Most influential book, I have ever read

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	• Witness Whittaker Chambers Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1978 - 808 pages average customer review:based on 61 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Impeachable Witness

During a recent vacation, I was able to finish reading Whittaker Chambers' startling eight hundred page autobiography, "Witness". And I must say that I feel both well informed and somewhat disturbed by the experience. Perhaps I may be allowed to explain.

Whittaker Chambers is the name finally employed by the very strange character, born as Jay Vivian Chambers. This man was raised by a rather odd set of parents, his father, a failed artist and bisexual, and his mother, a never launched actress. Now despite the failings of his parents at their chosen professions, they nevertheless had the audacity to look down upon their economic peers, among whom the Chambers boys grew up. And, though much of the personal information included in the early chapters of this book, relative to Chambers' formative years, is excruciatingly boring, it is also instructive.

Chambers was a diffident, slovenly young man, though evidently somewhat gifted academically. As a consequence, he was able to gain admission to Columbia University. There, his academic career was singularly unsuccessful. First expelled for publishing a blasphemous play about Jesus Christ, he later returned, but was unable to complete his basic degree. With this, we see a very odd, but recurrent aspect of Chambers' unique personality. Though unable to complete even a bachelor's degree, due to lack of discipline, he had the audacity to style himself as an intellectual. He began then, as his parents had done before him, to sneer condescendingly at those more disciplined and accomplished than he was. And, finally, he found a rationale for his rejection of discipline and orthodoxy in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Chambers became then a "dedicated" Marxist.

Our "hero" then went to work for a number of Marxist journals, and pursued a deviant lifestyle. Finally, he joined, quite willingly, the communist underground, and became an asset of Soviet intelligence. In this role, Chambers recruited numerous government officials, including the noteworhty Alger Hiss, and was associated with such men as Soviet agent and US Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White.

The cowardly Chambers eventually "broke" with communism, ostensibly on the occassion of the Soviet Union's treaty with Nazi Germany. In any case, Chambers then turned on his former colleagues. This turncoat behavior of the traitor brought him finally before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and enabled him to establish a strange professional relationship with a hard charging young congressman on that committee, Richard Nixon of California.

Having charged Hiss, and others, with that which he had been guilty of, being a communist, Chambers spent years as a cooperating government witness. Hence, we have the title of this book. In a stunning admission in this, his autobiography, Chambers allows that he perjured himself before a grand jury on the question of whether he had personal knowledge of espionage activity done in the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. Hiss was later convicted of perjury on essentially the same set of facts. But Chambers was spared conviction, as a cooperating government witness.

Given the above, it is stunning that the bisexual, cowardly, and deceitful Chambers has become a hero of the American "right". But perhaps this represents an essential aspect of the dialectical materialism of the "left/right" dichotomy of top level American politics. The despicable Chambers "broke" with communism. Hiss, equally despicable, never renounced this hideous ideology. American "conservatives" have since made a fetish of comparing Chambers to Hiss. To this reader, this comparison appears rather like trying to determine which is the taller of two midgets.

Despite the above, the book is worth reading. It is overly long and terribly turgid. And the author is surely no hero. But the history contained within this account is well worth knowing.

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Most influential book, I have ever read

I read this book when it was first published. I was fourteen or fifteen and in high school. It made a profound impact on me. Besides being beautifully written, its tale of a man who leaves what he calls the winning side (Communism) and joins the losing side (God) in the great conflict of the 20th Century influenced the course of my life.

I am now 69 and still have memories of reading Chambers' autobiography. I became a lifelong anti-Communist even before I became a conservative. I come from a family of blue-collar Irish Democrats but even at a young age felt the call of the other party and when I registered to vote at age 21, I immediately registered as a Republican.

Read this book and be astounded (as I was) about Chamber's life first as an overt Communist writing for the Daily Worker and then as an underground Communist working with cells in our nation's capital. We meet Alger Hiss and other important figures in the Roosevelt administration who led other lives as traitors and spies for the USSR. Doubtful as to those individuals? Then read the many books chronicling the findings in the Soviet archives after the fall of the Soviet Union (the Venona Project).

My only regret is that Whittaker Chambers did not live to see the collapse of the USSR. He would have been pleased.

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Haunting

Witness is among the most haunting books that I have ever read. The reader who picks it up expecting only a combination spy story and courtroom drama is likely to be as profoundly surprised as was I.

I had somewhat absent-mindedly placed Witness on my birthday gift list, in deference to the frequency with which it is cited as one of the indispensable political books of the 20th century. Upon receipt, I assigned it to the "to-read" stack, failing to note that it was a daunting 800 pages long. Shortly after I began it and realized its length, I feared it would prove too dense for me to enjoy. How wrong I was: when I at last closed the book a couple of weeks later, I knew that it would haunt me, possibly for all the years I have left.

