Customer Reviews

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A defining moment in the ongoing Cultural Wars; several years ago, when Anthony Lake was up for the job of National Security Advisor to President Clinton, he appeared on Meet the Press. Tim Russert asked him if, in light of new access to Soviet files & the revelation of the Venona Intercepts, he would be prepared to acknowledge that Alger Hiss was a spy. Lake sat there like a deer in the headlights & then mumbled some bilge about how it was still an open question. And there you had it; for 50 years now, this seemingly simple question has lain at the fault line of the Left/Right divide in American politics. You could tell where someone stood on the political spectrum simply by getting their answer to whether Chambers or Hiss had told the truth. (If you think this overstates the case, compare Victor Navasky's obituary editorial from The Nation with Brent Bozell's analysis of the Hiss obituaries). For the American Left (never mind the European Left), the innocence of Alger Hiss was an article of faith. After all, if such a mainstream New Deal figure as Hiss had actually been part of a secret underground cabal, spying on the US for the Soviets, even as WWII was underway, then a whole battery of conservative attacks would gain legitimacy and the whole of FDR's legacy (both New Deal and Grand Alliance) would be called into question. Well, it's time for our entire society to face those questions and this celebrated Chambers biography by Sam Tanenhaus offers an excellent starting point.

The story of Whittaker Chambers is familiar enough, yet remains fundamentally elusive. Born on April 1, 1901, his life journey is a virtual parable of Modern man. His father was bisexual, his mother paranoid, grandmother (who lived with them) completely insane, younger brother committed suicide. Chambers was brilliant but slovenly, both physically and mentally. His own sexuality was somewhat ambiguous and he was generally alienated from the world around him. After failing to complete his degree at Columbia, he joined the Communist party and went underground in it's extensive espionage apparatus, wherein, he helped to run a Washington, DC spy ring. By 1937, with Stalinist purges and show trials in full swing and amidst the brutal Stalinization of the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Chambers became disenchanted with the Party & fled the underground. he attempted to reveal what he knew about communist spying to the requisite government authorities, but was basically ignored. Chambers ended up as an editor at Henry Luce's Time magazine & built a reputable middle class life for himself, his wife & their son & daughter. He become devoutly religious and vehemently anti-Communist.

Then he was sucked back into the maelstrom when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He revealed that Alger Hiss, a prominent New Dealer and pillar of the Establishment, had been a member of his 30's spy ring. Hiss promptly denied it and the stage was set for a years long legal battle that finally ended with Hiss being convicted for perjury.

In 1952, he published his brilliant memoir, Witness, in which he recounted his own life experiences and sounded the alarm to alert the West that it was locked in a death struggle between Communism and Christianity. One of the things that made the book so extraordinary was his assertion that in leaving Communism & becoming a Christian, he had joined the losing side in this struggle.

He spent the last few years of his life working on his beloved farm & writing articles & reviews, including a series of letters to the newly born National Review. He died in 1961.

Seems straightforward enough, eh? But he was & remains one of the most controversial figures, along with Hiss, of the 20th century. Oceans of ink have been spilled, trying to explain how he could have been mistaken about Hiss or how he was a scorned lover of Hiss or how he was used to discredit Hiss & through Hiss impeach the whole New Deal, and so on & so on....

Despite the real greatness of this book, Tanenhaus can't clear up many of the mysteries of the story for us, but he does provide several valuable services. First, by presenting the Hiss material in a simple declarative manner, he lays to rest any lingering doubts about whether Hiss was guilty of spying for the Soviet Union and then committing perjury about it later. It will be impossible for anyone to contest the mountain of evidence that he lays out so masterfully. Second, he reclaims Chambers the writer. Witness is widely recognized as one of the great books of the Century, but Tanenhaus also demonstrates that his work for Time and National Review and even the stories that he wrote as a young man are the product of a gifted writer. Third, he shows that there were Reds to be uncovered during the Red Scares and when diligent men like Richard Nixon went after them, they hit pay dirt. But he also shows that Joe McCarthy, who alienated Chambers with his dilettantish behavior & was never really serious about the investigatory process, effectively discredited the whole anti-Communist movement. Finally, as the Cold War fades in our rearview mirror, Tanenhaus recaptures the mood & feeling of the time when it seemed likely to be our Gotterdammerung. Hopefully, folks who read this book will also seek out Witness and find, in it's dark and frightening world view, the lost emotional fervor that fueled the anti-Communists & brought us Barry Goldwater & Ronald Reagan and eventual victory over the USSR.

