Amazon.com
A coolly objective look at the most controversial figure in the postwar crusade against American Communists. Whittaker Chambers (1901-61) made headlines in 1948 with his sensational accusation that former State Department official Alger Hiss was not only a Communist, but a spy, charges Hiss denied until his death in 1996. This scrupulously evenhanded biography concludes that Chambers told the truth, even as it pitilessly delineates his tortured family background, anguished sexual confusion, and political ruthlessness, which might well prompt doubts about his trustworthiness. Chambers' life makes a perfect case study of the most morally fraught period in American history.
Book Description
Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America.
Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its improbably twists and turns, and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions.
A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art,
Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.
Customer Reviews:
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.......2007-07-11
Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.
Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University.
A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46).
Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.
Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him."
Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."
In all, Sam Tanenhaus did an excellent job using primary and secondary sources, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to write an engaging biography of Whittaker Chambers. In his book, he provides informative notes and a thorough index; all of which helped to provide readers with a better understanding of the political mood in the country at the time of the Hiss-- Chambers case. The book would have been better organized had Tanenhaus placed the Chambers Hiss relationship information in its proper chronology and not moved it from the 1930's into the Hiss trial period of the 1950's. That small criticism aside, Tanenhaus' biography of Chambers is an important scholarly work for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of CPUSA activities in U. S., the work of HUAC, and especially its star member, Richard Nixon, and the political left/right divide that was at the center of the Cold War era.
As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.
A vital book of an American conscience!.......2006-07-26
I cannot recommend this book highly enough for understanding the state of American politics, past, present and future. The inner turmoil of Whittaker Chambers is revealed to the world, leaving the reader without a shadow of a doubt as to his courage and greatness. His bitter childhood, his years as a Communist spy, his homosexual inclination, and ultimately his redemptive love for his wife and family, all lead to the climax of Chambers' courageous stance against Communism, which he wins despite all odds. This book fills in the gaps of Chambers' remarkable autobiography, "Witness," which I also recommend as essential political and moral reading.
The Moral Lodestone of the 20th Century.......2006-04-23
I grew up under the cultural shadow of Alger Hiss, stupidly thinking the term "commie" was a funny way to mock anyone concerned about the threat of Communism.
But, being a victim of bad education, I knew nothing of the epic, mid-twentieth century showdown between Hiss (now known to have been a communist spy and traitor, though still, ludicrously revered as innocent by left intelligentsia) and Whittaker Chambers, the moral lodestone of the twentieth century ,who offered up his own life as a sacrifice of sorts to unmask and quell the poison tentacles of communist Russia that reached high into the U.S. Government of the New Deal era. And Chambers was not only a former communist spy himself, but a burgeoning literary icon. This is the history of a clash of ideas, submerged in the clash between two men caught up in the rush of modern history. The truth, as always, is right in front of us. Only ideological dogma can prevent one from pretending not to see it.
The factual side of Chambers' spiritual journey.......2005-05-29
Chambers' autobiography "Witness" had left me speechless. It was a magnificent book, but unknown in most circles. I was hungry to learn more about Chambers' own life and times. It didn't take me long to get to Tanenhaus's fine biography, which gave me an outside perspective and did not disappoint. Tanenhaus is at his most valuable recounting Chambers' post-Hiss-Case life, not covered in "Witness"; in fleshing out the HUAC cast like Nixon, Mundt and Hebert, putting their careers and ambitions into perspective; and in covering the seamier sides of Chambers' personal and family background in even greater detail than Chambers had.
In "Witness", Chambers focuses on his spiritual journey, managing to keep a reader fascinated when that might easily have become eye-glazing. Tanenhaus pounds facts, availing himself of documents and accounts not available to Chambers in 1951. He remains objective about Chambers but ultimately finds little to criticize. Chambers was a man who put his career and life on the line to expose a conspiracy, as he saw it, threatening the world and eating away this nation from within. Despite circumstances strongly suggesting his veracity - would anyone throw away a lucrative career, as he did, to falsely accuse someone? - few believed him. History proved he was telling the truth - one worth hearing, since Chambers was the second-ranking U.S. man in the Communist underground espionage network.
