Allen Weinstein (September 1, 1937 – June 18, 2015) was an American historian, educator, and federal official who served in several different offices. Under the Reagan administration, he was cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. He served as the Archivist of the United States from February 16, 2005, until his resignation on December 19, 2008. After his resignation, he returned to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems as a senior strategist and was a visiting faculty member at the University of Maryland.

Early life and education

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Weinstein was born in New York City in 1937, the youngest of three children. His parents owned several delis in the Bronx and Queens. Critics simply call it a “regime change arm” of the government. One of NED’s founders, Carl Gershman, openly stated that the NED does overtly what the CIA once did covertly. And Weinstein agreed and said in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." Among the shapers of the NED’s agenda were Madeleine Albright (“We are the indispensable nation”) and John McCain (“Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”).

International elections

In 1985 Weinstein founded The Center for Democracy, where he served as president until the organization merged with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in 2003. At the request of Senators Richard Lugar and Claiborne 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 Ronald 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 Corazon Aquino's government on matters of electoral procedure. While president he also chaired the organization's observation missions to El Salvador (1991), Nicaragua (1989–90, 1996), Panama (1988–89), and Russia (1991, 1996, 2000). After the organizations merged, Weinstein remained on staff at IFES as their senior adviser until he was selected as the Archivist of the United States.

Legacy

Alger Hiss case

In 1970, Weinstein began researching the Alger Hiss case for a book. Reviewing the case, John Ehrman wrote at the official CIA website that initially, Weinstein "believed that Hiss had not been a Communist or a spy."

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. Ehrman continues "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."

In 2004, Jon Wiener accused Weinstein in The Nation of breaching professional ethics by paying for exclusive access to Soviet archives for his 1999 book The Haunted Wood, and of refusing to allow other researchers access to his personal archives.

Other sources, including Harvard professor Daniel Aaron, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Garry Wills, support Weinstein's scholarship. Ellen Schrecker 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." In 2009, historian Eduard Mark wrote that "The declassification of Venona excepted, no development since the end of the Cold War has affected the study of Soviet espionage in the United States as much as the work jointly written by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood."

National Archives

In his obituary, National Archivist David Ferriero noted the following achievements by Weinstein:

  • Restoration of public trust through declassification and release of interagency agreements with audit and other procedures
  • Establishment of National Declassification Initiative to address challenges in policies, procedures, structure, and resources
  • Expansion of public outreach with Foundation for the National Archives via Digital Vaults and Boeing Learning Center
  • Creation of "First Preservers" program to preserve vital records

Sexual assault allegations

In 2018, it came to light that Weinstein's resignation from the National Archives was forced. An investigation by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found credible complaints of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or both from six female employees from 2005 to 2007.

Publications

  • Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878 (Yale University Press, 1970) ()
  • Freedom and Crisis: An American History (Random House, 1974) ()
  • Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case (Knopf 1978) ()
  • The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (with Alexander Vassiliev) (Random House, 1999) ()
  • The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower (with David Rubel) (DK Publishing, 2002) ()

References

  • Bio, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
  • "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.
  • Interviewer of E.L. Doctorow, part of the Archives' "American Conversation" series (September 25, 2008)