I resisted. I smuggled from Russia hundreds of top secret non-declassified KGB documents, and therefore I can’t return there now.” But soon enough, still living in exile in London, beached by the tides of history, Vassiliev would find a new outlet for his anger.
#ALGER HISS DEFINITION TV#
I gave up my career as a TV presenter and newspaper columnist for it. I spent 2 years in the KGB archives, doing the research for The Haunted Wood.
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“In my universe,” Vassiliev replied in an e-mail, “the thing he did to me is called theft, and thieves get punished. Navasky replied that he was “reluctant to collaborate in any legal actions vis-à-vis Weinstein” but was curious about Vassiliev’s grievance. Vassiliev was so angry that he wanted to sue, and turned for advice to The Nation‘s Victor Navasky, well known both as a defender of Alger Hiss and as a critic of Weinstein’s scholarship and ethics. Not only did Weinstein, who couldn’t even read Russian, claim top billing he used Vassiliev’s findings on Hiss in a 1997 reissue of Perjury without permission. The project seemed to have brought Vassiliev only grief. Bush in April 2004 as archivist of the United States. For Weinstein, the acclaim merely accelerated his rise from the comparative obscurity of the Smith College history department, via the National Endowment for Democracy, to his appointment by President George W. The fruit of their collaboration, The Haunted Wood (1999), was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “a small arsenal of smoking guns.” In The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers declared that “anyone who wants to know what Hiss and his friends were up to can find a rich, convincing, and vivid report in The Haunted Wood.” Hiss, who’d died in 1996 still protesting his innocence, was already beyond redemption.
![alger hiss definition alger hiss definition](https://image1.slideserve.com/2834807/slide5-l.jpg)
A small, fair-haired man wearing a dark suit and a black shirt, Vassiliev was an ex-KGB officer who had helped Allen Weinstein, an American historian whose Perjury (1978) convinced most Americans that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy, to write another book. The last time I saw Alexander Vassiliev he was slumped in a seat at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.