There is a certain irony that in America's bicentennial year almost as much ink has been spilled over Joe McCarthy and the witch-hunts of the 1950s as on the virtues of George Washington. Woody Allen stands up against the blacklist and prying Congressional Committees in The Front; Lillian Hellman provides her view of the period, often scathing, in Scoundrel Time; and a spate of books, articles and film has appeared dealing with the Hollywood Ten trial, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases. Professional historians are also now taking a closer look at McCarthyism and America's entry into the Cold War.

One such historian, Allen Weinstein, a professor at Smith College, has found himself in the middle of a literary brouhaha in the pages of The New York Review of Books and The New York Times over his maverick stand in the now re-ignited Hiss case controversy.

In 1948, Alger Hiss, New Deal whiz kid, Harvard Law graduate, head of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, was accused by an ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers first of being a Communist, then later of passing State Department documents during the 1930s to the Communist underground. Chambers, a senior editor at Time, made his initial accusations in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where Hiss vigorously denied the charges. Despite Chambers' somewhat sordid past, the weight of evidence seemed on his side in the two perjury trials that followed; Chambers produced State Department documents allegedly typed on the Hiss' Woodstock typewriter and four memos allegedly in Hiss' handwriting. Hiss, convicted and sentenced to a prison term, has to this day unequivocably maintained his innocence.

Hiss' conviction was seized upon by some conservatives as proof that there were Communists in the government, a Fifth Column of sorts, and the case helped pave the way for McCarthy's demagoguery (he was to constantly refer to Hiss in his first major speech on Communism in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950).

Weinstein, who successfully sued under the Freedom of Information Act to see FBI files on the case, now says his research there, and in Hiss defense files, has led him to believe that Chambers was telling the truth on the major points and that there was no frame-up of Hiss. In a book review of John Chabot Smith's Alger Hiss: The True Story (April 1, 1976 The New York Review of Books) Weinstein first advanced his findings--a switch from his earlier position expressed in the early 1970s that Hiss might be innocent. Smith's book argued the opposite, and so the debate by letter and article was on, spilling over onto the front page of the New York Times and involving the likes of I.F. Stone and Robert Sherrill.

Weinstein, a self-described "left-liberal," now waits for his own book Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Conflict, to be published by Knopf next year to answer his critics. While Weinstein claims to have a measure of objectivity--"I don't deny Whittaker Chambers told whoppers and lies, I'm simply saying on most major points at issue Alger Hiss told the greater and more significant ones"--he also says no one book can yet completely and adequately tell the full story of the Hiss case.

The following are excerpted from an interview held at Smith College in late November.

--Crimson: Why this sudden interest in the 1950s, in the McCarthy period, in the Hiss and Rosenberg cases?

Weinstein: Why now? Partly because of the shift in the climate of American opinion in the aftermath of Watergate; a perhaps more critical set of attitudes towards institutions, towards government, a belief that there were wrongs to be righted, and a search for heros in what seems to many of us a villainous time.

I think it's impossible to overestimate the importance of Watergate and the changing symbolism of the 50s and of anti-Communism in general. There have been many such upheavals but not the least important element was the downfall of Richard Nixon--the very symbol of the anti-Communism of the 50s.

Crimson: What type of history is being produced?

Weinstein: There's a great deal of useful documentary culling. There's an enormous record being built up partly through Freedom of Information Act suits such as my own and the Meeropols (the Rosenberg's sons) and Alger Hiss and others against the FBI and CIA, disgorging materials which five years ago scholars like myself could not obtain.

As for dispassionate historical works being produced in the immediate future, I remain somewhat pessimistic for several reasons. First, the symbolism of that period is quite live. I think, if nothing else, my own experiences over the past year have shown how people on both sides react in an extraordinarily emotional way to what for them remains a live and unsettled issue--not history at all. One of the problems here, and I recognize it, is the legitimacy of this direct concern for righting the wrongs of the 50s. There is a perfectly useful place for the analysis of the period through the eyes of those who were victimized at the time, or who consider themselves victimized. But these studies of victimization will not give us any overall analytic dispassionate view of the changes in American institutions and practices that took place as a result. They just will not. Which is not to say there will not be some efforts at a more dispassionate view of the period. I hope my own work will fit into that category, whatever people think of my conclusions.

Crimson: Like the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories abound about the Hiss case. Have you discovered anything that would link the FBI, or anyone involved in the case, to a frame-up of Hiss, whether through forgery by typewriter or tampering with witnesses?

Weinstein: No, I have not--although I have given this question probably a more extended and more dispassionate scrutiny than anyone I can think of who has ever researched the case. I think there are conspiratorial dimensions to the case, rather surprising ones, which I'd rather not talk about now, but which will come out very soon in my book.