Whittaker Chambers, Journalist

...I was visited," Matthews recalled, "by an unofficial delegation from the staffs of both Time and Life, urging me strongly not to print the piece: it would drive a wedge between the Allies, it was biased and bitter, irresponsible journalism, et cetera...

...In chapters of Life's "History of Western bers's life and work...

...An enthusiast of a sternly cheerless sect...

...I wish to show that these issues are the real line of cleavage in the modern world between conservative and revolutionary, cutting across all lines of economic class and political party...

...Witness that he was hired by Time "because I began a review of a war book with the line: `One bomby day in June...

...But Chambers continued to make enemies at Time with pieces like "The Revolt of the Intellectuals," in which "'For some goddam reason," Luce allegedly replied when asked why he employed so many left-liberal types at Time, "Republicans can't write...

...Such assaults on the left were a staple of Time's book reviewing under Chambers...

...Henry Luce's admiration for Chambers remained unshaken by the difficulties surrounding the writing of the "History of Western Culture" series...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 he coolly surveyed the behavior of American intellectuals in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact and concluded that "it remains to be seen . . . whether the U.S...

...His 1946 profile of the black contralto Marian Anderson provoked such an enthusiastic response from readers that Time broke with its longstanding policy of anonymity and identified Chambers as the author in a "Letter from the Publisher": The preliminary work involved talks with Miss Anderson, her mother, friends, teachers, impresarios, etc...

...It was the assignment he had been waiting for since his arrival at Time...

...C hambers's mortar was exchanged for a howitzer when T. S. Matthews, now managing editor of Time, made him editor of Time's "Foreign News" section in the summer of 1944...

...Luce's contemporaries had no such difficulty...

...But Luce initially remained faithful to his old friend, allowing him to take a leave of absence and picking up his legal fees...

...But after nine years of loyal service to Henry Luce, Chambers was beginning to chafe at the constraints of mass journalism...

...It is difficult for younger readers to imagine just how much power Luce, the founder and editor in chief of Time, Life, and Fortune, wielded during the thirties and forties...

...They were not only subject to temperamental tantrums but prey to fits of despair...

...But the important work was done, the writer claims, one afternoon when he shut himself up with a phonograph and a heap of records of Negro spirituals and played them over & over...

...The Ghosts on the Roof' was a fable in which the shades of the murdered Czar Nicholas II and his family, having converted posthumously to Marxism, convened on the roof of their old palace and predicted with relish that the Soviet Union would engage in wholesale territorial expansionism after the war: Ghosts on the Roof' notwithstanding, Time "neither said nor thinks that Soviet-U.S...

...was Life's "History of Western Culture" series...

...Luce's influence extended to culture as well as politics...

...Peter Drucker, who worked at Fortune in 1940, observed that Luce ran his magazines "by working around people who had the title, office, and responsibility...

...Matthews assigned Chambers and James Agee to form a "Special Projects" unit designed, in Chambers's words, "to provide Time chiefly with cover stories which, because of special difficulties of subject matter or writing, other sections of Time were thought to be less well equipped to handle...

...Fitzgerald, who edited the "Books" section of Time in 1939, remembered the workings of his department with obvious fondness thirty years later: We managed nevertheless to hack through . . . a fairly wide vista on literature in general, including even verse, the despised quarterlies, and scholarship...

...Matthews, who by that time had come around to Chambers's way of thinking about Communism, promptly scheduled the piece for publication as an unsigned "Time essay...

...view the Soviet Union as an ally...

...That review, published on May 1, 1939, was followed in the next issue by a cover story on James Joyce's just-published Finnegans Wake...

...only to well-equipped researchers...

...He died two years later, leaving unfinished his last book, The Third Rome...

...He is magnificent...

...On December 10, eight days after he turned over the "pumpkin papers" to HUAC investigators, Chambers resigned from Time Inc...

...It was so beautifully written (my guess would be Whittaker Chambers) and gave such a spiritual lift...

...collaboration is 'doomed to failure.' " Three years later, after the Iron Curtain had descended on Central Europe, Time reprinted "The Ghosts on the Roof" with an accompanying editor's note explaining that the piece "will repay a second reading as the world enters the new year, 1948...

...Chambers understood what he was up against...

