|
Editorial Review Product Description
An autobiographical memoir, written just after Chambers confessed to his earlier affiliation with the Communist Party and testified against his former friend and comrade, Alger Hiss, in perhaps the most celebrated espionage trial of the century. 11 cassettes.Amazon.com Review
First published in 1952, Witness was at once a literaryeffort, a philosophical treatise, and a bestseller. Whittaker Chambershad just participated in America's trial of the century in whichChambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a full-standing member of thepolitical establishment, was a spy for the Soviet Union. This poeticautobiography recounts the famous case, but also reveals muchmore. Chambers' worldview--e.g. "e;man without mysticism is amonster"e;--went on to help make political conservatism a nationalforce. ... Read more Customer Reviews (75) 
Witness
The book is written about 1952 which makes it sound like old stuff, not relevant.Not true.It is not only interesting and well written but it gives insight into the mind set of Socialists/Communists and liberal.
Most of the people who fit those categories do not even know that they have embraced the philosophy of "From Each According To His Ability, and to each according to their need".It is OK with them to use the power and force of government to transfer wealth from those who produced it to those who didn't.
I am half way through it and can't hardly put it down.
Jack Kitchens
Kuna, Idaho
great history that isn't likely tols well
I read this book using the book Venona, the files that were released by our government around 1995, as a reference. (Venona was code word for the intelligence branch of the army that started decoding soviet diplomatic cablegrams in 1943 then evolved into the decoding of communications between spies here in the US and the Soviets through the 1970's.) There were so many names dropped by Chambers and using Venona as a reference gave me deep insight of how much the Soviets were involved in our government in the 40's -60's. I was amazed that Sen. McCarthy was 99% right in his claims. I was taught that he was a drunkard that was a paranoid right wing extremist (although a democrat). Man, was I wrong. He was just an American trying to tell the truth. Chambers was trashed for telling the truth about Hess and others. The leftists and the press treated him the same as McCarthy. The press was very poweful and influential, like today. But at least today you can here other views when back then you only had the left reporting. This book opened my eyes to the truth and how this country was very close to becoming something other then a democratic republic if Henry Wallace became president. Wild stuff in this book for sure but all of it is confirmed through the Venona files. It is a must read for anyone with an interest in history.
Whittaker Chamber's "Witness" is the sine qua non of American Anti-Communists literature
Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) lived a relatively short but enormously eventful life. He was born in Philadelphia to an eccentric artist and a loving mother. His brother committed suicide. The family often lived in poverty; his father would disappear for long stretches of time and his mother had to take demeaning jobs to help the family survive. Chambers attended Columbia University in New York City. He dropped out and became a member of the Communist Party. Chambers was a disillusioned young intellectual during the Great Depression thinking the Communist party offered political and social solutions to the traumas of the times.
From the mid-twenties to the brink of World War II Chambers was the member of open and secret Communist Party work. He earned his meagre living as a translator of such books as "Bambi." He saw friends murdered in the horrible Stalin purges and became didsdainful of communism. He served for a time as editor of the communist party periodicals "New Masses" and "The Daily Worker." He left the party telling Adolph Berle a high official in the FDR government of communist conspiracies in the federal government. Little was done to stop this infiltration. Chambers became a respected editor at Time magazine and a friend of Time publisher Henry Luce.
In August 1948 Chambers testified before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities of communists in the government. He especially pointed out his quondam friend Alger Hiss. Hiss was Harvard educated and had served the government in the State and Agriculture Departments. Hiss was involved with the United Nations, the Carneige Foundation for World Peace and had been an advisor at the Yalta Conference. Chambers knew he was also a dedicated communist. The intellectual community and press were divided on the charge. Was the dumpy Chambers a kook who had a history of mental illness or was he telling the truth?Chambers went on the radio program "Meet the Press" to defend his position but was hotly criticized by the panelists. Americans were divided on the Hiss guilt or innocence much as France had been in the nineteenth century by the Alfred Dreyfus case.
Hiss was indicted for treason in New York undergoing two trials and being convicted of espionage. He would serve three years in federal prison. The discovery of microfilm showing Hiss had stolen government documents was found in the pumpkin patch of Chamber's Pipe Creek farm near Westminster, Marlyland. The case made Congressman Richard Nixon of California a national figure.The Pumpkin Papers were really microfilm which had been hidden by Chambers at his farm.
Chamber's "Witness" was embraced by such conservatives as William F. Buckley and columnist Robert D. Novak who wrote good introductions to this fiftieth anniversary of the 1952 publication of the bestseller. Witness is a long book of 800 pages of small type. It is one of the greatest autobiographies written by an American. The book is also valuable for its dissection of how a communist spy and espionage appartus was set up and functioned on the American scene.
Chambers attempted suicide during his agony of the Hiss affair. Chambers became a strong Christian believer and worshppped in a Quaker congregation. He was faithful to his wife and they worked hard on their farm. His two children supported their father through the agony of the Hiss trial. Chambers was plagued by heart trouble and
never physically recovered from the Hiss trials.