GRADE: A

Chambers' autobiography "Witness" had left me speechless. It was a magnificent book, but unknown in most circles. I was hungry to learn more about Chambers' own life and times. It didn't take me long to get to Tanenhaus's fine biography, which gave me an outside perspective and did not disappoint. Tanenhaus is at his most valuable recounting Chambers' post-Hiss-Case life, not covered in "Witness"; in fleshing out the HUAC cast like Nixon, Mundt and Hebert, putting their careers and ambitions into perspective; and in covering the seamier sides of Chambers' personal and family background in even greater detail than Chambers had.

In "Witness", Chambers focuses on his spiritual journey, managing to keep a reader fascinated when that might easily have become eye-glazing. Tanenhaus pounds facts, availing himself of documents and accounts not available to Chambers in 1951. He remains objective about Chambers but ultimately finds little to criticize. Chambers was a man who put his career and life on the line to expose a conspiracy, as he saw it, threatening the world and eating away this nation from within. Despite circumstances strongly suggesting his veracity - would anyone throw away a lucrative career, as he did, to falsely accuse someone? - few believed him. History proved he was telling the truth - one worth hearing, since Chambers was the second-ranking U.S. man in the Communist underground espionage network.

Certain striking aspects of Chambers' character emerge here, some suggested by his autobiography but better to have confirmed independently. He was one of the great intellectuals of his time, the equal of better known friends and contemporaries from his Columbia days - Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman among them. His command of languages was exceptional. (Fabulous piece of trivia: Chambers translated the novel "Bambi" from the German in the 1920s, later inspiring the Walt Disney film.) His command of the classics, ditto. This was a man who never finished college - when he died, he was enrolled in a local college attempting to finish - but who dropped Dante quotations into interviews with ham-and-egger newspaper reporters. He was one of the greatest writers Time magazine ever had, writing first-class cover stories on philosophy, religion and other intellectual pursuits beyond most journalists. I was inspired to search out an available collection of his magazine work.

Chambers' continuing intellectual and political development did him credit. He became a father figure to the modern conservative movement, inspiring those like the young Bill Buckley who shaped it. But Chambers refused to follow them where his own conscience and intellect did not dictate. He wouldn't pursue a scorched earth policy against Republican moderates like Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, unlike Buckley and others, despite Chambers' personal closeness with them: Buckley had more or less rescued him from professional and financial oblivion in the 1950s. Chambers regarded the struggle against Communism as far more important than a Republican civil war over doctrinal purity. He backed Sen. Joseph McCarthy initially, but ultimately broke with him, fearing his recklessness "would lead him and us into trouble," jeopardizing the entire anti-Communist movement, Chambers wrote in declining to endorse Buckley's pro-McCarthy book.

And Chambers was willing, in his later years, to seek a politics that did not rationalize away the world's woes in favor of purist conservatism. It would have been easy for a man treated like Chambers was - who had seen the blindness of liberalism up close in the 1930s and 1940s, and had felt the savagery and hypocrisy of its backlash during the Hiss case - to become more extreme in his rejection of it. But he did not. Chambers expressed, in dealings with young writers, a fascination with the Beat poets then emerging. He saw in Columbia-tied bohemians like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg a reflection of his own distant youth. Very unBuckleyesque.

