Whittaker Chambers remains one of the great witnesses to the moral, political, cultural, and spiritual crisis that spanned the “short twentieth century,” beginning with the “guns of August” in 1914 and ending with the annus mirabilis of 1989 as East-Central Europe was liberated from the Communist yoke. His masterwork, Witness, was published seventy years ago in 1952; it is worth pondering that great work once more. It took the country by storm for both the right and wrong reasons. Too many people treated the “case,” as Chambers called it, as a personal contest between Chambers, a remarkably talented ex-Communist writer and journalist who had broken with the Communist underground in 1938, and his former friend and collaborator Alger Hiss, a Soviet agent in the upper echelons of the State Department who shamelessly denied his culpability until his death in 1996.
