Witness

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Summary: Great Book By A Prime Grade A Large ...
Review: Though over-flowery at times, this is a great book written by one of the most prominent ... of the 20th century -- a fellow from a fouled-up family who accordingly developed his own severe personality impairments. He appeared to constantly seek some force other than himself for improving his life -- such as communism then mysticism -- and seemed to believe we should all spend our lives tilling carrots in a truck patch.

His quote, "Anyone can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a good natural death" was significantly relevant to communism, one of the most effective ways-of-death that civilization has ever formulated.

This is an important book, by an extremely pitiful individual.

Rating:
Summary: For all time
Review: In every age, there are people who experience life at the fulcrum. The bend and turn of history cross the arc of their lives. Frequently, because they are able and talented, these central people are capable of more than just historical action; they are capable of understanding and recording their experience in the larger context of the era. Whittaker Chambers is a man whose experience is inseparable from the 20th century. One thousand years from now, if books are read, Whittaker Chambers' WITNESS will be an account that matters. The account of what? The account of an idea, hopefully forgotten, which historians will call the Communist error. In that error, millions of men and women are forever entombed. In WITNESS, nothing is entombed. The force of life, the force of liberty, the eternal growth of honesty and understanding live. Is WITNESS perhaps wrought and overstuffed? Oh hell yeah. This is literature.

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Summary: Important, Interesting and Beautiful
Review: This book is IMPORTANT because it is the first person chronicle of a very real and very dangerous conflict.

The cold war was not just fought across the Berlin Wall, or in Vietnam. It was also fought on American soil, and America's enemies included some of her own citizens -- not just communist sympathizers, or fellow-travellers, or even members of the Communist Party, but spies and saboteurs, members of the communist underground who lived in deep cover and took their orders from Moscow.

The tendency now is joke about "commies," and how the "Russians are coming!" _Witness_ is important because we must remember that the threat was real, and people like Whittaker Chambers (who left the communist underground and testified against it) and Ronald Reagan (who fought the very real communist presence in Hollywood before entering the Oval Office to fight it on a grander scale) are heroes.

The book is also INTERESTING, among other reasons, because it details -- from Chambers's perspective -- the famous Hiss Trial. Chambers names the names (well, most of the names) of his underground associates, and the 20th century -- the New Deal, Yalta, McCarthyism -- just doesn't look the same after you've read this book.

Best of all, _Witness_ is BEAUTIFUL. It's a very well written memoir by a powerful writer whose own spiritual journey -- from the godless quasi-religion of communism to faith in a divine Creator -- had repercussions throughout America, and, arguably, the world.

Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing Look at a Courageous Man
Review: I acquired an original 1st edition copy of this classic, but oddly enough I kept it shelfed, assuming it to be rather mundane. I was very wrong! This is a fascinating biographical account of a former American communist, who 'defected' to the cause of freedom after seeing communism for what it really was- a LIE! Witness profiles the life of Whittaker Chambers during his hey-day as an avid Marxist to his conversion, which was as much a spiritual transformation, as an ideological one.

He was the whistleblower who offered the account of over Alger Hiss and an entreched number of communist agents in the U.S. State Department and other positions of power. I also recommend his biography by Sam Tanenhaus. Chambers would later continue his journalism career, writing for Time. He eventually came under the umbrella of the conservative William F. Buckley's National Review.

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Summary: Time to accept the painful truth
Review: It's only after the cold war that we can accept the threatening truth of "Witness". There was a massive spy network in place in the United States. Many of our best and brightest worked to subvert the American democracy and Constitution. Any objective look at history now shows that Alger Hiss was guilty just as the Rosenbergs were.

But there's a deeper message behind "Witness". Chambers wants us to know that the Cold War wasn't about the conflict between faith and no faith. It was about a war between two faiths, both deeply held. Chambers ultimately opted for Christianity over Communism because he became aware of the evil the latter inevitably produced. He gave the reason one of his acquaintances gave up the Communist faith. It was simple and moving: He heard screams.

Read this book and appreciative the moving genius of Whittaker Chambers.