Certain striking aspects of Chambers' character emerge here, some suggested by his autobiography but better to have confirmed independently. He was one of the great intellectuals of his time, the equal of better known friends and contemporaries from his Columbia days - Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman among them. His command of languages was exceptional. (Fabulous piece of trivia: Chambers translated the novel "Bambi" from the German in the 1920s, later inspiring the Walt Disney film.) His command of the classics, ditto. This was a man who never finished college - when he died, he was enrolled in a local college attempting to finish - but who dropped Dante quotations into interviews with ham-and-egger newspaper reporters. He was one of the greatest writers Time magazine ever had, writing first-class cover stories on philosophy, religion and other intellectual pursuits beyond most journalists. I was inspired to search out an available collection of his magazine work.
Chambers' continuing intellectual and political development did him credit. He became a father figure to the modern conservative movement, inspiring those like the young Bill Buckley who shaped it. But Chambers refused to follow them where his own conscience and intellect did not dictate. He wouldn't pursue a scorched earth policy against Republican moderates like Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, unlike Buckley and others, despite Chambers' personal closeness with them: Buckley had more or less rescued him from professional and financial oblivion in the 1950s. Chambers regarded the struggle against Communism as far more important than a Republican civil war over doctrinal purity. He backed Sen. Joseph McCarthy initially, but ultimately broke with him, fearing his recklessness "would lead him and us into trouble," jeopardizing the entire anti-Communist movement, Chambers wrote in declining to endorse Buckley's pro-McCarthy book.
And Chambers was willing, in his later years, to seek a politics that did not rationalize away the world's woes in favor of purist conservatism. It would have been easy for a man treated like Chambers was - who had seen the blindness of liberalism up close in the 1930s and 1940s, and had felt the savagery and hypocrisy of its backlash during the Hiss case - to become more extreme in his rejection of it. But he did not. Chambers expressed, in dealings with young writers, a fascination with the Beat poets then emerging. He saw in Columbia-tied bohemians like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg a reflection of his own distant youth. Very unBuckleyesque.
Tanenhaus treats the Hiss case conservatively, letting the record speak rather than relying on Chambers' detailed account of it in "Witness". Chambers drew vividly his and his wife's close relationships with Alger and Priscilla Hiss, placing it chronologically in the 1930s when it happened. In contrast, Tanenhaus's treatment of Chambers' life in the 1930s mentions Hiss only in passing. He instead takes Hiss on in the context of the hearings and trials, as the two sides jousted over whether Hiss and Chambers, from very different walks of life, knew each other at all. The question was a proxy for the greater question of espionage, although Hiss was never tried specifically for that charge. He was, however, convicted of perjury in denying he had given Chambers government documents, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
It is sad we have had to wait so long to have this case studied in such fine perspective. The Hiss case put the New Deal itself on trial, asking whether its leadership was pervaded with Communists; whether those leaders had followed the Communist Party line in shaping U.S. policy; whether they had tainted American war and China policy during and after World War II. And whether liberals were either so blind to these problems or so secretly sympathetic to them as to forever render them incapable of loving and protecting their homeland as it was.
One of the finest books I have ever read.......2005-04-04
I found this book endlessly fascinating. Whittake Chambers emerges as a complex, torn figure, one who is driven by an overwhelming sense of what's right -- but all through his own perspective. There is no smarmy, politicized cheerleading or criticism, just the poignant portrayal of a complex man who placed himself at a vortex of American history. A wonderful, wonderful story, and an amazing accomplishment. It is rare that I cannot put down a biography, but this is one.
Amazon.com
First published in 1952, Witness was at once a literary effort, a philosophical treatise, and a bestseller. Whittaker Chambers had just participated in America's trial of the century in which Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a full-standing member of the political establishment, was a spy for the Soviet Union. This poetic autobiography recounts the famous case, but also reveals much more. Chambers' worldview--e.g. "e;man without mysticism is a monster"e;--went on to help make political conservatism a national force.
Book Description
Whittaker Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies...penetrating and terrible insights into America in the early twentieth century. --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Customer Reviews:
Redemed By History .......2007-08-26
Ask a group of graduate students, "who was Whittaker Chambers", and the answers range from blank stares to vague memories of someone associated with the witch hunt for communists in the US Government. One of a hundred might remember that the man he accused of being a communist agent was found guilty of perjury, Alger Hiss. As a high ranking official of the Roosevelt administration Hiss was very involved in the tragedy of postwar Europe, the forced return of peoples to the territories now controlled by the Soviet Union and in the formation of the United Nations.
Only decades after the hysterical defenders of Hiss, Rosenberg and others have passed from the stage have serious academic researchers accepted the reality that yes, there was a large group of communists within the United States government and at the top level of the nation's nuclear program.
