Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  To be sure, in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a military historian and sometime Yeltsin advisor named Dmitri Volkogonov sent Hiss a letter exonerating him after a search of existing KGB files. But joy among the Hiss loyalists was short-lived. General Volkogonov admitted that he had not made a careful search of the files and that many files had been destroyed. Shortly thereafter, according to Russian researchers, intelligence officers removed all remaining KGB files relevant to Chambers and Hiss.

  In 1993, the end of Communism in Hungary yielded from the Interior Ministry archives in Budapest a dossier containing a 1954 interview with American Communist Noel Field in which he revealed his espionage collaboration in the United States with Alger Hiss. In 1995, the U.S. government released decrypted cables between Moscow and Soviet agents based in America that pointed to Hiss as a Soviet agent.

  So, case closed: Alger Hiss was a liar, spy, and traitor.

  Why then the continuing refusal to accept reality? There may be a residual distaste for Chambers as a nonheroic figure, tortured by his tragic role, wracked by inclinations toward suicide, and, like most of us, not immune to sins of the flesh. But even if Chambers were as elegant as Hiss, I suspect the obloquy would not be much less intense.

  The problem with Whittaker Chambers is that he is no more a congenial figure for the twenty-first century than he was for the mid-twentieth. While smashing away at the liberal consensus, he does not even reassure conservative conventions.

  On the first full page of Witness, he talks of “this sick society, which we call Western Civilization,” locked in a struggle between “the two irreconcilable faiths of our time—Communism and Freedom.” A relativist establishment that never forgave Ronald Reagan for just one time branding the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” could not abide a Chambers who indicts Communism as “evil, absolute evil.” For Westerners who imagined in each succeeding Soviet ruler a turn from Stalinism, Chambers was hard to take: “The point was not that Stalin was evil, but that Communism is more evil, and that, acting through his person, it found its supremely logical manifestation.”

  It is this portrayal that so transformed my attitudes as a young army officer and that so offended the moral and cultural relativists of the world. But that scarcely is the limit of Chambers’s capacity to outrage the establishment.

  He views this struggle as inseparable from faith in God, asserting that “man without mysticism is a monster.” He goes on to assail liberals as sharing with Communists “a similar vision” of man without God and indeed sharing complicity with them. Finally there is his conviction that in leaving Communism he has switched from the winning to the losing side.

  The defeat of Communism in the Cold War shows that Chambers was wrong on this salient point. But it is imperative for the future of Western civilization to explore the reasoning behind his error.

  Chambers’s assertion that he was on the losing side was heavy going for conventional America. It was heavy going for me when I first read Witness. But in moving from youth to advanced middle age, with each rereading I came to accept more and more of it as harsh reality and yet, paradoxically, as a preeminent source of hope.

  Chambers has Communism posing “the most revolutionary question in history: God or Man? ... If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?” Describing the twentieth as the first century in which man “has deliberately rejected God,” he sees an “irrepressible” conflict among and within nations between “those who reject and those who worship God.”

  That is hard enough for a secularized establishment. Harder still is his contention that Communism is only the “most conspicuously menacing form” of God-rejection. He points to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he sees as a “genuine revolution.” Herein is Chambers’s explanation of why his exposure in 1939—to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle—of a highly placed espionage ring, including Hiss, went unheeded until his subpoena from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in 1948.

  It was not treason: “Men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves.... For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made.” So it was that the Hiss spy ring was covered up for nearly a decade.

  In his congressional testimony, Hiss consciously encouraged the defenders of the New Deal to consider Chambers’s revelations as an attack against their cause (“to discredit recent great achievements of this country in which I was privileged to participate”). When he aimed at Communism, Chambers confessed, he “also hit something else.” It was, he said, “that great social revolution, which, in the name of liberalism ... has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

  Even decades later, such rhetoric would generate the reflexive charge of McCarthyism, though Chambers regarded Senator McCarthy as a disaster for the anti-Communist cause. The suggestion that the liberal could not cope with the Communist menace generated passionate indignation.

  The element of Witness rejected by conservatives as well as liberals is its pessimism. First-time readers are stunned by the first page of Chapter 1, when Chambers recounts telling his wife that he was turning from Communism: “You know,” he recalls saying, “we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” He adds that “almost nothing” has made him think he was wrong about that judgment.

  But Witness has not been continually reread and republished because of Chambers’s playing Cassandra. It has not been fervently pressed onto children by me and many others because it is a testament of doom.

  Curiously, the message of hope prevails in the end. Chambers the ex-Communist is finally eclipsed by Chambers the Christian. His pessimism on political grounds is tempered by faith—in God and in his fellow Americans.

  It was Providence that finally enabled Chambers, at such personal cost, to “win” the Hiss case. He sees the hand of God in the selection of the intrepid Thomas Murphy as federal prosecutor of Hiss when the overriding attitude of the Truman administration, from the president on down, was contempt and derision. Had there not been a thirty-five-year-old freshman congressman from California named Richard M. Nixon who insisted on carrying through the case for Chambers, it would have been buried by Hiss’s lies and evasions. Indeed, for someone with the strength and force of Chambers to sacrifice his life for his country can be called providential.

