Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's unfortunate that the Left is so earnest and humorless, otherwise they might be able to enjoy the immense irony of the lofty position held by Whittaker Chambers in the Right's pantheon of 20th century heroes. I mean think about it for a second, Chambers, who spent half his life as a bisexual Communist spy, was also a leading light of TIME and the National Review, a friend of Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley, was awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, and made many conservatives' end-of-century lists, both for this memoir and for his personal influence. That's a fairly interesting resume by anyone's standards. Chambers would be a heroic figure to the Right even if he had done nothing else but to accuse Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy. This action, so divisive that it still echoes through our politics today, helped to define the Cold War era, forcing people to choose sides--between anti-Communists, on the one side and communists, communist sympathizers and fellow travelers, and Anti-Anti-Communists on the other--and in turn hardening the lines between the sides as the nation headed into a period of prolonged cultural civil war, from which we have still not truly emerged. But Chambers did not merely attack one man. With his memoir Witness he declared war on Communism and the Soviet Union and explained in no uncertain terms just what the struggle was about--what was at stake, the methods that the other side was using, and the seriousness of purpose which would be required to defeat them--and at the same time he told a life story which somehow managed to unite nearly all of the themes of modernity in one gloriously messy tale of personal degradation and desperation, followed by political and religious redemption and salvation. And to top it all off, not only does the story have all of the elements of a thriller and a courtroom drama, the author just happens to write brilliantly. Chambers starts the book out with a forward in the form of a letter to his children (available on-line and well worth checking out) which seeks to explain why the book is necessary and why their father gained such notoriety in the first place. It is worth quoting a largish chunk : Beloved Children, I am sitting in the kitchen of the little house at Medfield, our second farm which is cut off by the ridge and a quarter-mile across the fields from our home place, where you are. I am writing a book. In it I am speaking to you. But I am also speaking to the world. To both I owe an accounting. It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live. It is about what the world calls the Hiss-Chambers Case, or even more simply, the Hiss Case. It is about a spy case. All the props of an espionage case are there--foreign agents, household traitors, stolen documents, microfilm, furtive meetings, secret hideaways, phony names, an informer, investigations, trials, official justice. But if the Hiss Case were only this, it would not be worth my writing about or your reading about. It would be another fat folder in the sad files of the police, another crime drama in which the props would be mistaken for the play (as many people have consistently mistaken them). It would not be what alone gave it meaning, what the mass of men and women instinctively sensed it to be, often without quite knowing why. It would not be what, at the very beginning, I was moved to call it: "a tragedy of history." For it was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts. At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces. But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic. Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope For it is about the struggle of the human soul--of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time. In 1952, when the book was published, we were only seven years removed from WWII, in which FDR and Churchill had allied the West to the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazism. The great service which Chambers provided in this book, in his journalism for TIME like the imaginative Ghosts on the Roof (1945), and in the Hiss Case, was--along with Winston Churchill in his Fulton, MO speech of 1946, declaring that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent"--to force home the realization that the war against Communism, though "Cold," was just as much a "twilight struggle" as the war against Nazism had been. For the next four decades the West, basically the United States, would pursue this war with various levels of determination and fecklessness, and would eventually win it, thanks, appropriately, to Ronald Reagan, a near contemporary of Chambers, who had been inspired by him, as reflected in that Medal of Freedom. The problem for us looking back at Chambers, and it may make readers scoff a little at the heated rhetoric of his prose in Witness, is that the West's victory looks inevitable to us now. Several powerful institutions--like the media, the Democratic Party, and the academy--have a vested interest in portraying the Cold War as a battle in which everyone pitched in to help defeat an enemy which pretty much self-destructed anyway. The memory of the fierce opposition of the Left to the confrontation with the Soviet Union is being gradually erased from the historic memory, and along with it the acknowledgment that as late as the mid-1980's, mainstream intellectuals considered Communism to be a viable alternative to de