By Ronald Radosh A few weeks ago, The American Scholar summer issue appeared. Its lead article is a defense of Alger Hiss' purported innocence--at least an assault on the charge that the man identified as "Ales" in a Venona decrypt is not Alger Hiss, but a man named Wilder Foote. The article is significant for two reasons: First, it is co-authored by Pulitzer Prize winner Kai Bird, a distinguished writer. Second, it appears to be a scholarly reassessment of whether Alger Hiss was really identified as a Soviet agent in the Venona decrypts. The bottom line: Alger Hiss may well be innocent. If that was true, it would lead to a major reassessment of the roots of the Cold War, and the would-be anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s. Today, in the web pages of Slate, Ron Rosenbaum has written a masterly dissection of the Bird-Chervonnya article. It is also dealt with here by John Haynes and here by Haynes and Harvey Klehr (to read their article, scroll down to the April 11 entry). A few months back, I discussed the issue of the Bird paper on these web pages. For those who have followed this debate, and are interested in the critical issues surrounding analysis and history of the Cold War, Rosenbaum's article cannot be missed. Since he confines himself to analyzing their arguments, he does not raise another point that is germane to the issue. Why did The American Scholar, a distinguished publication of Phi Beta Kappa, publish this article? After reading Rosenbaum's careful analysis of the article, and the Haynes-Klehr analysis, it becomes obvious that the Bird-Chervonyya piece is hardly the kind of article that should be taken seriously. Rather, as Rosenbaum suggests, it is a carefully composed ideological argument based on what is not only a tendentious argument, but one that resorts to real McCarthyite (or Nixonite if you prefer) guilt by association to make its case. Its publication in a major and highly regarded journal of the Academy is, one would think, a scandal of its own.