...Whittaker Chambers's journalism is more than just a footnote to Witness...

...The driving force of my work at Time," Chambers wrote to Henry Luce in 1948, "has been a sense of mission, of calling...

...It is one of the innumerable ironies of Chambers's life that he never realized he had already written that report, not merely in Witness and in his letters but in the pages of Time, Life, and National Review...

...Only the strongest personalities survived at Time Inc., and Whittaker Chambers filled the bill with ease...

...rr ime Inc...

...Time's support of Whittaker Chambers was short-lived...

...Time believes that Chambers's penetrating knowledge of the ways of Communism, at home and abroad, has been extremely valuable to Time—and to Time's readers...

...He fought back with the zeal of a practiced revolutionary, unhesitatingly rewriting stories filed by Time's foreign correspondents to make them accord with his anti-Communist views...

...Chambers was rehabilitated by the publication of Witness...

...In time, Chambers overcame his difficulties with Time style and, like James Agee, learned how to bend it to his own literary ends...

...He told Luce that he wanted to resign from Time as of January 1, 1949, and thereafter write strictly as a freelance...

...Has a man who has something to say and the ability to say it any real place at Time...

...ing China "high-handedly," he was doing so "in order to safeguard the last vestiges of democratic principles in China" against the Chinese Communists...

...But people who go to pictures for the sake of seeing pictures will see a great one...

...Chambers's last major writing project for Time Inc...

...The short, stocky, bullet-headed, barrel-chested, blackgarmented figure had something almost stagily drab about it, something to make you wonder who would dress like that—a man on call as a pallbearer...

...It did what for most men would have is difficult to imagine such criticism apbeen the principal work of a lifetime...

...Chambers nonchalantly dropped "The Ghosts on the Roof' on T. S. Matthews's desk one day, "saying that I might like to read it but that it was certainly not for Time...

...Penniless THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 17 and terrified, Chambers grabbed at the first opportunity that came his way: an offer from his friend Robert Cantwell to introduce him to T. S. Matthews, then a senior editor at Time...

...For the land in which the slaves found themselves was strange beyond the fact that it was foreign...

...They hung suspended in their sockets like orbs in a void of omnivorous vigilance, motionless, enveloping and contemplative without compassion...

...There he sits, so small, so sure...

...As 1948, he testified under oath before the Culture" series...

...It seems to me that you will not want me around here any longer," Chambers told Luce the next day...

...Time received 877 letters about Chambers between August 1, 1948, and January 14, 1949, including 103 subscription cancellations...

...Relieved of the pressures of weekly editing, Chambers embarked on a lengthy series of memorable cover stories on such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, A dozen of Chambers's colleagues at Time have recorded their first impressions of him, in most of which the adjective "Dostoevskian" figures prominently...

...his underground activities...

...Joseph Stilwell...

...I've always been conscious of beautiful prose," William F. Buckley, Jr...

...As he told Luce: I have spent some 15 years of my life actively preparing for FN...

...Fearing a relapse, Matthews promptly relieved Chambers of his duties as "Foreign News" editor and temporarily reassigned him to book reviewing...

...grief, like a tuning fork, gave the tone, and the Sorrow Songs were uttered...

...W hat is surprising is not that Chambers's work remains an incomplete torso (given the circumstances of his life, one could hardly have expected anything else) but the extent to which his talents were in fact realized in his journalism...

...This essay is adapted from his in- quickly began to look for a "visible troduction to Ghosts on the Roof: identity" as a means of preventing his Selected Journalism of Whittaker former colleagues from killing him Chambers, 1931-1959, to be published before he had a chance to testify about by Regnery Gateway this summer...

...Time devoted generous space to unsigned essays, articles, and reviews dealing with the arts, and Luce's stable of house intellectuals during the thirties and forties included such unlikely employees as Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, and Robert Fitzgerald...

...Out of his earshot," a sympathetic colleague recalled, "the gibes, digs and cracks aimed at him showed that half his writing and research staff were ready not merely to dislike him but to hate him...

...To read his contributions his agents...

...For Peter conquered only in the name of a limited class...

...But Chambers's most important work as a journalist had already been done, and his influence on conservatism was for the most part exerted not through his work for National Review but through Witness and his letters to William E Buckley, Jr...