Surprisingly to many Chambers' involvement in the historic conflict was not related to his position as a senior editor of Time Magazine but rather to a much earlier time when he was the editor of the letters to the editor of the Daily Worker, the magazine of the American Communist party.
Chambers leaves us with an incredibly eloquent autobiography of his travel through these troubled times. The book is a worthwhile acquisition for its introduction alone which is in the form of a letter to his children. Chambers captures the void felt by so many dedicated young people as they leave their parents and complete their higher education. In Chambers' case it was during the turbulent years of the depression when everything relating to our form of government and economic foundation was brought into question.
The author believed he had found his calling in the Communist Party of the USA along with so many other intellectuals. Contrary to the predictions of Marx and others the Party's recruits came largely from the most privileged campuses, not from the most struggling workers both here and in Europe. The struggle that ripped though the movement in the 1930's culminating with Stalin's liquidation of thousands of "unreliable" party members including Trotsky, shook Chambers' faith to the point of his departure from the party.
Chambers's, aware of the many Communist Party faithful working in the Roosevelt administration, attempted a quiet approach to the government and only after 5+ years of its refusal to respond did he take the story public. That triggered famous Chambers / Hiss showdown in the Congressional hearings.
Witness is important as a historical work and a treasure as a personal journal of a man of tremendous conflict, intellect, literary skills and courage. Highly recommended.
Major Work.......2007-06-23
To be fair, this is a big book, a long book. It is not for the casual reader. I'm not sure it would be for young readers generally. In some respects it's a history book covering the era from the 1920's to the 1950's. For young people, that's ancient history, and probably requires some context.
Having said all that, I can now say this is a tremendously wonderful book. A unique book. It's an intense autobiography of an unusual and multi-talented man. (For a long period he was the top editor at Time magazine.) It's an inside look at all the spies and subversives we had running loose in this country. (Chambers was for several years a mere courier, carrying stolen secrets, out of loyalty to that glorious dream called Communism.) This book chronicles what ideology does to people, especially intellectuals, driving them to break their own moral codes.
Finally, this book is part of a 20th century genre that might be called the God-That-Failed confessional. (Compare Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" and Max Eastman's "Reflections on the Failure of Socialism.") Whittaker Chambers, like these other writers, was both an intellectual and an idealist. He became a Communist and a spy because he thought he could help save human civilization. Then he realized he was horribly wrong. Imagine the fear and anguish going into that other world, and then the fear and anguish trying to escape from that world. He was hated by many; still is. He and his family were often in danger. He carried a gun for years.
So, when you're ready for something big and deep, jump into this one.
a fair review of an important book.......2006-07-24
this is a review for those people that want a fair review of the book, not an extreme consersative bias bashing on socialists and lefts and not an and exreme leftist bashing on conservatives. Don't read most of the reviews because they are all bias beyond return, most of which by people who probably had no where else better to display their beliefs than amazon.
The book Witness is important to read regardless of your political beliefs, because it will most likely hone down your own ideas and give you more clearity on what your own beliefs even are. The book opens with the fascinating 'letter to my children', immediatly grabbing the reader. I've reread that part a few times. He goes on to explain why he joined the communist party and also why he decided to be a spy. It's vital for people to understand the difference betweem Stalin Communism, Lenin Communism, and the Communism Marx wrote about, so i would suggest reading on these subjects before diving into Witness. The book has many different feels to it throughout it, at parts it feels like your reading espionage thriller, at other times a law and order case, and at some parts are extremely religious.
Like I said it's important to read this book, and it's important to have an open mind and learn and accept philosophy beyond what you grew up with.
Read this book.......2006-05-18
Witness is the best autobiography I've ever read. It details the fascinating life of Whittaker Chambers, and the monumentally important Hiss-Chambers case. It is also first-rate prose.
What made Chambers's life so compelling? Two things: courage and redemption. Courage is the greatest of the virtues, because without it all the other virtues are merely pleasant thoughts that melt away at the first sign of adversity. Chambers needed that courage, because his devotion to the cause he would later repudiate, placed him in extreme danger.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Soviet handlers of the Communist underground dealt with defectors by killing them and anyone who assisted them. Starting in 1937, Chambers assisted numerous communists to escape from this network, and he in turn fled with his family in 1938. Chambers compounded the danger to himself by approaching each of his Washington sources, and pleading with them to also break ties with Communism and stop performing espionage.
