Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America (many written jointly with John Earl Haynes).
He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971, after defending a dissertation entitled "The Theory of American Exceptionalism".
[1] Klehr later recalled that his interest in the American radical left had been shaped by the domestic political upheaval of the era of the Vietnam War during which he had attended college.
These self-described "revisionists" made Klehr's 1984 work a focus of heated intellectual critique by asserting that it was an example of polemic Cold War anti-Communism.
The highly politicized argument was returned in kind by the so-called "traditionalists," who frequently saw in the "revisionists'" predilection for local history and the party rank-and-file a thinly-disguised apologetic for the abuses of communism "glorifying the CPUSA, hiding its warts, and apologizing for its crimes.
[6] The historical approaches were largely connected to the contemporary views of their adherents, Klehr later noted: The disagreements between the two camps were only partly generational, because some traditionalists, like myself and my long-time co-author John Haynes, were roughly the same age as our revisionist counterparts.
To some degree, the combatants were divided by current political loyalties, with most revisionists locating themselves at least on the left wing of the Democratic Party, if not as members of various socialist groupings.