Tanenhaus treats the Hiss case conservatively, letting the record speak rather than relying on Chambers' detailed account of it in "Witness". Chambers drew vividly his and his wife's close relationships with Alger and Priscilla Hiss, placing it chronologically in the 1930s when it happened. In contrast, Tanenhaus's treatment of Chambers' life in the 1930s mentions Hiss only in passing. He instead takes Hiss on in the context of the hearings and trials, as the two sides jousted over whether Hiss and Chambers, from very different walks of life, knew each other at all. The question was a proxy for the greater question of espionage, although Hiss was never tried specifically for that charge. He was, however, convicted of perjury in denying he had given Chambers government documents, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

It is sad we have had to wait so long to have this case studied in such fine perspective. The Hiss case put the New Deal itself on trial, asking whether its leadership was pervaded with Communists; whether those leaders had followed the Communist Party line in shaping U.S. policy; whether they had tainted American war and China policy during and after World War II. And whether liberals were either so blind to these problems or so secretly sympathetic to them as to forever render them incapable of loving and protecting their homeland as it was.

I grew up under the cultural shadow of Alger Hiss, stupidly thinking the term "commie" was a funny way to mock anyone concerned about the threat of Communism.

But, being a victim of bad education, I knew nothing of the epic, mid-twentieth century showdown between Hiss (now known to have been a communist spy and traitor, though still, ludicrously revered as innocent by left intelligentsia) and Whittaker Chambers, the moral lodestone of the twentieth century ,who offered up his own life as a sacrifice of sorts to unmask and quell the poison tentacles of communist Russia that reached high into the U.S. Government of the New Deal era. And Chambers was not only a former communist spy himself, but a burgeoning literary icon. This is the history of a clash of ideas, submerged in the clash between two men caught up in the rush of modern history. The truth, as always, is right in front of us. Only ideological dogma can prevent one from pretending not to see it.

I found this book endlessly fascinating. Whittake Chambers emerges as a complex, torn figure, one who is driven by an overwhelming sense of what's right -- but all through his own perspective. There is no smarmy, politicized cheerleading or criticism, just the poignant portrayal of a complex man who placed himself at a vortex of American history. A wonderful, wonderful story, and an amazing accomplishment. It is rare that I cannot put down a biography, but this is one.

The Hiss-Chambers affair continues to reverberate through the years. This event set in motion the career of Richard Nixon to national prominence, set the stage for much of the anti-Communist debate and policy decisions of the government, destroyed many careers and poisoned the relations among many intellectuals along the lines of what side they took.

Sam Tanenhaus very efficiently shows the many facetted personality of Whittaker Chambers, from his undeniable brilliance (got the library and find a back copy of TIME and read some of his book reviews to see this firsthand - excellent review of Finnegan's Wake) to his well deserved paranoia, to how hard he worked to support his family and how much he loved his children.

We are shown what I believe was an exciting intellectual period of ferment in this country, especially when compared with today's climate were "Crossfire" and "Hardball" pass as intellectual debate. Chambers is portrayed as one who was interested in the communist system but quickly discerned its true colors and remained a patriot. In my opinion, the debate as to Hiss' guilt has been determined, and Chambers was on the right side of history.

Whittaker Chambers still arouses great passions. He accused Alger Hiss (and others) of spying for the Soviet Union and claims he knew that it was true because he was himself a communist spy and was Hiss's contact. But that story, while a part of this book, isn't the sole focus of this magnificent book. You can read the story of the trials of Alger Hiss, the testimony given, and more about that story in Allen Weinstein's very fine "Perjury" (a book which also arouses strong emotions).

The story of Chambers' life is also told by Chambers himself in his powerful autobiography "Witness". His life is a rather involved tale, and though the spy story is why Chambers became famous (infamous) it isn't reason why he is important. It is hard to recapture the vast esteem in which Stalin and the Soviet Union were held by the "literate" classes in American Society. But it doesn't take too much reading to peel back current revisionist writing that pretends the left rejected Stalin. It wasn't so. They loved Uncle Joe at the time of the Hiss case and made apologies for him even after the horrors of the Gulag were revealed. Even after Hiss' guilt has been proven beyond all but the most determined and self-blinded doubt, you can find those who insist on his innocence.

