Allen Weinstein

U.S. Government photo of Allen Weinstein

Allen Weinstein is the Archivist of the United States. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on February 16, 2005.

Career

The son of Russian immigrants, Weinstein was born in New York in 1937, the youngest of three children. His parents were deli owners in the Bronx. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and City College of New York, then received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. He taught at Smith College from 1966 to 1981. In 1981, he moved to Georgetown University, where he was a professor until 1984. In 1982, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies, and in 1983 he served on the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO-sponsored International Program for the Development of Communication. He was a Professor of History at Boston University from 1985 to 1989.

From 1985 to 2003, he served as President of The Center for Democracy. At the request of Senators Lugar and Pell of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Center for Democracy organized a bipartisan group of election lawyers to oversee the preparations for the February 1986 elections in the Philippines. At President Reagan's request, Weinstein returned to the Philippines to continue to monitor the election procedures. The Center drafted the official report of the U.S. Observer Delegation, and went on to work with President Aquino's government on matters of electoral procedure.

Weinstein was a founding member in 1985 of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace and Chairman of its Education and Training Committee, remaining a Director until 2001, and now serves on the Chairman’s Advisory Council. He was a founding officer of the Strasbourg-based International Institute for Democracy from 1989 to 2001. He chaired the Judging Panel for the annual International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award from 1995-2003. He serves on the Advisory Council of the LBJ School of Public Affairs (University of Texas-Austin). He is Chairman of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library's Advisory Council. He chaired the annual "Global Panel" in the Netherlands from 1993-98. From 1982-91 he was a member of the Foreign Policy Association's Editorial Advisory Board.

The Alger Hiss Case

In 1970, Weinstein began researching the Alger Hiss case for a book. Initially, he "believed that Hiss had not been a Communist or a spy."^[1] Weinstein's extensive research included interviews with former Soviet intelligence officers who had worked with Chambers and a Freedom of Information request that eventually yielded 30,000 pages of FBI and CIA files. "Hiss also cooperated with Weinstein, granting him six interviews and access to the defense's legal files. After plowing through the data, however, Weinstein did what no previous Hiss defender had done: he changed his mind."^[1]

Controversy resulted when Weinstein indicated in a 1976 book review that he now believed that Hiss was guilty, and grew with the publication in 1978 of Weinstein's book, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. "The most vociferous response came from Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation and Hiss's leading defender .... Much of Navasky's attack was personal, reflecting the lingering bitterness of the Progressives and the Hiss partisans' sense that Weinstein had betrayed them."^[1] The Nation has since printed several attacks on Weinstein since then. In 1997, Navasky accused Weinstein of misquoting, misrepresenting, or misconstruing several of his interview subjects for Perjury.^[2] In 2004, The Nation accused Weinstein of breaching professional ethics by paying for exclusive access to Soviet archives, and of refusing to allow other researchers access to his personal archives.^[3]

Other sources, including Harvard professor Daniel Aaron^[4], Sidney Hook^[5], Irving Howe^[6], Alfred Kazin^[7] and Garry Wills^[8], support Weinstein's scholarship. Ellen Schrecker, no friend of anti-communists, has "explicitly acknowledge[d] that the 1999 publication of Allen Weinstein's The Haunted Wood finally convinced me of the guilt of the major communist spies."^[9]

Publications

• Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878 (Yale University Press, 1970) (ISBN 0-300-01229-2)
• Freedom and Crisis: An American History (Random House, 1974) (ISBN 0394326121)
• Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (Knopf 1978) (ISBN 0-394-49546-2)
• The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (with Alexander Vassiliev) (Random House, 1999) (ISBN 0-679-45724-0)

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c} Ehrman, John (May 8, 2007). The Alger Hiss Case. CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence. Retrieved on 2007-07-11.
2. ^ Navasky, Victor (November 3, 1997). "Allen Weinstein's Docudrama". The Nation. Retrieved on 2007-05-25. 
3. ^ Wiener, Jon (May 17, 2004). "The Archives and Allen Weinstein[". The Nation. Retrieved on 2007-05-25. 
4. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14555-2005Mar30_3.html
5. ^ Philosophy and Public Policy (Southern Illinois University Press), see also http://www.fortfreedom.org/n08.htm
6. ^ New York Times Book Review, April 9, 1978
7. ^ David Oshinsky, "The Meaning of the Enduring Controversy Over Alger Hiss", The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 20, 1996
8. ^ "The Honor of Alger Hiss," New York Review of Books, vol 25 no 6, April 20, 1978
9. ^ Schrecker, Ellen (December 18, 2000). Comments on John Earl Haynes' The Cold War Debate Continues. Retrieved on 2007-07-11.

External links

• "Testimony of Allen Weinstein Regarding His Nomination as Archivist of the United States" July 22, 2004
• Allen Weinstein Becomes Ninth Archivist of the United States, The American Historical Association.
• Interview, September 18, 2005, on Q&A

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