...What does not come through clearly in this cover story is Chambers's own authorial voice, which is for the most part lost in the corporate anonymity of "Time style," the elaborately artificial house style created by Time's early editors and memorably parodied by Wolcott Gibbs in the New Yorker ("Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind...

...He edited Time's remarkable period in the history of "Foreign News" section from 1944 to American journalism—and about the 1945, giving it a strongly anti-Soviet mind and character of one of postwar slant at a time when the American pub- American conservatism's central lic was being officially encouraged to figures...

...On August 1, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee subpoenaed him to testify about his Communist past...

...Anti-Communism was anything but popular in the early forties, especially among Time's staffers, whose Communist contingent was sufficiently large to publish a newsletter called High Time.' Not surprisingly, Chambers's enemies at Time were legion...

...In fact, I can say: I was there, I saw it, at least in a small way, I did it...

...After he resigned from National Review in 1959, he wrote nothing more for publication...

...Immensely popular with the general public, the Luce magazines were dismissed by progressives as vulgarly written and profoundly reactionary...

...This mission, Chambers explained in Witness, was to take every possible opportunity "to clarify, on thebasis of the news, the religious and moral position that made Communism evil...

...In 1942, Chambers sent Luce a memo on the subject in which he set forth at length what would later become familiar as the central theme of Witness: Tentatively, I am calling what I have written: The irreconcilable issues—Belief in God or Belief in Man...

...I think I have something to say and little time to say it...

...That is the mighty, new device of power politics which he has developed for blowing up other countries from within...

...Our argument that time was that if Time ought to be written for the Manin-the-Street (a favorite thought of the Founder), here were books that would hit him where he lived, if he could get them...

...The result was as swift as it was predictable...

...Even so, to encounter Whittaker Chambers's journalism, for all its obvious imperfections, is to see Chambers not merely as a political martyr but as a critic and commentator of unusual power—to see, at last, the whole man...

...His pre-underground years as an editor at the Daily Worker and New Masses had fitted him with the practical journalistic skills that, in the more structured setting of Time, quickly blossomed...

...Luce first noticed Chambers as a result of his 1940 review of the film version of The Grapes of Wrath...

...when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it...

...by encouraging juniors to come to him but enjoining them not to tell their bosses...

...A dozen of Chambers's colleagues at Time have recorded their first impressions of him, in most of which the adjective "Dostoevskian" figures prominently...

...Time was inundated by hostile letters after the piece appeared...

...Generations of diviners, black magicians, fortune tellers and poets have made night and dreams their province, interpreting the troubled images that float through the men's sleeping minds as omens of good and evil...

...In his journal, Chambers explained that he was writing The Third Rome for his son, believing that "the most important thing I could do for him was to report for him how his father had viewed certain aspects of our reality, what I believed the forces of reality to be, and how I saw their origins and development, which pulverized individual men, and caught peoples, like shovelfuls of corn in a hammermill...

...and they had absolutely no feeling about going to press, one way or the other...

...Typical of the battles over "Foreign News" was the imbroglio that began when Theodore White, Time's China correspondent, filed a lengthy cable from Chungking about the recall of Gen...

...The public life of Whittaker Cham- later assigned, together with James Chambers's journalism, early and late, came a contributing editor of New T bers revolves endlessly around two Agee, to a department of his own, the is all but unknown, even to scholars Masses, and 1959, when he resigned dates...

...According to White, the cable told the story of "the chaos, decay, misery, sadness and dissolution in China," all of which he blamed on the corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek...

...in 1939 bore little resemblance to the conglomerate that today serves as corporate umbrella for such varied enterprises as People, Sports Illustrated, and Home Box Office...

...Whatever tension remained between Luce and Chambers was resolved by Luce's congratulatory letter of July 18: "I salute you, as of old, as a great writer...

...The story of how these pieces senior editor of the most popular news- came to be written tells much about a magazine in America...

...and by keeping alive feuds, mutual distrusts, and opposing cliques...

...According to Matthews: Whenever I edited his copy, if I cut a sentence or altered a word, I could always expect his protesting presence or, more effectively, an eloquently despairing note (often quoting Dante, Milton, or some German poet—usually in the original) to the general effect that his story was now ruined and . . . completely senseless and not worth publishing...