Many conservatives regard this book as a seminal founding charter, a characterization that not only underrates its literary quality, but which also erects a needless barrier before others who would appreciate it. This book is must-reading, regardless of political persuasion. I myself differ from Chambers in several fundamental ways: I am as predisposed to optimism as he was to pessimism; I relished elementary school as greatly as he was tormented by it; and I do not share his religious faith. But these and other differences do not inhibit a reader from appreciating this magnificent book.

This book not only tells a riveting story, it does so with a poetic, melancholy beauty reminiscent of a great Russian novelist. Something about his writing reminded me of Nabokov (an inexact comparison, given that the style exhibits none of Nabokov's exuberant, puckish wordplay). But Chambers's fluid, graceful sentences, and his gift for reconstruction of sensory and emotional states, are comparable to those of the brilliant Russian emigre. Suffice it so say that this book does not read like a bestselling memoir, but rather as a great work of literature.

The story of Witness is of a man originally alienated from his society, and of his struggle to find good and meaning in his world. Chambers's account of his early life is deeply saddening. One suspects that the entire family was genetically predisposed to depression, considering his brother's suicide, the narrator's own similar attempts, and his parents' many self-destructive actions.

Attending school only accentuated young Vivian's (later Whittaker's) sense of isolation. One story he relates is hard to forget: on one of his first school days, he witnessed three boys urinating on a lollipop, and then tricking a later-arriving fourth boy into putting it into his mouth. (The incident itself is gloomy enough; equally so is the fact that Chambers later remembered it as emblematic of his school experience.) Young Chambers is traumatized by the pervasive cruelty around him. He struggles through the ordeal of school - the mockery of his name Vivian, the taunts of being a "sissy," and being compelled to fight.

One is hardly surprised that such an alienated, secretly intelligent, unappreciated youth, convinced of the intractable injustice of the world, would be seduced by communism. In the central section of the book, Chambers details his gradual descent into that world, first as an open party communist, later as a practitioner in espionage. It is in this section that he meets Alger Hiss, and collaborates with him in betraying his country.

This middle section of the book is probably the most arduous reading. At points, many of the figures and spy escapades seem to all run together. But stick with it, because the final 300 pages or so, detailing the Hiss case, are among the most gripping you will ever read.

Chambers at some point realizes that the actions and amorality of communist agitation offend his still-living conscience. He finally responds to that conscience, and begins a further personal journey to where he locates the spiritual comfort he previously lacked: in truth, in family, in working the land, and in religious faith.

Ultimately, Chambers's break with the party compels him to inform on Alger Hiss and others during a Congressional investigation of communist infiltration of the executive branch. Chambers chooses his title of "Witness" advisedly, meaning "witness" in quite the literal, religious sense - a moral compulsion to testify to what he knows, in spite of the danger to himself, in order to help save the world around him. Indeed, Chambers is convinced that he is defecting from the winning to the losing side when he makes his break, but feels he cannot rightly do otherwise.

Popular memory of this period in American history has been, unfortunately, blurred by the excesses of Joe McCarthy. McCarthy's crude and reckless actions have made him a convenient whipping boy for subsequent Hollywood treatments of the Cold War. It is too little remembered that prior to the McCarthy debacle, it was revealed that in fact, there were many communists who had ensconced themselves in the highest levels of the American government, where they practiced a treasonous espionage. The Chambers-Hiss case, much more than the buffoonery of McCarthy, is the truly dramatic and relevant parable of the age.

Much of the final chapters of Witness is told through transcripts of the Congressional hearings. Reading them, one can only wish for a skilled Hollywood treatment of these scenes. The events included every dramatic turn one could hope for - the steady unraveling of a senior State Department official as his lies are exposed on the witness stand, the relentless and skilled probing of Congressional investigators, dramatic personal confrontations, the discovery of critical evidence midway through the proceedings, and even the secreting of classified material in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

What is sobering to realize is that the case would be likely to play out in much the same way today: the press reflexively sided with the urbane, politically-approved Hiss, while the slovenly, seemingly-shady Chambers was subjected to every calumny imaginable. But it turned out that it was the schlub who was actually the man of intelligence and integrity. Appearances are often deceiving.

One thing that leaps out from these pages after the fact is just how pathetically incompetent a liar was Alger Hiss. You follow him weaving and revising and hedging, and not very convincingly. But so blinding were the ascendant political assumptions of the time that he was the one who was initially believed.

One needn't share Chambers's views on politics, religion, or even of the mind of the typical communist subversive, to find his memoir to be a story of surpassing poetry and haunting resonance. Few people have had such an important story to tell in their memoirs, and almost none have told them so lyrically. Few are the books that are virtually impossible to forget. This is one.

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Witness to what

I've never given much thought to Whittaker Chambers, although I was sympathetic to him in the Hiss case. His book, however, is powerful and insightful. Even though the Soviet Union is gone, the forces at work that are trying to undermine Western Civilization are still present. Now more than ever we need a "Witness".

The Best Autobiography I've Ever Read

This reads like a great spy novel, but (of course) it is true. After one has finished the last page there is a feeling of loss ... where are giants like Chambers these days?

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

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