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5.0 out of 5 stars
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand, July 10, 2007
This review is from: Whittaker Chambers (Audio Cassette)
Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers. Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University. A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46). Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist. Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him." Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West...
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand, July 10, 2007
Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers. Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University. A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46). Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist. Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him." Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West...
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The witness is gone, the testimony will stand, July 10, 2007
Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers. Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University. A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46). Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist. Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him." Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West...
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