...In dealing with international affairs, I feel like a man in a dark but familiar room: I may bump against the furniture, but I'm usually sure where the door and windows are...

...And yet," thought the pessimist, "those are certainly not the eyes of a Yale man...

...A serious heart attack had already forced him to take an eight-month leave of absence from Time in 1942...

...Chambers claimed in...

...he was Terry Teachout is a member of the Then Whittaker Chambers broke editorial board of the New York Daily with the Communist party, he News...

...In addition, Chambers served as his own editor throughout his later years at Time, and most of his identifiable unsigned pieces, despite the obvious quirks of Time style, are clearly the work of the man who wrote Witness, Cold Friday, and the letters collected in Odyssey of a Friend...

...According to Matthews, "there was such an air of suppressed melodrama about him that I should not have been greatly surprised if one day a Communist gunman had shot him down in one of the office corridors...

...In the course of HUAC testimony...

...haven...

...In this deep night of land and man, the singers saw visions...

...Only one of his essays had any major influence on the emerging American conservative movement: "Big Sister Is Watching You," a controversial 1957 review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which Chambers, in Buckley's words, "read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement," in the process foreshadowing (and, to some degree, triggering) the great libertarian-conservative schism of the sixties...

...Greater than Rurik, greater than Peter...

...Though the first seven chapters were written by Chambers, Life also engaged a team of outside consultants led by Jacques Barzun, and Chambers regularly ran afoul of their advice...

...He described his new beat to Luce as "religion, culture, history, with a strong consciousness of current political forces and implications...

...Public reaction to the revelation that a senior editor of Time had been a Communist was swift and negative...

...Recognizing Chambers's remarkable gifts, Matthews increasingly gave him his own head as a stylist...

...In 1938, Chambers, then the "Special Projects" unit, which produced specializing in the Hiss case, who in- from National Review, have been courier for a Soviet spy ring based in cover stories on politics, culture, and variably cite the same half-dozen essays reprinted in book form...

...In fact, published between 1931, when he be- to Time and Life is to marvel at the imFor many people, Chambers's story plicit compliment that Henry Luce was stops with the first date and resumes paying his readers in publishing literary with the second...

...Some of those years were spent close to the central dynamo that powers the politics of our time...

...be better known than they are...

...For the pupils of the Devil's eyes were a swampy black, and into their depths all vision sank without leaving a trace, like a toad in a pool of petroleum...

...Carnegie Endowment for World Peace one would naturally expect that his ar- Time Inc...

...It was a nocturnal land . . . alive with all the elements of lonely beauty, except compassion...

...On August 23, 1945, Chambers blacked out on a train from Baltimore to New York...

...Though Whittaker Chambers would subsequently publish two essays in Life, his real return to journalism took place under the auspices of National Review, which he joined as a senior editor in 1957, and in which he published a dozen full-length essays on topics ranging from farm policy to the space race...

...He retreated to his farm in Westminster, Maryland, spending the next four years testifying at Alger Hiss's perjury trials and writing his autobiography...

...literary liberals will bring their intelligence to bear effectively on the side of democracy...

...One rea- Witness and, to a lesser degree, of Cold mittee about his activities as a member were unsigned that Whittaker Chambers son is that the inherent drama of his Friday, a collection of unpublished of the Fourth Section of the Soviet was not more widely known prior to his role in the Hiss case naturally over- writings, and Odyssey of a Friend, a Military Intelligence...

...In spite of their erratic work habits, Chambers and Agee together transformed the "Books" section of Time into the magazine's most widely read department...

...Late in 1947, Luce even asked Chambers to write his first signed piece for Time Inc., a dark fantasy in the style of C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters called "The Devil," which drew hundreds of admiring letters from the readers of Life: The presence beside him looked distinguished, relaxed, urbane...

...When thinking of Whittaker Chambers's writings, it is hard not to recall the poem George Orwell wrote about himself in 1935: "A happy vicar I might have been/Two hundred years ago/ . . . But born, alas, in an evil time,/I missed that pleasant 2"He didn't like to talk about Harry Luce very much," William F. Buckley, Jr...