Whittaker Chambers was a gifted writer and a well regarded editor at Henry Luce's Time magazine. When he admitted his role in spying for the USSR and International Communism it represented the initial break in the dam. In "Witness", Chambers' autobiography, Chambers describes the agony he went through in realizing he had no choice but to take the course of trying to stop Hiss and thereby ruining his own life and irreparably harming his family.

Chambers was pessimistic about the West surviving a mortal struggle with Communism. He is often linked with McCarthy, but he thought McCarthy's recklessness more of a benefit to the other side.

"Witness" was an important best seller and is still in print. In it Chambers pours out his conscience and how his atheism turned to a deep faith and why that turned him against the movement he had embraced and had helped prosper through his gifts as a writer and editor.In this amazing book.

In this wonderful biography, Tanenhaus gives us context for all of this and so much more detail. The author also provides verification (and refutation) of claims made by and about Chambers. This book is beautifully written and carefully researched. The author shows great judgment and insight into all of the issues involved in this rich life at the extremes of human philosophy.

It is wrong to condemn this book and its author because of anger with Chambers. It is beyond all doubt that the thrust of Chambers' story was the truth. In my judgement, it is the truth in all but a few details. Tanenhaus is the reporter of fact and wishes that reality were different cannot change the facts. What is the old saying? You are entitled to your own interpretations, but not your own facts.

We owe Tanenhaus a great deal for putting such wonderful talent and years of hard work in giving us this outstanding book. This book was the subject of a great interview on Booknotes and is still available online. I am glad to see that this book is now part of the Modern Library series. It should be widely read.

This is probably the best version of the Whittaker Chambers's life. It is particularly useful as a supplement to Chambers's own story: "Witness."

Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chamber was written with a deliberately neutral stance, although collaborated well with Chambers's own story. It was backed by copious and meticulous research, and filled in more than a few gaps.

The most notable gaps in "Witness" included Chambers's strong [same sex] tendencies and his having engaged in habitual [same sex] acts for a period of time, even though he had made testimonial depositions to that effect. In fact, in "Witness", the reader gets the impression that Chambers regarded his adversaries' insinuation of his [alternative lifestyle] as a baseless attack. Another omission was that Chambers, in his youth, was apprehended for stealing significant number of books from two libraries, and was barred from them. These issues later emerged as a strike against him during the Hiss trials. A third, perhaps most significant "omission" was that Chambers in his own book consistently claimed that the reason he withheld the evidence of espionage was because he wanted to shield Hiss and his family from being prosecuted for a much more serious crime. The truth of the matter was that Chambers was also shielding himself from the same crime. Tanenhaus's book provided these facets, which Chambers would rather not get into.

Tanenhaus's book also gave a much more nuanced version of the proceedings of the Hiss trials, including defense lawyer Stryker's courtroom rhetoric and the sparring on the Woodstock typewriter. As well, there were some interesting facets of Chambers's life after the Hiss trial, in particular the writing and publication of "Witness", his declining health, his support of and eventual distancing from Senator Joseph McCarthy, his friendship with the up-and-coming William Buckley, Jr., and the gradual, mellowing shift of his political thinking in his last years away from the extreme right. Also, Tanenhaus's book added some new material regarding the accusation, which surfaced after the cold war, that tend to put Alger Hiss's guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Although not as riveting as "Witness", this book more than held its own in terms of style, pace, clarity, completeness, and analytic insight. Tanenhaus also tried hard to maintain a sense of neutrality on a person as complex and controversial as Whittaker Chambers. I am quite willing to regard "Whittaker Chambers" as the definitive portrayal of the person, and definitive assessment of the Hiss Case.

This book is not only interesting, informative, and powerful, it's an easy read. I read a great deal, and this is one of the very best books I have ever read -- and I was only tepidly interested in the subject before I read it.

