E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle
(And thus we emerged again to see the stars.)
-Dante,
The
Divine Comedy
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 democracy, with which we would have to co-exist for the foreseeable future. But this is, of course, the reality that existed at the time. As Andrew Sullivan has recently written in a stirring 90th birthday tribute to Ronald Reagan, there's something perverse about the spectacle of two nuclear freeze advocates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, basking in the economic and political afterglow of the defeat of Communism, a defeat for which they manifestly deserve no credit. There is no doubt that Communism is a failure, but it is important to realize that its final defeat was not preordained. Socialism too is a failure but the countries of Western Europe continue to cling to it and much of the Democratic Party continues to aspire to it. Had the advocates of Détente, appeasement, and coexistence prevailed we might easily have found ourselves today in a situation where the entire world lay prostrate under the weight of various forms of statism, and, though the Cold War would technically be over, the peoples of Eastern Europe would still reside in what were essentially police states.
This is the context that must be recaptured in order to really appreciate Witness. In fact, one must go further; Chambers genuinely believed, as did many at that time, that western capitalist democracy was doomed :
I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term
penalty, for herself and for the children, of the
step I was taking. I said : "You know, we
are leaving the winning world for the losing world." I
meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the
20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable
defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed,
or that has happened to me since, has made me think
that I was wrong about that forecast. But
nothing has changed my determination to act as if I were
wrong--if only because, in the last instance, men
must act on what they believe right, not on what
they believe probable.
A more recent memoir by an apostate from the Left, David Horowitz's Radical Son, was frequently compared by the critics to Witness. But there was one huge difference; Horowitz knew when he moved to the Right that he was deserting the losing side and switching to the winners. The power of Witness, on the other hand, derives in great measure from the author's discomforting sense of pessimism about the prospects of his new team.
And so in his book Chambers sought to warn the West about the dangers in its midst, in particular the fact that, for really the first time, the West faced a conflict in which significant segments of its own population were working for the other side. Chambers drew upon his own insider's knowledge of Communist espionage to sound the warning that there were enemies in our midst :
The deeper meaning of the Soviet underground apparatus,
and all the apparatuses that clustered
hidden beside it, was not so much their espionage
activity. It was the fact that they were a true
Fifth Column, the living evidence that henceforth
in the 20th century, all wars are revolutionary
wars, and are fought not only between nations, but
within them.
The men and women Communists and fellow travelers
who staffed this Fifth Column were
dedicated revolutionists whose primary allegiance
was no longer to any country--nor to those
factors which give a country its binding force :
tradition, family, community, soil, religious faith.
Their primary allegiance was to a revolutionary
faith and a vision of man and his material destiny
which was given political force by international
Communism, of which the American Communist
Party (and hence the Soviet Government, which is
only an administrative apparatus of the Russian
Communist Party) are component sections.
That his warnings, and the proof he served up in the Hiss case, would eventually be warped into McCarthyism was unfortunate, but not for the generally accepted reasons, nor from the presumed causes.
What was truly unfortunate about McCarthyism was not the fact of the Red Hunt itself, but that it was left to such an incompetent as Joe McCarthy. If, instead of circling the wagons to protect their own, responsible members of the Left had joined with the Right to root out men and women in government, academia, and the media who were actively trying to subvert democracy, the entire process might have been salutary, rather than turning into one of the more divisive episodes in our domestic political history. But the Left, as a general rule, which had been untroubled by FDR's decision to imprison every American of Japanese descent on the West Coast during WWII, reacted viscerally to the idea of exposing and removing genuine agents of an enemy government from positions of power.
To a great, and unacknowledged, degree, this reaction was dictated by class animosity. For the bitter truth is that Communism, particularly in America, was an ethos of the upper classes and the intelligentsia. The middle classes, for obvious reasons, and the lower classes, for more complex reasons, never subscribed to the ideals of Communism. And so, when the time came to destroy the Fifth Column, the destruction was led by men like McCarthy and Nixon, men with the stink of the common on them, and opposed by those who, like Hiss, had gone to the best Eastern schools and moved in the best social circles :
No feature of the Hiss Case is more obvious, or more
troubling as history, than the jagged fissure,
which it did not so much open as reveal, between
plain men and women of the nation, and those
who affected to act, think and speak for them.
It was, not invariably, but in general, the "best
people" who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared
to go to almost any length to protect and
defend him. It was the enlightened and the
powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind
and the common man, who snapped their minds shut
in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an
individual patient, means the simple failure of
the ability to distinguish between reality and
unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the
end.
Those seeking to understand the passions stirred up by the Hiss Case need look no farther than the condescending aside of Hiss to Nixon : "My college was Harvard, I understand yours was Whittier." There, in a sentence, is expressed the contempt and animosity between classes which would soon turn a simple espionage case into the cause which separated a generation of Americans. So while it was common to blame Chambers and his supporters for McCarthyism, most of the blame should really fall upon the Anti-Anti-Communists, those who, though they did oppose communism, could not bear to see their peers brought down by commoners, no matter what crimes those peers may have committed in the putative name of those very commoners.
The further time removes us from the events of the Hiss case and the
more information is revealed from the secret archives of both the U. S.
government and the old Soviet Union, the less ambiguous the legacy of Whittaker
Chambers becomes. No one outside of the most irrational Left wing
circles will any longer argue that Hiss was innocent; at most they try
to impugn the character of Chambers, hinting darkly at elements of psychosexual
drama in the case. And the files further reveal that throughout the
Cold War, many of the groups on the Left (like those disarmament groups
that Clinton and Blair supported) were, either wittingly or unwittingly,
funded and controlled by the Soviet Union. The scope and effectiveness
of Soviet subversion in the West is continually being revised upwards and
those who warned about it and opposed it look better and better in retrospect.
No one looks better than Whittaker Chambers, whose life's journey from
darkness into light so closely parallels that of the West as to serve as
an allegory for the age. Witness, his testimony to that journey
and his statement of faith, stands as one of the great books of any age
and perhaps the best book of the 20th century.
(Reviewed:09-Feb-01)
Grade: (A+)
