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IC's Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 10 - Whittaker Chambers, Witness
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
16 December 2004

Witness Whittaker Chambers' Witness helped awaken America to the domestic threat of communism and is one of the most significant autobiographies of the twentieth century.

No doubt, Chambers' Witness qualifies as one of the great books of the Generalized Right.
 
In the Wolfe sourcebook, Right Minds, the following passage appears under the "personal testimony" section:
One of the most significant autobiographies of the twentieth century, this story of Chambers' period as a Communist agent, his disillusionment, and his subsequent confrontation with Alger Hiss is of more than historical interest: it is a prophetic call to acknowledge the decline of the West and to nourish the 'permanent things.'

I use the phrase, "generalized right" with immense purpose. This book ushered in the Buckley Right of the Cold War period -- that it did not contribute a fig toward the notion of Liberty as our forefathers sought is the conundrum where I affix.
 
A little about a milieu familiar to the IC reader: The period after WWII saw converts to anticommunism, many of whom were to be found on the National Review masthead. Chambers (1901-1961) had written for the popular New Masses and The Daily Worker in the pro-Left frenzy of the 30's. A committed Stalinist, he had recruited agents from sundry government bureaucracies. From this period on, he had settled comfortably as Senior Editor for Time.
 
And, of course, Alger Hiss.
 
During the famous 1947-48  HUAC hearings (Nixon was lead counsel), Chambers exposed Hiss as a spy for Moscow. They had been solid friends, the details of which loom in the book. Hiss had been an operative while a high-level New Deal State Department functionary (this charge fully substantiated with the release of the Venona papers in 1995). The McCarthy Hearings, a form of pop-art emanating from the serious Hiss charges, dominated the early 50's. After the censure, sides were chosen, and the Cold War continued, until Russian money ran out.
 
And Ann Coulter brought it all back, this time mixed with the ethos of a strange new phenomenon -- The Neoconservative Movement.
 
This is the morass in which I find myself, whereby I praise the book's importance, and, by a heel's twist, consternate, forms for me, the substance of my piece.
 
One cannot talk Rock without huge Beatles homage (the Stones are better)! It is well-nigh impossible to talk IC "Top 25" without the same "approachment."
 
Who writes as well (and as darkly) as Chambers?
 
His introductory Letter to His Children is alone worth justification. He says, in part,
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…(my book)… is terrible in what it says about men…it is more terrible in what it tells about the world…(the Hiss Thing)…Two faiths were on trial…(there was)…a critical conflict of faiths…

He brings it home:
Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks (to avoid) 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…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.

(Is there a better piece of prose? Is there a darker piece of prose? Is there a scarier piece of religiosity extant)?
 
The following emanate?
 
Chambers made a hell of a splash.

Spies are not nice people and should be punished.
 
Here's the rub:

Chambers' worth resides in the sphere of "realpolitique."  Liberty was clearly in jeopardy. Hiss and the subsequent embarrassment of the Left-Leaners was good exposure. "Homo Americanus" was awakened (not that today's Walmart patron needs such instruction -- with them, spotting phonies is instinctive).
 
Chambers went Theology Wacky. He substituted one closed system for another. He was pre-Pat Robertson -- a cheerleader for the brand of catholic of the 1950's Notre Dame Law School coalition -- no holds-barred autocracy -- Communism with Eucharist.
 
And the neoconservatives of the Fox coalition are the inheritors of  Chambers Talk.
  
We decimate a nation-state whose connection to true anti-American terrorism is as accurate as mine is to Heather Locklear's boudoir.
 
Years ago the young Rothbard saw danger in the Frank Meyers-Chambers worldview (check this out in the Lew Rockwell archives).
 
I conclude by recommending collateral reading (more like a must read). Gary North's "Introduction to Neoconservatism" clearly spells out Old Right anti-communism in contrast to the then pubescent brand now found within the Buckley-Kristol Network.
 
North at his best:
I recall a 1963 essay by novelist and anti-Communist Taylor Caldwell, in which she complained loudly against the ex-Communists who were taking over the intellectual leadership of the fledgling conservative movement. She was greatly annoyed. She reminded her readers that she had never succumbed to the siren call of dialectical materialism. She basically labeled the newcomers as Johnny-come-latelies.
 
The neoconservatives in 1965 were Johnny-come-safelies. Their heirs still are.


Witness is available on Amazon.com.

IC's Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books.

Dr. Enrico Peppe is a retired educator who runs the website, "The Third Way."  He spends an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking about the conservative movement, studying Catholic theology and listening to Sinatra and Miles Davis.  Forever a committed Rightist, he married the beautiful Deborah on July 4th, 2004.

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