Tanenhaus has done superb work: his biography of Chambers is methodically documented and beautifully crafted. He challenges us readers who are used to the black and white moral harangue of character sketches to understand the shades of grey in the Hiss/Chambers episode, the anti-Communist fervor following the hearings and trials, and the personalities involved (e.g. Chambers, Hiss, their wives, and Richard Nixon, to name only a few).

Tanenhaus gives us no easy answers and forces us to think that 1) just because some were maliciously and falsely named as Communist spies doesn't mean that every one accused was innocent; and 2) a man who can lie can also tell the truth.

If anything, Tanenhaus is somewhat too loyal to Mr. Chambers. Alger Hiss's character is less well developed in this book than I wanted as a longtime student of the Hiss/Chambers affair. It is reasonable, though, that Hiss was somewhat the privileged, pretty-boy smartass Tanenhaus portrays Hiss to be. Tanenhaus thankfully doesn't indulge himself much in his personal feelings. He sticks closely to the evidence and remembers that being a richboy like Hiss is not justly punishable by 44 months in the federal pen, just as being a slovenly, fat, and uncharismatic little man like Chambers doesn't preclude literary brilliance or profound courage.

I never expected to like--or even understand--Mr. Chambers, but by the end of this book, I did both.

"Whittaker Chambers: A Biography" by Sam Tanenhaus is an important, though by no means perfect, work. This book is especially important for those familiar with Chambers' "Witness," Allen Weinstein's "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," and "Odyssey of a Friend" edited by William F. Buckley, Jr. and was looking for something that tied the various myths and legends of Chambers into a coherent whole.

Whittaker Chambers was an extremely important figure in the post-World War II American Right. In many respects his "Witness" was the anti-communist manifesto and his views on the crisis in Western, Christian culture has greatly influenced two generations of conservative thinkers. Furthermore, Chambers was a master of prose writing, as his essays in Time magazine and his autobiography attest.

Why, then, is Tanenhaus the first biographer to seriously tackle the subject? The reason is that Whittaker Chambers was an extremely complex and secretive man who consciously assumed many identities in his journey from Soviet spy to idol of the Right. Furthermore, Chambers was never entirely candid about his own life, making his own writings at times difficult to use as a source. The simple fact is that Chambers had many dark spots in his past and worked hard to cloud or erase as many as possible. Therefore, any attempt to write a biography must necessarily be tainted by the author's own political leanings. To the Left he was a monster and to the Right he was a saint.

To Tanenhaus's credit, his work is simultaneously sympathetic towards his subject while remaining critical enough to avoid accusations of whitewashing the man. Tanenhaus highlights Chambers' numerous accomplishments while addressing his blemishes, many of them of an embarrassing sexual nature. Of particular interest are details of his life in the communist underground and his stormy tenure as an editor at Time under the supervision of Henry Luce.

Regarding the Hiss case, Tanenhaus gives Chambers the benefit of the doubt throughout the narrative. This is the correct approach since there is no longer any real debate regarding Alger Hiss's guilt. Weinstein's "Perjury" pretty much wrapped up the case and Tanenhaus helpfully reviews the unsuccessful attempts to rehabilitate the unrepentant traitor over the last several decades. The only thing that's certain is that the continuing trickle of Cold War-era documents from Soviet and American archives will further establish Hiss's guilt beyond any doubt whatsoever.

As stated earlier, however, this is not a perfect biography. Many readers would have liked a more thorough discussion of what he wrote at Time to help understand both the bitter battles he fought there with his peers and the overall evolution of his thinking. Furthermore, since the main audience for the book is Chambers' legions (still) of conservative admirers, a more thorough discussion of his writings at "National Review" would have been expected. For instance, his extremely controversial denunciation of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" receives a mere two paragraphs.

In short, this is an important book skillfully put together given the difficult nature of the subject. The influence of Whittaker Chambers is still being felt in American politics and the need for a major biography was long overdue. Tanenhaus' work will be the standard reference on the life of Whittaker Chambers for the foreseeable future.