Chambers was no Saint. He was probably bisexual (implying unfaithfulness to his devoted wife), he spied for a foreign government, and his communist duties required him to regularly practice deception.
Nonetheless, his courage allowed him to reject communism and seek redemption when its evil nature became apparent to him. At the age of 36 he started his life over; he renewed his faith in God, he used his position at Time magazine to relentlessly warn of the dangers of communism, and he risked everything (disclosure of his past, a civil libel suit, his job and professional reputation/relationships) to prove that the highly-placed State Department official Alger Hiss was a Communist spy.
The Hiss case was pivotal in warning the nation that communist spies were present at the highest levels of American policy-making. Hiss was a key figure at Yalta and Bretton Woods and other globe-shaping events, that rewarded the Soviets with more power than they had won during the war. Most Americans of my generation are unaware that prior to McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee was performing a genuine service for America, and removed numerous actual Communists from positions of influence. Hiss's conviction against the "immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts" is a testament to the greatness of this country, and this victory could not have been won without the undaunted courage of Whittaker Chambers.
I cannot conclude this review without attempting to describe the pleasure I received from reading each line of Chambers's prose. Every human is born with the ability to think, to feel, and to recognize or remember.....so is every animal. What separates humans from animals is an immortal soul. The immortal soul is what links humans with one another through the barriers of culture and time. This linkage is possible through a piece of God's eternity. This eternity allows for an accumulation of the shared conscience of man, and serves to help him recognize truth, recognize right from wrong, and recognize what is holy. But for most of us, when the soul speaks, it doesn't do so with a voice. It speaks to us in goose bumps, in dreams, or in familiar but unidentifiable melodies. At critical junctures in my life, I'm unable to say what I want to say; because my soul is saturated with feelings that defy articulate speech. Chambers was one of the special few born with the ability to communicate what his soul says to him. He was able to translate feelings charged with meaning into language charged with meaning.
No review I write can possibly do justice to this wonderful book. Please do not let my failure prevent you from reading this book and keeping the memory of Chambers's contributions to America alive
Tremendously moving, quiet, unaffected writing.......2006-01-17
I would rate this work among the greatest I have ever read, particularly as autobiography. With all politics aside, Chambers illuminates the human condition and the redemptive power of suffering in a deeply moving way. The plot is very engaging, the detail exhaustive. He had the full force of the Truman administration, the Communist underground and Party, and the mainstream press all bearing down on him to destroy and discredit him (all proven wrong in later years if you were blind to the clear truth then). As a battle between good and evil, truth and manipulation, this book is unmatched. If you want fatuous, insensitive manipulation of the truth and proof that the forces Chambers warned against are very much with us today, look no further than the one-star (non)review that precedes this one. Appalling. That's an unsophisticated example of the nonsense he dealt with in life.
This book will, quite simply, add to your life; Chambers' unique voice, unmatched in credibility, speaks for itself, as you will see. And as I have begun to do, you will want to seek out his other work. I am as yet a non-believer (religiously speaking) and am moved to say, "may God rest his soul."
Book Description
Never-before-published collection of letters between Chambers, a former Communist agent, and journalist Ralph de Toledano.
Customer Reviews:
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.......2007-08-14
Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that "Notes From the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers/Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960 "; whose purpose is to show the intellectual motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.
A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life." However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church."
Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed." While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.
Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, he entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. Chambers understood how much the liberals hated him. He wrote, "If Hiss is guilty, not the New Deal, but the whole Age of Reason is guilty." However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. It is the letters between Chambers and Ralph de Toledano from 1949-1960 that gives insight between the thinking of these two ant-Communists and how they observe current events of their time that makes the book a most interesting read. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope." He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Chambers wrote, "history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."
As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.
Book Description
Chambers emerged from the communist Party, but did not surrender the conviction, by which his very bones had been virtually irradiated, that apocalypse menaced. Hugh Kenner
Book Description
This collection of Whittaker Chamber's journalism is a superb rediscovery of the artistry of a great figure. --William F. Buckley, Jr.
Customer Reviews:
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.......2007-07-26
Read this for graduate American history course. This book is a compendium of Chamber's writing as a Communist, for Time Magazine, and finally for National Review. He is a wonderful prose writer, as you will learn in the short bio below. He was uniquely qualified to write about the struggle between the U.S. and Communism during the Cold War as well. He foresaw the giveaway of Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference in his essay "Ghosts on the Roof." His historical essays are prescient as well. Chamber's was one of the most underestimated figures in the 20th century.
