Whittaker Chambers

...This, of course, is not what he is supposed to be, according to those in America who would make Africa central to Rich-burg's identity...

...Thus in his monumental memoir of 1952, he tried to point America — though he doubted he would succeed—back to the spiritual moorings that alone could save it in its struggle against atheistic Communism...

...The witness is gone," Arthur Koestler wrote at Chambers's death...

...Nonetheless, he Understanding the "African" in African-American The American Spectator • May 1997 73...

...But where William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Surveying Africa as a whole, he writes that, in the three decades since power was transferred from white colonial dictators, there has been more repression and brutality: "For the Africans, for the ordinary, decent, long-suffering Africans, precious little has changed...

...In his final decade he became an icon and ambivalent godfather of postwar conservatism...

...By 1948 he had striven for nearly a decade — through crusading journalism at Time—to awaken America to the menace of Soviet Communism...

...He can, however, recommend America...

...By 1932 he was (in one writer's words) "the hottest literary Bolshevik" in New York...

...government employees in Washington...

...Born in 1901, Chambers seemed fated for an unconventional life...

...Tanenhaus discloses some of the less-than-saintly aspects of Chambers's life: his bohemian lifestyle in the 1920's...

...Some were notes in Hiss's own handwriting...

...The professorial skeptics at Columbia, he said, had "absolutely nothing" to put in the place of the "traditional beliefs" that they had destroyed in him...

...If you were lucky, they might finish you off with a machete blow to the back of the head...

...To Chambers, who had begun to devour leftist and Communist literature, his middle-class family's travails were emblematic of the malaise of a decadent civilization...

...For all Chambers's reservations about National Review and McCarthy, he still called himself "a man of the Right...

...And in Rwanda, Richburg found in the civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis "a senseless orgy of violence...

...In August 1948 President Truman himself denounced the congressional inquiry as a "red herring" created by reactionary Republicans...

...Some of the old dictators seemed on the ropes, and socialism was yielding to free markets...

...The family's home was spiritually barren...

...Pilloried on the witness stand as a moral leper and a liar, the beleaguered ex-Communist came to feel that he was a witness in another sense: a martyr for a faith that might yet redeem the West at its moment of supreme crisis...

...One by one, Communists of his acquaintance were summoned to Moscow and their doom...

...In the summer of 1948, as the Cold War turned more rancorous, Whittaker Chambers's testimony stunned the nation...

...Why (in Tanenhaus's words) the "passionate belief of so many" that Alger Hiss "must be innocent no matter what the evidence...

...He turned to Christianity and dedicated himself to combating Communism through his journalism...

...Out ofAmerica thus is also a confrontation, a brave one, of currently fashionable Afrocentrist teaching in the United States...

...But in 1950, after two traumatic trials, Hiss was convicted of perjury (and, implicitly, espionage) and sentenced to five years in prison...

...For a young man of Chambers's temperament and inner turmoil, genteel negations could not satisfy...

...For some, his effort had the grandeur of a religious pilgrimage...

...In the ensuing decade Chambers had carved out a brilliant career as a protégé of Henry Luce...

...Tanenhaus (evidently a moderate liberal himself) asserts reproachfully the "awful fact" that Chambers's "worldview...

...But before we glibly dismiss his ruminations, consider this: the growing divergence in late twentieth-century America between our secularized liberal elites and the so-called Religious Right...

...To moderate liberals his utterances have seemed to be fanatical nonsense...

...military spokesman: "We fed them, they got strong, they killed TERRY EASTLAND is media editor of Forbes Digital Tool and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...

...Richburg has purposely chosen that self-identification...

...Tanenhaus emphasizes the horrifying disintegration of Chambers's home life in these years: an ordeal culminating in his younger brother's suicide in 1926...

...His mind was a "vacuum" whose "law" was skepticism...

...Then, at the height of his literary fame, Chambers was abruptly ordered underground into the clandestine world of Soviet-orchestrated espionage...

...As he relates in riveting detail in Out of America, that is not the story he found...

...It is the gripping story of a tormented man who embraced a false god, committed crimes in its name, repudiated it in fear and loathing, and then bravely bore witness against it at great personal and professional cost...

...Religious influences were nil, except for a German-language tutor who tried to convert Whittaker to Christian Science...

...Indeed, he is grateful that he is "out of America," not Africa...

...strove to fathom its meaning, Chambers intrigues and jars us even now...

...Chambers, too, believed that he was confronting liberalism head-on—and notjust its superiority complex...

...won him international acclaim on the Left...

...In August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been an underground Communist in the 1930's and had known as Communists a number of U.S...

...Not everyone will be comfortable with the portrait that emerges from this impressive biography...