  But why was he then so pessimistic about the world struggle? Like Ignazio Silone in The School for Dictators, Chambers could not conceive of a citizenry able to overcome the modern police and military power of the twentieth-century state. That skepticism was confirmed by the failure of popular revolts against Communist rule in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But in 1989, when revolution again seized the old capitals of central Europe, the ramparts of Communist tyranny were brought down in a wave that finally extended all the way to the Kremlin.

  Biographer Tanenhaus places journalist Ralph de Toledano “among the first of a generation of intellectuals who saw Chambers as a towering moral figure.” He was followed by William F. Buckley Jr., the young editor of the fledgling National Review, who developed a close relationship with Chambers and, from afar, with young people like me. All were infused with Chambersian commitment to the struggle but also with Chambersian pessimism about the future.

  Chambers and all his acolytes, in the final analysis, fell short in failing to fully appreciate the hand of God. Tanenhaus sees his subject “interested in religion—more precisely, in the convergence of religion and politics.” Yet Chambers could not imagine a divine power overseeing the epochal struggle.

  What else other than such intervention can explain the failure of seventy years of relentless mind control in t
he Soviet Union and forty-five years in its satellites? There may have been divine inspiration in the mistake by Mikhail Gorbachev in relaxing, ever so little, that horrible apparatus of social engineering and terror that was the Communist empire—whereupon, the whole rotten edifice began crumbling.

  The end of the Communist empire leads to interpretations of Witness on new levels. Rereading it, I am struck by its invocation of tragedy in modern America. Chambers, the son of a dysfunctional middle-class family, is driven to dissent, treason, and finally what he refers to as making, “like Lazarus, the impossible return.” Andre Malraux told Chambers in a letter, “You are one of those who did not return from hell with empty hands.”

  This is a literary masterpiece, but it is also a political instrument, something the Left recognized from the moment of its publication in 1952. “The great effort of this new Right,” said novelist Mary McCarthy in a private letter, “is to get itself accepted as a normal part of publishing.” She added that this effort “must be scotched, if it’s not already too late.” It was indeed too late.

  Chambers concludes this often anguished work with a testament of faith in the American people. While the “best people” of the nation then supported Hiss (and to this very day belittle Chambers), he believed that by and large most Americans had come to realize “what forces disastrous to the nation were at work in the Hiss case.”

  Chambers calls them “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness, in common forgiveness.” Would that they all read this book, to be inspired and strengthened, as I and many others have been.

  In 1990, former president Richard Nixon, missing his original copy of Witness, which he had loaned out, wrote me a letter noting that he had purchased the new 1987 edition and read my preface. “The highest compliment I can pay is that it reads like Chambers,” Nixon said. I can conceive of no higher compliment in my journalistic career.

  Robert D. Novak has written the nationally syndicated column “Inside Report” since 1963. He publishes the Evans-Novak Political Report and cohosts the Novak, Hunt & Shields and Crossfire interview programs on Cable News Network (CNN). He is also executive producer of and a regular panelist on CNN’s Capital Gang and a contributing editor for Reader’s Digest.

  FOREWORD IN THE FORM OF A LETTER TO MY CHILDREN

  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.

  My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father—dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes. Sometimes you will wonder which is harder to bear: friendly forgiveness or forthright hate. In time, therefore, when the sum of your experience of life gives you authority, you will ask yourselves the question: What was my father?

  I will give you an answer: I was a witness. I do not mean a witness for the Government or against Alger Hiss and the others. Nor do I mean the short, squat, solitary figure, trudging through the impersonal halls of public buildings to testify before Congressional committees, grand juries, loyalty boards, courts of law. A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. A witness, in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.


  One day in the great jury room of the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York, a juror leaned forward slightly and asked me: “Mr. Chambers, what does it mean to be a Communist?” I hesitated for a moment, trying to find the simplest, most direct way to convey the heart of this complex experience to men and women to whom the very fact of the experience was all but incomprehensible. Then I said:

  “When I was a Communist, I had three heroes. One was a Russian. One was a Pole. One was a German Jew.

  “The Pole was Felix Djerjinsky. He was ascetic, highly sensitive, intelligent. He was a Communist. After the Russian Revolution, he became head of the Tcheka and organizer of the Red Terror. As a young man, Djerjinsky had been a political prisoner in the Paviak Prison in Warsaw. There he insisted on being given the task of cleaning the latrines of the other prisoners. For he held that the most developed member of any community must take upon himself the lowliest tasks as an example to those who are less developed. That is one thing that it meant to be a Communist.

  “The German Jew was Eugen Leviné. He was a Communist. During the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, Leviné was the organizer of the Workers and Soldiers Soviets. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was crushed, Leviné was captured and courtmartialed. The court-martial told him: ‘You are under sentence of death.’ Leviné answered: ‘We Communists are always under sentence of death.’ That is another thing that it meant to be a Communist.

  “The Russian was not a Communist. He was a pre-Communist revolutionist named Kalyaev. (I should have said Sazonov.) He was arrested for a minor part in the assassination of the Tsarist prime minister, von Plehve. He was sent into Siberian exile to one of the worst prison camps, where the political prisoners were flogged. Kalyaev sought some way to protest this outrage to the world. The means were few, but at last he found a way. In protest against the flogging of other men, Kalyaev drenched himself in kerosene, set himself on fire and burned himself to death. That also is what it meant to be a Communist.”