There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Whittaker Chambers wrote his autobiography Witness. His purpose was to make the first serious explanation of his life and motivations, he became one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.
Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Chambers illuminates his theme, which is to examine his tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War II, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination." After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University.
A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life." However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church."
Chambers paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed." While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.
Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Chambers does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and his testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers is very revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial.
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written in 2006, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him."
Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, he entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope." He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."
As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.
Excellent selection of Chambers writings.......2002-04-24
This is an excellent anthology of Whittaker Chambers' writings from his moonlighting as a communist journalist to the period after his fall out with the Reds. He follows his subsequent migration to Time and his days penning for the National Review. If you've read and enjoyed his autobiography, Witness, than you will probably enjoy this book.
witnessing.......2001-03-15
For forty years the accepted establishment view of Whittaker Chambers was that of a fat, rumpled weirdo, obsessed, presumably for some kind of degenerate sexual reasons, with the destruction of Alger Hiss, a man who was in every way his better. Even the publication and excellent sales of his extraordinary memoir, Witness, could not erase that caricature from the minds of the elites. I remember a PBS miniseries about the Hiss case, which must date from the late 70's or early 80's (I checked; it looks like it was, fittingly, broadcast in 1984), which portrayed Hiss as a victim, if not an outright innocent. But then the pendulum began to swing :
-First came the 1978 publication of Allen Weinstein's authoritative book, Perjury : The Hiss-Chambers Case, which convinced most of the holdouts of the guilt of Alger Hiss.
-Then, in 1984, Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
-Five years later came this collection of the journalism of Whittaker Chambers, Ghosts on the Roof, which began the process of restoring his literary reputation.
-The fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a flood of government secrets from both US and Russian files which exposed both the extent and success of Soviet efforts to penetrate the US government, media and Hollywood in the 30's & 40's and peace groups in the subsequent decades.
-In 1995, the VENONA intercepts were revealed, with their decoded messages confirming that the Rosenbergs and Hiss, among others, had been Soviet agents.
-Finally, the publication in 1997 of the first serious biography, Whittaker Chambers : A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus, and the truly bizarre moment on Meet the Press when Clinton CIA nominee Tony Lake could not bring himself to declare Alger Hiss guilty, even fifty years after the fact, forced a major re-examination of Chambers, his legacy, and the legacy of those who were simply unable to accept his charges no matter the evidence (like Lake and like CNN in their Cold War series).
After all of that, it is perhaps now possible to contemplate Chambers the writer in a somewhat more neutral, less partisan, light. This collection includes everything from political essays to reflections on the Hiss case to movie and book reviews to a set of historical essays on Western Culture written for LIFE. Among the best pieces are a review of Finnegans Wake and a tribute to Joyce on his death; a review of the movie version of Grapes of Wrath, which Henry Luce said was the best film review ever published in TIME; a really scathing review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; and the prophetic title essay.
...
The outstanding piece though may well be the one that Teachout chose for the title. Ghosts on the Roof ran in TIME on March 5, 1945, shortly after the Yalta Conference, when the Allies were still basking in the glow of having cooperated to defeat Hitler. With admirable foresight, Chambers pricked this gonfalon bubble. The essay fantasizes that the ghosts of Nicholas and Alexandra and the other murdered Romanovs descend upon the roof of the Livadia Palace at Yalta to watch the goings-on. There they meet Clio, the Muse of History, who has likewise come to observe the Big Three Conference. When History expresses her surprise at finding the Romanovs there, they reveal that they have become fans of Stalin and have converted to Marxism, actually Stalinism. The Tsar and Tsarina explain that Stalin is achieving conquests which even Peter the Great never dared and now come Britain and America as virtual supplicants, unwittingly giving him the opportunity to grab more land in the East in exchange for entering the war with Japan. They share the Marxist belief that in the years following the war, England and the U.S. will collapse because of the internal contradictions of capitalism. Clio tells them that this will not happen, that the years to come will see a conflict between two opposing faiths, leading to "more wars, more revolutions, greater proscriptions, bloodshed and human misery." The Tsarina asks why she does not intervene to avert this, and Clio answers that humans never learn from History and :
Besides, I must leave something for my sister, Melpomene to work on.