...In Somalia, though the famine eased, the U.S.-led military intervention proved unable to save the country from itself...

...Its vision was "the vision of man without God," of "man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world...

...The political and spiritual fault lines that he identified continue to shake, revealing issues of fundamental import that vex us still...

...Not just Communism, but the policy of liberal American officialdom toward Communism, was now at issue...

...Astonishing as it initially seemed to some, it was Chambers — the self-confessed Communist, pudgy and unprepossessing—who had told the truth...

...But in Africa, he says, "I am an alien...

...Out of America does include good political news—from Malawi, Mozambique, and Benin...

...Richard Nixon (who helped to break open the case), the Chambers testimony took on new significance...

...Nor can he recommend it to other black Americans...

...ly hopeless, doomed to maneuver precariously within the terms set by the socialist tide of modem history...

...Not that America is perfect, or that, being black, he does not at times feel an alien in his own country...

...And when Hiss himself died last November at 92, both ABC and NBC television news implied that he had been an innocent victim of anti-Communist hysteria...

...Hence his dissent from doctrinaire conservative sectarianism and his support for that Republican tactician par excellence, Richard Nixon...

...Even today the full historical significance of this operation cannot be fathomed...

...Ominously, his own Soviet handler ordered him to visit the Soviet Union—a command ' he managed to evade...

...Then, in 1948, came the subpoena which shattered Chambers's life yet again and thrust him reluctantly onto the national stage...

...Otherwise, they might carve off your ears, your nose, and toss your limbless torso atop the pile of dead bodies, where you could slowly bleed to death...

...Initially, at least, the luminaries of American liberalism (including Eleanor Roosevelt) believed him...

...For him the ultimate meaning of the turbulent Hiss case—and of his own sad, self-convicting witness—was religious...

...But as the "culture wars" of the nineties intensify, substantial numbers of Americans believe that at the root of our troubles is indeed a conflict of visions...

...His father was a commercial artist and bisexual who deserted his family for two years to lead an alternative lifestyle and who held himself aloof from his wife and sons when he returned...

...Suave, elegant in appearance, and well-connected, he seemed to epitomize New Deal liberalism, committed to progressive social change and a peaceful world...

...Now, ten years later, he and Hiss stood exposed before their country not just as once-concealed Communists but as spies...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Ambivalent Icon Whittaker Chambers: A Biography Sam Tanenhaus Random House / 638 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY George H. Nash N ext year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the most sensational espionage case in American history...

...God was merely a "convention...

...Insisting that he was neither a Communist nor a spy, the former diplomat asserted his innocence with growing implausibility...

...But the overall outlook for democracy and improved living conditions is decidedly bleak...

...A gifted writer and translator, he eventually became editor of the Communist-dominated monthly, New Masses...

...At Time he relentlessly fought in-house leftists and naffs who thought that Joseph Stalin's intentions were benign...

...Blacks were a minority at his public high school, but he says he was never made to feel unwelcome or the subject of hostility...

...Then, if you didn't pass out, they would chop off one of your legs, or maybe just a foot...

...his early homoerotic poetry and long struggle with homosexuality...

...Questioned recently on "Meet the Press," Anthony Lake—President Clinton's erstwhile nominee to direct the CIA, no less—opined that the evidence of Hiss's guilt was not "conclusive...

...Elsewhere, Richburg found that elections were stolen in Cameroon, annulled in Nigeria, and rigged in Kenya...

...These were fighting words in 1948 —and long afterward...

...Chambers died in 1961...

...God or Man, Soul or Mind: Chambers's formulation may seem facile...

...4% us...

...T]he testimony will stand...

...But not just his testimony in a legal sense...

...But for now the files of Russian military intelligence, for which Chambers worked, remain inaccessible...

...For those who have read Witness or Perjury, much of Whittaker Chambers will be familiar...

...In 1920 Chambers entered Columbia University, where he impressed students and professors alike with his literary talent...

...His mother, a child of economically fallen gentry, struggled desperately to keep up appearances and raise her boys to be somebody...

...Richburg quotes the U.S...

...It is, as the subtitle indicates, a confrontation with Africa written by a "black man...

...It was Hiss, the "liberal"well-dressed, well-spoken, a graduate of Harvard Law School—who had lied...

...For the rest of his life he and his supporters claimed he had been framed...

...Here is that thought, perfectly captured in the book's last sentence: "By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today—my culture and attitudes, my sensibilities, loves, and desires—derives from that one simple and irrefutable truth...

...During much of his youth Chambers was a self-conscious outsider, immersed in a private world of literature, including Les Miserables, his favorite novel...

...It cannot work for me," he writes...

...Tanenhaus's book is much more, however, than an updated account of a famous controversy...