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Summary: the book of the century
Review: It's unfortunate that the Left is so earnest and humorless, otherwise they might be able to enjoy the immense irony of the lofty position held by Whittaker Chambers in the Right's pantheon of 20th century heroes. I mean think about it for a second, Chambers, who spent half his life as a bisexual Communist spy, was also a leading light of TIME and the National Review, a friend of Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley, was awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, and made many conservatives' end-of-century lists, both for this memoir and for his personal influence. That's a fairly interesting resume by anyone's standards.

Chambers would be a heroic figure to the Right even if he had done nothing else but to accuse Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy. This action, so divisive that it still echoes through our politics today, helped to define the Cold War era, forcing people to choose sides--between anti-Communists, on the one side and communists, communist sympathizers and fellow travelers, and Anti-Anti-Communists on the other--and in turn hardening the lines between the sides as the nation headed into a period of prolonged cultural civil war, from which we have still not truly emerged.

But Chambers did not merely attack one man. With his memoir Witness he declared war on Communism and the Soviet Union and explained in no uncertain terms just what the struggle was about--what was at stake, the methods that the other side was using, and the seriousness of purpose which would be required to defeat them--and at the same time he told a life story which somehow managed to unite nearly all of the themes of modernity in one gloriously messy tale of personal degradation and desperation, followed by political and religious redemption and salvation. And to top it all off, not only does the story have all of the elements of a thriller and a courtroom drama, the author just happens to write brilliantly.

Chambers starts the book out with a forward in the form of a letter to his children (available on-line and well worth checking out) which seeks to explain why the book is necessary and why their father gained such notoriety in the first place. It is worth quoting a largish chunk :

Beloved Children,

I am sitting in the kitchen of the little house at Medfield, our second farm which is cut off by the ridge and a quarter-mile across the fields from our home place, where you are. I am writing a book. In it I am speaking to you. But I am also speaking to the world. To both I owe an accounting.

It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live. It is about what the world calls the Hiss-Chambers Case, or even more simply, the Hiss Case. It is about a spy case. All the props of an espionage case are there--foreign agents, household traitors, stolen documents, microfilm, furtive meetings, secret hideaways, phony names, an informer, investigations, trials, official justice.

But if the Hiss Case were only this, it would not be worth my writing about or your reading about. It would be another fat folder in the sad files of the police, another crime drama in which the props would be mistaken for the play (as many people have consistently mistaken them). It would not be what alone gave it meaning, what the mass of men and women instinctively sensed it to be, often without quite knowing why. It would not be what, at the very beginning, I was moved to call it: "a tragedy of history."

For it was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts.

At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.

But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope For it is about the struggle of the human soul--of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time.

In 1952, when the book was published, we were only seven years removed from WWII, in which FDR and Churchill had allied the West to the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazism. The great service which Chambers provided in this book, in his journalism for TIME like the imaginative Ghosts on the Roof (1945), and in the Hiss Case, was--along with Winston Churchill in his Fulton, MO speech of 1946, declaring that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent"--to force home the realization that the war against Communism, though "Cold," was just as much a "twilight struggle" as the war against Nazism had been. For the next four decades the West, basically the United States, would pursue this war with various levels of determination and fecklessness, and would eventually win it, thanks, appropriately, to Ronald Reagan, a near contemporary of Chambers, who had been inspired by him, as reflected in that Medal of Freedom.

The problem for us looking back at Chambers, and it may make readers scoff a little at the heated rhetoric of his prose in Witness, is that the West's victory looks inevitable to us now. Several powerful institutions--like the media, the Democratic Party, and the academy--have a vested interest in portraying the Cold War as a battle in which everyone pitched in to help defeat an enemy which pretty much self-destructed anyway. The memory of the fierce opposition of the Left to the confrontation with the Soviet Union is being gradually erased from the historic memory, and along with it the acknowledgment that as late as the mid-1980's, mainstream intellectuals considered Communism to be a viable alternative to de

Rating:
Summary: Critical Views of "Witness"
Review: "A Long Work of Fiction" is the title of the review of "Witness" by Nixon's Watergate defense attorney Charles Alan Wright, an eminent constitutional scholar who believed Alger Hiss innocent. (Saturday Review of Literature, May 24, 1952)

"Just from a literary point of view, it is ghastly twaddle -- huge stretches of overwritten, self-important, desperately self-inflating swill." Such was "Witness" to the columnist Molly Ivins. (The Salt Lake Tribune, Nov. 22, 1966)...