Melpomene, Clio's sister, is the Muse of Tragedy. Here, years before he became embroiled in the Hiss case, long before the Cold War started, before the Atomic Age had even dawned, is Whittaker Chambers warning the West of the future it faces and forecasting it uncannily.
These essays, and the many others included here, make for really interesting reading. They reveal Chambers to be both a gifted and a prescient writer. His opinions on the Arts stand up extremely well. His assessments of political situations were as much forty years ahead of their time; particularly perceptive in this regard is one ("Soviet Strategy in the Middle East" [National Review October 26, 1957]) in which he predicted how the Soviets would foster Arab radicalism in the Middle East. All in all, the book serves to add depth and heft to a man who spent almost half a century as a caricature, who was more an undeserving victim of Anti-Anti-Communism than any of those who were blacklisted were "victims" of Anti-Communism. It is altogether fitting that the 20th Century, which Chambers did so much to redeem, ended with his reputation ascendant and those of his opponents in rapid decline.
GRADE : A
The Losing Side.......2001-01-10
Most people know Whittaker Chambers as the former Communist spy who gave testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the process, he blew the cover of fellow agent, Alger Hiss, a high-ranking official in FDR's State Department.
That was in 1948. Even in recent times, with evidence by now thoroughly convincing, liberal Democrats have refused to believe that Hiss, a left-wing icon, was a traitor. In the introduction to this book, Milton Hindus writes that their lack of contrition makes relevant Chambers's work, some of which is collected for the first time in this anthology of journalism. For a wider view of Chambers, outside the famous case depicted in Witness, one can turn to these articles, reviews, and stories written between 1931 and 1959.
The chronological arrangement of the pieces allows the reader to see the progress Chambers made from his revolutionary fiction for The New Masses, through his authoritative anti-Communism as an editor at Time, to the mature conservatism he composed for National Review from his farm in Maryland late in life. In all there is a steady introspection and honesty. He was that rare thing, Hindus reminds us - his own man.
There is also a good bit of variety: reviews of Ayn Rand, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and George Santayana; a prophetic short story about the rise of Russian imperialism; a history of western culture; and a moving piece about the resistance of Maryland farmers to the intrusion of bureaucrats from the Department of Agriculture.
The review of Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, is particularly devastating. Chambers found this popular book to be less a novel than a political tract in which Rand presented a melodrama meant to depict the world's problems, then, in the sort of authoritarianism she denounced, set herself up as that world's savior. Chambers criticized Rand's inability to see shades of grey. In effect, the review drew a line between conservatism and libertarianism, with Chambers and Rand at opposite poles, a line just as sharp as the one Chambers often drew between Christianity and Communism.
In leaving the Communist Party, Chambers was convinced that he was joining history's losing side. It should not surprise us that the word "witness" in Greek also means "martyr," for in Chambers work there is more than a hint of martyrdom. At times his gloomy pessimism about the fate of the West trips his logic, causing not so much a leap of faith but a jump to a conclusion.
Yet I believe that Ghosts On The Roof still has something to offer: for the craftsmanship of its fine prose; for the challenging breadth of its world view; and for a perspective on the central political and moral events of the twentieth century, a perspective based not on theory but on experience, on having felt these conflicts in his bones.
Average customer rating:
- The witness is gone, the testimony will stand
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Whittaker Chambers
Sam Tanenhaus
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Customer Reviews:
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.......2007-07-11
Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.
Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University.
A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46).
Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.
Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him."
Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."
In all, Sam Tanenhaus did an excellent job using primary and secondary sources, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to write an engaging biography of Whittaker Chambers. In his book, he provides informative notes and a thorough index; all of which helped to provide readers with a better understanding of the political mood in the country at the time of the Hiss-- Chambers case. The book would have been better organized had Tanenhaus placed the Chambers Hiss relationship information in its proper chronology and not moved it from the 1930's into the Hiss trial period of the 1950's. That small criticism aside, Tanenhaus' biography of Chambers is an important scholarly work for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of CPUSA activities in U. S., the work of HUAC, and especially its star member, Richard Nixon, and the political left/right divide that was at the center of the Cold War era.
As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.