...certainly it is worth consideration and debate...

...If his testimony was correct—and the purloined documents offered powerful corroboration —Soviet Russia had organized a massive espionage ring in the 1930's which had penetrated the upper echelons of the Roosevelt administration...

...He thought Leninist Communism could...

...The story, he angrily declared, "isn't true...

...Some readers may be put off— as many acquaintances were in Chambers's lifetime—by his self-created aura of inscrutability and what a colleague at Time called his "suppressed air of melodrama," as well as his attempt in Witness and other writings to find transcendent meaning in his ordeal...

...Arguing that Africa's failings have been "hidden behind a veil of excuses and apologies," Richburg rejects the usual explanations—the legacy of white colonialism, tribal diversity, and lack of natural resources...

...So Chambers at age 24 became a Communist and remained one for twelve more years...

...Looking back on the late 1940's, do we not see the same cleavage that Chambers called the "jagged fissure" at the heart of the Hiss case: the chasm between "the enlight72 M ay 1997 • The American Spectator ened and the powerful" (who were frequently pro-Hiss) and "the plain men and women of the nation" (who believed Chambers...

...Distinguished Americans such as Felix Frankfurter and Adlai Stevenson agreed to serve as character witnesses for Hiss...

...70 May 1997 The American Spectator A long now comes Sam Tanenhaus with the first full-length biography of the enigmatic man at the center of this drama...

...It was further reinforced in 1978 by Allen Weinstein's volume Perjury, which concluded after exhaustive study that Hiss was guilty as charged...

...some held Ivy League degrees...

...Richburg arrived in Nairobi thinking that the continent's best days since independence were immediately ahead...

...Chambers admitted and repented his terrible past...

...For most Americans at the time, the verdict was persuasive...

...Here Tanenhaus carefully documents Chambers's deep misgivings about Joseph McCarthy, his uneasy relationship with National Review, his denunciation of Ayn Rand, and his various deviations from 1950's-style conservatism...

...His short story "Can You Make Out Their Voices...

...Much of this analysis and prescription seems sound...

...and his allies wished to "stand athwart history yelling Stop," Chambers the inveterate pessimist judged the conservative cause to be near-44 In his final decade Whittaker Chambers became an icon and ambivalent godfather of postwar conservatism...

...But as Tanenhaus notes, his grasp of the direction of current history was far more accurate and even prophetic than that of his ideological foes...

...helped bring McCarthyism into existence...

...Perhaps someday we will learn about all this in Moscow...

...army major who served as the U.N...

...In this respect he anticipated Solzhenitsyn (with whom he is briefly compared by Tanenhaus...

...Hiss, meanwhile, had become a high-ranking State Department official and a trusted member of the American delegation to the Yalta conference in 1945...

...They would carve off your arm first and watch you bleed and scream in pain...

...His list of needed reforms includes limiting "imperial presidencies," empowering opposition parties, decentralizing government, creating regional economic groups, and ensuring press freedom...

...Repelled by the monThe American Spectator • May 1997 71 strous evil in which he was enmeshed, Chambers finally bolted in 1938 — convinced, he told his wife, that he was leaving the winning for the losing side...

...Instead of turning these items over to his Russian spymaster in 1938, Chambers had held onto them as protection against reprisal by Stalin's hit men...

...Others were copies of highly confidential State Department materials—typed, it was later established, on Hiss's own home typewriter...

...But Out ofAmeri- ca is not really a book about the condition of various African nations and how they might be bettered...

...From Hiss and others, Chambers regularly collected sensitive government documents, copies of which he delivered to Soviet intelligence officers in New York...

...In this irrepressible conflict, Chambers believed, secular liberalism was on the wrong side...

...For others, his words seemed portentous...

...The militias, he writes, wouldn't shoot you in the head, Somali style...

...An only child in a working class family, Richburg grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood, attending parochial school through the seventh grade...

...Because his own life was riven by this conflict, and because he so movingly Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa Keith B. Richburg Basic Books / 257 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY Terry Eastland I n1991, Keith B. Richburg had finished a tour of duty for the Washington Post in Southeast Asia when his editors asked him to go to Africa, where things were looking up...

...Richburg was born in Detroit thirty-five years ago, the son of a South Carolinian who had moved to Detroit during World War II in search of a better job...

...Even in death, the witness of Whittaker Chambers is not yet history...

...His 1996 book, Ending Affirmative Action (Basic Books), is now available in paperback...

...Among these was an up-and-corning State Department officer named Alger Hiss...

...Dispatched to Washington in 1934, he soon met Alger Hiss, among others...

...The passions of fifty years ago are not dead yet...

...I was nothing...