...His testimony made the front pages of every newspaper in America...

...Novelist Rawlings guessed right...

...In this frightening darkness men lie down to sleep and dream...

...binding together proletarian and capitalist in a common belief in the primacy of God, just as they inexorably throw together those who believe in the primacy of secular Man no matter what their superficial differences or pseudo-religious trappings...

...Many of Chambers's later essays for Time and Life could be cited in evidence of this claim, though Buckley had in mind a passage from "In Egypt Land," Chambers's 1946 profile of Marian Anderson: [The Negro spirituals] were created in direct answer to the Psalmist's question: How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land...

...His essay on the Reformation, for example, was drastically rewritten by other hands as a result of what Chambers described as "a head-on clash of historical viewpoint—between the economic interpretation of history and the humane interpretation of history...

...The child of Presbyterian missionaries to China, Luce was extremely receptive to Chambers's religious anti-Communism...

...But the story which appeared in Time on November 13, 1944, as rewritten by Chambers, explained that while Chiang was governTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 "And now," said the Bar, peering through the chink in the roof, "the greatest statesmen in the world have come to Stalin...

...The fortnight's grace was due merely to the fact that the Communist Party had not yet discovered my presence at Time and warned its local members...

...But Stalin embodies the international social revolution...

...The fight in Foreign News," he wrote in Witness, "was not a fight for control of a seven-page section of a newsmagazine...

...Shaken by the fervor of his staff's opposition to the piece, Matthews delayed publication of "The Ghosts on the Roof' for a week before sending it to press...

...Cantwell showed me a short story Chambers had written, and it was something like Malraux: it was shot through with the same murky flashes of rather sinister brilliance...

...One week we jammed through a joint review of Henry Miller, for which Jim [Agee] did Tropic of Cancer and I Tropic of Capricorn, both unpublishable in the United States until twenty years later...

...Luce's managerial style may have increased the incidence of alcoholism among his employees and the frequency with which he was portrayed in third-rate novels, but it also helped make Time, Life, and Fortune, for all their biases and factual misrepresentations, among the most consistently interesting magazines of their day...

...Of equal importance, how- Whittaker Chambers's journalism, and a former high-ranking official in tides for Time and Life, as well as his ever, is the fact that virtually none of however, is more than just a footnote the State Department, had been one of later essays for National Review, would the hundreds of articles Chambers to Witness...

...I had not been at Time a fortnight," he remembered, "before the Communists went to work on me...

...said recently, "and in some of [Chambers's] prose I saw what I thought was journalistic perfection...

...rr he meeting took place as scheduled, but the agenda was changed by circumstances beyond Chambers's control...

...Yet during the inter- criticism and cultural commentary of vening decade, Whittaker Chambers such erudition and high seriousness...

...This triumph wasin part the product of sheer stubbornness...

...Chambers's new assignment immediately caused consternation among Time's left-wing writers and editors...

...Nonsense," Luce replied, "testifying is a simple patriotic duty...

...But the biggest difference between Time Inc...

...In 1939, Chambers was still mastering the finer points of Time style, which he took with absolute seriousness and which he would later describe in Witness as "a discipline of expression, and not a horseplay with queer words and elliptical phrases...

...The bulk of Washington, D.C., broke with the Com- religion...

...I salute you, too, of course, as a great warrior of the spirit—and as a friend...

...Born in an evil time, Chambers was unable to fully realiie his great talent as a writer...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989...

...Every week," one of his friends told him with unconcealed pleasure, "that mortar goes off in the last five pages of Time...

...and he wrote the text for seven and articles in discussions of Cham- Chambers's journalism is accessible munist party and went into hiding...

...Serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-theMonth Club, Witness quickly became one of the biggest sellers of 1952...

...According to Duncan Norton-Taylor, one of Whittaker Chambers's closest friends, The Third Rome was to have been "a supplement to Witness...

...TWo things kept Whittaker Chambers afloat: his journalistic skills and the steadfast patronage of Henry Luce...

...says of Chambers...

...Marjorie Kinnan (The Yearling) Rawlings wrote: "My belated obeisances for the magnificent story on Marian Anderson...

...On September 6, Time published the following reply to the anti-Chambers mail it had received: "Time was fully aware of Chambers's political background, believed in his conversion, and has never since had reason to doubt it...