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Whittaker Chambers: The secret confession
E. J Worth
Manufacturer: Mazzard
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- Redemed By History
- Major Work
- a fair review of an important book
- Read this book
- Tremendously moving, quiet, unaffected writing
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Witness: Library Edition
Whittaker Chambers
Manufacturer: Blackstone Audiobooks
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Customer Reviews:
Redemed By History .......2007-08-26
Ask a group of graduate students, "who was Whittaker Chambers", and the answers range from blank stares to vague memories of someone associated with the witch hunt for communists in the US Government. One of a hundred might remember that the man he accused of being a communist agent was found guilty of perjury, Alger Hiss. As a high ranking official of the Roosevelt administration Hiss was very involved in the tragedy of postwar Europe, the forced return of peoples to the territories now controlled by the Soviet Union and in the formation of the United Nations.
Only decades after the hysterical defenders of Hiss, Rosenberg and others have passed from the stage have serious academic researchers accepted the reality that yes, there was a large group of communists within the United States government and at the top level of the nation's nuclear program.
Surprisingly to many Chambers' involvement in the historic conflict was not related to his position as a senior editor of Time Magazine but rather to a much earlier time when he was the editor of the letters to the editor of the Daily Worker, the magazine of the American Communist party.
Chambers leaves us with an incredibly eloquent autobiography of his travel through these troubled times. The book is a worthwhile acquisition for its introduction alone which is in the form of a letter to his children. Chambers captures the void felt by so many dedicated young people as they leave their parents and complete their higher education. In Chambers' case it was during the turbulent years of the depression when everything relating to our form of government and economic foundation was brought into question.
The author believed he had found his calling in the Communist Party of the USA along with so many other intellectuals. Contrary to the predictions of Marx and others the Party's recruits came largely from the most privileged campuses, not from the most struggling workers both here and in Europe. The struggle that ripped though the movement in the 1930's culminating with Stalin's liquidation of thousands of "unreliable" party members including Trotsky, shook Chambers' faith to the point of his departure from the party.
Chambers's, aware of the many Communist Party faithful working in the Roosevelt administration, attempted a quiet approach to the government and only after 5+ years of its refusal to respond did he take the story public. That triggered famous Chambers / Hiss showdown in the Congressional hearings.
Witness is important as a historical work and a treasure as a personal journal of a man of tremendous conflict, intellect, literary skills and courage. Highly recommended.
Major Work.......2007-06-23
To be fair, this is a big book, a long book. It is not for the casual reader. I'm not sure it would be for young readers generally. In some respects it's a history book covering the era from the 1920's to the 1950's. For young people, that's ancient history, and probably requires some context.
Having said all that, I can now say this is a tremendously wonderful book. A unique book. It's an intense autobiography of an unusual and multi-talented man. (For a long period he was the top editor at Time magazine.) It's an inside look at all the spies and subversives we had running loose in this country. (Chambers was for several years a mere courier, carrying stolen secrets, out of loyalty to that glorious dream called Communism.) This book chronicles what ideology does to people, especially intellectuals, driving them to break their own moral codes.
Finally, this book is part of a 20th century genre that might be called the God-That-Failed confessional. (Compare Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" and Max Eastman's "Reflections on the Failure of Socialism.") Whittaker Chambers, like these other writers, was both an intellectual and an idealist. He became a Communist and a spy because he thought he could help save human civilization. Then he realized he was horribly wrong. Imagine the fear and anguish going into that other world, and then the fear and anguish trying to escape from that world. He was hated by many; still is. He and his family were often in danger. He carried a gun for years.
So, when you're ready for something big and deep, jump into this one.
a fair review of an important book.......2006-07-24
this is a review for those people that want a fair review of the book, not an extreme consersative bias bashing on socialists and lefts and not an and exreme leftist bashing on conservatives. Don't read most of the reviews because they are all bias beyond return, most of which by people who probably had no where else better to display their beliefs than amazon.
The book Witness is important to read regardless of your political beliefs, because it will most likely hone down your own ideas and give you more clearity on what your own beliefs even are. The book opens with the fascinating 'letter to my children', immediatly grabbing the reader. I've reread that part a few times. He goes on to explain why he joined the communist party and also why he decided to be a spy. It's vital for people to understand the difference betweem Stalin Communism, Lenin Communism, and the Communism Marx wrote about, so i would suggest reading on these subjects before diving into Witness. The book has many different feels to it throughout it, at parts it feels like your reading espionage thriller, at other times a law and order case, and at some parts are extremely religious.
Like I said it's important to read this book, and it's important to have an open mind and learn and accept philosophy beyond what you grew up with.