Whether you are a liberal or conservative note that "Witness" is an essential book in understanding the mood of the United States in immediate post World War II America. Read it and decide whether Chambers was truthful and Hiss guilty. This reviewer found Witness to be well written, gripping in its story and well worth the time to read it.
overlong
This was one of those books that it seemed like everybody had read except me, so I finally got around to it.I was not disappointed:it's a fairly engrossing tale from a man whose name should be synonymous with courage.
The effectiveness of his memoirs, however, was blunted by the following:
1.Did it really need to be so long?
2.It was disorganized.For example, the first section was basically a bunch of name-dropping before you'd gotten your sea-legs -- did Chambers really need to put this section first?
3.Way too many topical references.This may have been fine in the 50's, but 60 years on, many of these names don't ring a bell.And this is going to get even worse with time.It's only a matter of time before this book has to be issued with footnotes or something.In this respect, Chamber's book is a bit like the Inferno:the raw power of his narrative is often weakened by so many not obscure names and events.
Re. 'Witness'
Witness --- Amazon --- 07 10
As a matter of fact, Chambers' Witness is one very impressive book, very well written, and filled with much factual material that demonstrates someof the extent to which the USSR had penetrated the American government during the 30s and 40s.Of course, we had our own spies, as did the British, in the Soviet Union as well, so the whole game was pretty much a tit for tat exercise, with the losers, especially in the USSR, often paying in blood.
However, like any autobiography, Ben Franklin's comes to mind, and Chambers' autobiography is no different --- it is not the work of a professional scholar and suffers from someserious factual defects.For example, the descriptions of the Hiss house that Chambers gave at the trials are consistent with that house as it was in 1948, but contradict the actual characteristics of the house as it was in 1938, when the alleged espionage was supposed to have taken place.
Further, Hiss's stepson, Dr Timothy Hobson has recently related the fact that he was laid up with a broken leg during the time period in question, and states positively that he never heard any typing going on in that very thin-walled house; nor had he ever seen Chambers at his house nor ever heard Chambers enter their front door which was just below the bedroom where he was convalescing --- all facts in contradiction to Chambers' stories.
In reality, so many facts are still in serious dispute in Chambers' tales, and in 'Witness,' that it would take an entire book just to discuss them.Further, much evidence uncovered in the last 40 years indicates that in all probability, Alger Hiss was an innocent man, convicted in a time of national antiCommunist hysteria and refused a legal appeal by a judge who prohibited the best evidence in favor of Alger Hiss' innocencefrom being presented in a court of law, the 'best evidence' being the fact that the Woodstock typewriter presented in court during the Hiss Case was in reality a forgery: someone had, as a matter of fact, "remanufactured" it, much as the British had so easily done in Argentina during WWII,probablyminions of J Edgar Hoover, now known for breaking almost as many laws as he enforced --- burglaries, unauthorized wiretaps, mail "covers," even the framing of people for crimes they had not committed [seethe Joe Salvati case, for example.]The other candidate for such typewriter forgery was the US Army intelligence agent Horace Schmahl, who, working as a private detective, took an investigative job with the Hiss defense, all the while illegally reporting the Hiss defense plans and investigations to the FBI.See 'Bringing Alger Hiss to Justice," by Stephen W. Salant at the U. Of Michigan [ [...] ]In other words, much of the evidence now available indicates that Hiss really was framed.
In short,'Witness,' and Chambers, are as unreliable as anything can be.The book is in fact seriously marred by the idiosyncrasies of Chambers' personality.He seems to have been a born fanatic --- going from staunch Republican in the 1920s, to a fanatical Bolshevist in the 1930s, to a right wing, religious fundamentalist Christian in the 1940s: at the end point, anyone to the left ofEisenhower was in his mind a "communist," although he really meant Leninist/Bolshevik; what passed as "communism" in the USSR had about as much relation to genuine communism as Detroit does to the Emerald City.
Thus, any reader of Witness has to do much more investigation into this case than simply reading Whittaker Chambers' version of reality.In fact, brilliant though he was in so many ways, every indication exists that he did not have a very firm grasp of the real world. He once told the FBI, for example, that Time magazine's New York office had within it a "communist cell" group, and that Under Secretary Of State Francis Sayre, Woodrow Wilson's son in law, was a communist agent.
A reader interested in the truth might also want to read, in addition to Witness, the Hiss side of this same story -'Alger Hiss: The True Story,' by John Chabot Smith [9780030137761]; and 'A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss,' byMorton & Michael Levitt [ McGraw-Hill, 1979], [9780517371343, 9780070373976].Most of the rest of the real story can be found in various other sources, an enlightening and thorough one of which is Meyer Zeligs''Friendship and Fratricide,' Viking, 1967 [various ISBNs].
For a very complete accounting of all of the facts in the Hiss-Chambers Case, see:
[...], web site of an outstanding Russian scholar, Svetlana Chervonnaya.
And [...], the Hiss web site, wherein all of the facts of the case are discussed by experts.
jim crawford
Westwood N
... Read more
|