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Summary: Chamber's trial by fire . . . no one would listen . . .
Review: I loaned my first edition of "Witness" to a friend. Haven't seen it in more than 15 years.

Chambers, a literate, thought-leader in the U.S. (editor of Time Magazine), became convicted that his activities were selling out his beloved country instead of reaching for his ideal of making his homeland better.

When he wanted to tell his story of the cancer, eating away at the vitals of America, no one would listen. He searched for a listening ear who could possibly provide an antidote. The young Congressman from California, Richard Nixon, not only listened, but could be trusted.

Liberals would have us believe that the ensuing investigations were baseless, panic-driven, witch-hunts, when in fact they were critical to the survival of our country.

How many more enemies have found secure places in the vital innards of our governmental framework where they can hide and erode our freedoms. Our democratic republic is exquisitly easy to betray. We are a nation built upon and thriving up trusting each other.

We must not sleep, but be eternally vigilant. Communism and other forces who would bring down our nation have their roots in the days of Chambers and Hiss, but still thrive in the young 21st century. Their threat is not dead.

"Witness" should be required reading for all who love America, and should be a textbook for learning how to ferret our her enemies within.

Rating:
Summary: My 2nd All-Time Favorite book
Review: I bought my copy this year at the library book sale, but plan to order a few for friends. I saw it by accident and had remembered vaguely hearing of it. If other history buffs had understood what it was, it would have been gone the first day of the sale. It's the most beautifully written and powerful book I have ever read (outside of scripture). My used book was also underlined in pencil throughout, a testament to the impact it has on the reader. I am re-reading it for the 3rd time. It's a book that you want to show people passages from and say... "see, look what happened not too long ago?"... and we are losing our collective memory of that time. I don't have the book with me, but the part that stunned me the most was when (I believe it was the late '30's) Chambers first tried to notify officials of communism in high places - he says that it was reported back to him that the President "laughed". I quickly pulled out a book that contains a fascinating interview with Father Coughlin to compare dates. Coughlin recounts a meeting with Roosevelt at the President's home along with Joe Kennedy (at Roosevelt's request) because he wanted to know why Coughlin had not been to see him recently. It was because his Bishop had come by some documents from government sources indicating there was widespread communist infiltration of government offices. Roosevelt then - a few years earlier than being approached with Chambers' information - reportedly said "It just can't be". Joe Kennedy, by the way, wrote a letter of resignation as head of the SEC that day, after hearing the information from Coughlin. I looked again at the passage in Witness and said to myself... the President "laughed"? A few years later he laughed? You see Coughlin had told Roosevelt exactly where he could find the pertinent information and facts back in Washington.

We are losing, for lack of a better phrase, our historical memory of the truth. And because of that, the various groups that promote world government are successfully tricking and fooling people. When I read Witness the first time and read that Hiss worked for Wilson's son-in-law, and Harry Dexter White was a Communist, a high government official, AND first head of the World Bank, I was, I guess I could say shocked at how long these dedicated and ongoing attempts to undermine our freedoms and sovereignty as a nation have been going on. Again, this book is powerful and beautifully, poetically written. I love it on about 5 different levels. It's great!

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Summary: Yes Virginia, there really were communist spies...
Review: I recently read this book and was stunned at what it held. I always knew there were spies and traitors (every society, even the communist ones, has them) but to have such a large endeavor displayed before your eyes and to have it supported by reams of material evidence makes such knowledge real.

Mr. Chambers lays out why he was a communist and why he spied. He lays out the factual circumstances of his spying along with his traitorous compatriots (to include, despite "The Nation's" shrill cries of protest - Alger Hiss). He explains their motivation as well as their activities. He then goes through the agonizingly personal process of justifying his switch from communism to freedom and God. He makes clear that his choice was between two religions - the religion of man and slavery known as communism - and the religion of God and freedom - known as Christianity (as manifested in a culture of tolerance and freedom). He is explicitly personal and religious and he has been derided for such stands since he made them. His actions were a typical mix of faith, doubt, courage and cowardice, but he finally stood on the side of faith and courage and he was counted and Alger Hiss went to jail - where he belonged. Not even the slanderous bilge of "The Nation" can change that.

Kelly Whiting