Read this book.......2006-05-18
Witness is the best autobiography I've ever read. It details the fascinating life of Whittaker Chambers, and the monumentally important Hiss-Chambers case. It is also first-rate prose.
What made Chambers's life so compelling? Two things: courage and redemption. Courage is the greatest of the virtues, because without it all the other virtues are merely pleasant thoughts that melt away at the first sign of adversity. Chambers needed that courage, because his devotion to the cause he would later repudiate, placed him in extreme danger.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Soviet handlers of the Communist underground dealt with defectors by killing them and anyone who assisted them. Starting in 1937, Chambers assisted numerous communists to escape from this network, and he in turn fled with his family in 1938. Chambers compounded the danger to himself by approaching each of his Washington sources, and pleading with them to also break ties with Communism and stop performing espionage.
Chambers was no Saint. He was probably bisexual (implying unfaithfulness to his devoted wife), he spied for a foreign government, and his communist duties required him to regularly practice deception.
Nonetheless, his courage allowed him to reject communism and seek redemption when its evil nature became apparent to him. At the age of 36 he started his life over; he renewed his faith in God, he used his position at Time magazine to relentlessly warn of the dangers of communism, and he risked everything (disclosure of his past, a civil libel suit, his job and professional reputation/relationships) to prove that the highly-placed State Department official Alger Hiss was a Communist spy.
The Hiss case was pivotal in warning the nation that communist spies were present at the highest levels of American policy-making. Hiss was a key figure at Yalta and Bretton Woods and other globe-shaping events, that rewarded the Soviets with more power than they had won during the war. Most Americans of my generation are unaware that prior to McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee was performing a genuine service for America, and removed numerous actual Communists from positions of influence. Hiss's conviction against the "immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts" is a testament to the greatness of this country, and this victory could not have been won without the undaunted courage of Whittaker Chambers.
I cannot conclude this review without attempting to describe the pleasure I received from reading each line of Chambers's prose. Every human is born with the ability to think, to feel, and to recognize or remember.....so is every animal. What separates humans from animals is an immortal soul. The immortal soul is what links humans with one another through the barriers of culture and time. This linkage is possible through a piece of God's eternity. This eternity allows for an accumulation of the shared conscience of man, and serves to help him recognize truth, recognize right from wrong, and recognize what is holy. But for most of us, when the soul speaks, it doesn't do so with a voice. It speaks to us in goose bumps, in dreams, or in familiar but unidentifiable melodies. At critical junctures in my life, I'm unable to say what I want to say; because my soul is saturated with feelings that defy articulate speech. Chambers was one of the special few born with the ability to communicate what his soul says to him. He was able to translate feelings charged with meaning into language charged with meaning.
No review I write can possibly do justice to this wonderful book. Please do not let my failure prevent you from reading this book and keeping the memory of Chambers's contributions to America alive
Tremendously moving, quiet, unaffected writing.......2006-01-17
I would rate this work among the greatest I have ever read, particularly as autobiography. With all politics aside, Chambers illuminates the human condition and the redemptive power of suffering in a deeply moving way. The plot is very engaging, the detail exhaustive. He had the full force of the Truman administration, the Communist underground and Party, and the mainstream press all bearing down on him to destroy and discredit him (all proven wrong in later years if you were blind to the clear truth then). As a battle between good and evil, truth and manipulation, this book is unmatched. If you want fatuous, insensitive manipulation of the truth and proof that the forces Chambers warned against are very much with us today, look no further than the one-star (non)review that precedes this one. Appalling. That's an unsophisticated example of the nonsense he dealt with in life.
This book will, quite simply, add to your life; Chambers' unique voice, unmatched in credibility, speaks for itself, as you will see. And as I have begun to do, you will want to seek out his other work. I am as yet a non-believer (religiously speaking) and am moved to say, "may God rest his soul."
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Whittaker Chambers: A Biography.(Review) (book review): An article from: Presidential Studies Quarterly
James N. Giglio
Manufacturer: Center for the Study of the Presidency
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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Presidential Studies Quarterly, published by Center for the Study of the Presidency on March 1, 2000. The length of the article is 1041 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Whittaker Chambers: A Biography.(Review) (book review)
Author: James N. Giglio
Publication:
Presidential Studies Quarterly (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2000
Publisher: Center for the Study of the Presidency
Volume: 30
Issue: 1
Page: 207
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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