...Add to the mix his penchant for punditry, and the temptation arises to conclude that here was a man who read Spengler and Dostoevsky a little too often...

...Chambers made enemies by his anti-Soviet editing and his unabashed rewriting of his foreign correspondents' reports...

...Having seen Africa, Richburg will not allow himself to be an African-American, just an American...

...Chambers told the Committee that in 1938 he had broken from the murderous Soviet apparatus he served and had tried unsuccessfully to persuade his friend Hiss to do the same...

...The apparatus he encountered was no penny-ante affair...

...By the end of my sophomore year at Columbia," Chambers later wrote, "I had ceased to be a conservative...

...Many were in key agencies and had good career prospects...

...The self-assured, totalitarian zealotry of the Communists offered an alternative...

...The result is a skillfully crafted narrative that further substantiates Chambers's testimony and removes all reasonable doubt of Hiss's guilt...

...Even now, nearly forty years after his death, this man engenders controversy...

...The Cold War was over, and with it the superpower rivalries that had troubled various parts of the continent...

...Still, old myths die hard, and in some circles on the left a cult of agnosticism lingers on...

...When Hiss, who was by then president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, aggressively GEORGE H. NASH is author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, reissued last year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute...

...What I hit was the forces of the great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism...has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades...

...called "one of the most repellent of modern history...

...Although Tanenhaus is correct about these particulars, he perhaps makes too much of them...

...Alger Hiss, however, made no such con-fession or atonement...

...How does a college freshman whose hero in 1920 was Calvin Coolidge become a Communist five years later...

...In a lucid account of Chambers's college experience, Tanenhaus depicts his subject as a tortured religious seeker, groping anxiously for meaning and purpose in a world he perceived as sick and dying...

...To Chambers, twentieth-century liberals and Communists were both revolutionaries who shared an underlying vision: the replacement of "the power of business" by "the power of politics...

...Suddenly (as the saying went) a generation was on trial: the generation of the New Deal and the "Red Decade...

...government about the spy ring in 1939, and the government had seemingly done nothing about it...

...H ow did such a book, a kind of Roots in reverse, come to be written...

...For Republican politicians like Rep...

...To Chambers, militant Communism—the faith of Alger Hiss—posed an inescapable choice: "God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism...

...Communism, he explained in Witness, was fundamentally a religion—man's "great alternative faith" — whose seductive promise was: "Ye shall be as gods...

...And that, one suspects, is the final reason his voice still speaks to us: his stark, uncompromising indictment of modern liberalism...

...denied under oath Chambers's charges and sued him for slander, Chambers astounded the nation further by producing a cache of secret government documents given to him by Hiss ten years before...

...He later calculated that he knew of 75 different underground Communists in the nation's capital...

...Quoting the critic Leslie Fiedler, Tanenhaus supplies one answer: Chambers effectively challenged the liberal "dogma" that in every political controversy "the liberal per se is the hero...

...But something was profoundly amiss...

...Even worse: Chambers had warned the U.S...

...his "Party marriage" and other affairs...

...Truth was "wholly relative...

...For several years Chambers served, in Tanenhaus's words, as the "linchpin of an efficient espionage apparatus...

...While the Hiss legal team vainly strained to demolish his credibility, pro-Hiss partisans subjected him to a malicious whispering campaign that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...But Tanenhaus, a tenacious researcher, has adduced much new and important detail, including evidence from long-closed archives in Budapest and Moscow...

...Citing Asian countries that are former colonies, full of ethnic and linguistic diversity, and wanting in resources—yet that are now doing well—Richburg contends that Africa's problems stem from corruption and dependence on Western aid...

...For the crisis of the twentieth century, he held, was at bottom a crisis of faith...

...When an intermediary went to Roosevelt with Chambers's information, FDR brusquely rebuffed him...

...The simple fact," he subsequently wrote, "is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else...

...The popular understanding of the case was immeasurably strengthened in 1952 by the publication of Chambers's Witness, a work properly acclaimed as one of the classic American autobiographies...

...Chambers's electrifying disclosure carried even greater implications...

...Some of the State Department documents that Hiss provided, for example, could have helped the Russians to break American diplomatic codes...

...Tanenhaus does not emphasize—although Chambers himself later did—the role of the university's liberalism in subverting the certitudes of callow conservatives like himself...

...But as the Stalinist purges of the late 1930's gained momentum, he grew appalled —and increasingly frightened...

...Richburg spent time in depressing places and witnessed hellish things...

...Characteristically, however, Chambers the man of faith did not stop there...

...By successfully impugning Hiss, he destroyed the left's illusion—still strong in 1948 — that "mere liberal principle" was "in itself a guarantee against evil...