...Luce and Chambers, as was their custom, met for coffee at a corner drugstore on August 2 to discuss Chambers's future with the magazine...

...Who but he would have had the sense of historical fitness to entertain them in my expropriated palace...

...On August 3, Whittaker Chambers went before HUAC and, in the words of Arthur Koestler, "committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation...

...He always walked fast from the elevator to his office and, once inside, always shut and often locked his door...

...Why is Whittaker Chambers's career a result, it is chiefly as the author of House Un-American Activities Com- It was only because his Time articles as a journalist forgotten...

...It was a combination of a sort of affable sense of the person, the human being, combined with a feeling that Luce simply hadn't understood the apocalyptic nature of the challenge—which, of course, by Whittaker's standards very few people did...

...The years are running out on me," he wrote to Luce on July 31,1948...

...Understandably suspicious of strangers, Chambers made friends slowly, though the ones he finally made were invariably loyal...

...W hen Henry Luce asked Chambers what he wanted to do at Time after the war, he responded: "I should like to edit Foreign News for a long time to come...

...New writers at Time rarely found themselves assigned to write cover stories on any subject whatsoever, much less on topics of such manifest opacity, but Chambers, as T. S. Matthews recalled, "cleared this hurdle not only creditably but with extraordinary style," sounding an already-characteristic note in the very first paragraph: All children are afraid of the night...

...Except for a face a little too characterful to be contemporary, the Devil might have been a movie magnate, an airline executive, a college president, a great surgeon or a grain speculator...

...It also brought his career as a journalist to an abrupt halt...

...Drama critic Louis Kronenberger's description is as good as any: There was something about his—then not famous—appearance which was, to begin with, at odds with itself...

...More often, he antagonized colleagues by his appearance and behavior and, most of all, by the militant anti-Communism which permeated his thinking—and writing...

...From Foreign News," he wrote in Witness, "I fell down the whole flight of editorial steps...

...The Time writer who found Chambers's grim Weltanschauung most sympathetic was James Agee, Chambers's closest friend at Time and a man who, according to T. S. Matthews, was fully as difficult as Chambers himself...

...Chambers's most controversial exercise in interpretative journalism, however, was not a rewrite of an irate correspondent's cable but an original piece written in response to the news blackout surrounding the Big Three Conference at Yalta...

...then and now is the fact that Henry Luce was very much alive and well when Whittaker Chambers went to work for Time...

...pearing even occasionally, much less Starting out in 1939 as a book reviewer week after week, in the newsmagazines for Time, Chambers rose to become a of today...

...The revelation that Chambers had actively engaged in espionage against the United States put more heat on Luce than he was prepared to endure...

...Impressed by Chambers, Matthews hired him on the spot at a salary of $100 a week to review books for Time...

...Cantwell, Matthews recalled, told me that [Chambers) was an extraordinarily talented writer (Cantwell likened him to Andre Malraux), an experienced journalist, and a Communist who was about to leave the party...

...Chambers's behavior was as peculiar as his demeanor...

...Several letters were published along with a mollifying editor's note explaining that, "The 19 Albert Einstein, Arnold Toynbee, and Dame Rebecca West...

...What seemed at first a disaster soon proved a tremendous opportunity...

...Luce, White claimed, "let the story of the crisis be edited into a lie, an entirely dishonorable story...

...Given the extraor- shadowed what he described in Wit- volume of his letters to William F his testimony, he told the committee dinary controversy that surrounded ness, his 1952 autobiography, as "the Buckley, Jr., that Chambers the writer that Alger Hiss, president of the Chambers after he left Time in 1948, tranquil years" he spent working for is remembered...

...It was a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted into the exact opposite of their true meaning...

...11 "Out of earshot," a sympathetic colleague recalled, "the gibes, digs and cracks aimed at him showed that half his writing and research staff were ready not merely to dislike him but to hate him...

...His essays and articles are inevitably fragmentary in their impact, and it is impossible to know what directions his writing would have taken had HUAC not subpoenaed him immediately after his decision to break with Time Inc...

...His wish was in vain...

...Pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet Government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine, will go for a good cry over the hardships of the Okies...