Witness Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  WITNESS AND FRIEND: REMEMBERING WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

  A MASTERPIECE AT FIFTY

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 - FLIGHT

  I

  I I

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  Chapter 2 - THE STORY OF A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  LIII

  Chapter 3 - THE OUTRAGE AND THE HOPE OF THE WORLD

  I

  II

  Chapter 4 - THE COMMUNIST PARTY

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  Chapter 5 - UNDERGROUND

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVI

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  Chapter 6 - THE CHILD

  I

  Chapter 7 - UNDERGROUND

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  Chapter 8 - COLONEL BORIS BYKOV

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XX

  XXI

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  Chapter 9 - THE DIVISION POINT

  I

  Chapter 10 - THE TRANQUIL YEARS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  Chapter 11 - THE HISS CASE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  Chapter 12 - THE BRIDGE

  I

  Chapter 13 - THE HISS CASE II

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  LIII

  LIV

  LV

  LVI

  Chapter 14 - 1949

  I

  II

  III

  Chapter 15 - TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

  I

  INDEX

  Copyright © 1952 by Whittaker Chambers Copyright © renewed 1980 by Esther Chambers

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

  recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be

  invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer

  who wishes to quote
brief passages in connection with a review written for

  inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Witness and Friend: Remembering Whittaker

  Chambers” (an edited version of “Witness and Friend: Remembering Whittaker

  Chambers on the Centennial of His Birth”) is reprinted from National Review.

  Copyright © 2001 by National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue,

  New York, NY 10016. Reprinted by permission.

  ISBN: 0-89526-789-6

  Published in the United States by

  Gateway Editions

  A Division of Regnery Publishing, Inc.

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  Write to Director of Special Sales, Regnery Publishing, Inc.,

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  WITNESS AND FRIEND: REMEMBERING WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

  by William F. Buckley Jr.

  On July 9, 2001, the White House held a special ceremony to honor Whittaker Chambers on the fortieth anniversary of his death. At the private ceremony, held in the Old Executive Office Building, William F. Buckley Jr. recalled his friendship with Chambers.

  I first met Whittaker Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published Witness. When the preface of Witness appeared as a feature in the Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Alger Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss’s innocence had once been a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition.

  But the nature of the author was not grasped by the reviewers. “I am a heavy man,” Chambers once wrote me, apologizing for staying two days at my home. There is a sense in which that was true. But he never appreciated, as others could do, the true gaiety of his nature, the appeal of his mysterious humor, the instant communicability of an overwhelming personal tenderness; his friends—I think especially of Ralph de Toledano—took endless and articulate pleasure from his company.

  Witness was off to a great start. But, surprisingly, it did not continue to sell in keeping with its spectacular send-off. The length of the book was forbidding; and the trial, in any case, was three years old, and the cold sweat had dried. Alger Hiss was in prison, and now the political furor centered about Senator McCarthy. Those who did not know the book, and who were not emotionally committed either to Chambers’s guilt or to his innocence, seemed to shrink even from a vicarious involvement in the controversy, to a considerable extent because of the dark emanations that came from Chambers; depressing when reproduced, as was widely done, in bits and snatches torn from the narrative. “Until reading Witness it had been my impression,” Hugh Kenner, the author and critic, had written me, “that his mind moved, or wallowed, in a setting of continuous apocalypse from which he derived gloomy satisfactions, of an immobilizing sort. The large scale of Witness makes things much clearer. It is surprisingly free from rhetoric, and it makes clear the genuine magnitude of the action which was his life; a Sophoclean tragedy in slow motion, years not hours.”

  In 1954 I asked if I might visit him. He had written to a longstanding friend, Henry Regnery, the publisher of my book on Senator McCarthy, to praise the book while making clear his critical differences with its subject. Chambers had been struck down by a heart attack and it was vaguely known that he spent his days in and out of a sickbed, from which the likelihood was that he would never again emerge physically whole. I had every reason to believe that I would be visiting Jeremiah lying alongside a beckoning tomb.

  I was taken to his bedroom. The doctor had forbidden him even to raise his head. And yet he seemed the liveliest man I had ever met. I could not imagine such good humor from a very sick man, let alone anyone possessed by the conviction that night was closing in all over the world, privately tortured by his continuing fear that the forces aligned against him would contrive to reorder history, impose upon the world the ghastly lie that he had testified falsely against Alger Hiss, and so erase his witness, his expiation for more than ten years’ complicity with Communism.

  We did not, of course, speak of Hiss, nor did we for several months; though later he spoke of him, and of the case, with candor. But we talked about everything else, and I. left Westminster later than I should have, hustled anxiously to the door by a wife who knew she was helpless absolutely to enforce the doctor’s rules.

  As he began to recover he was, for a period, greatly renewed by a physical and spiritual energy that were dialectically at odds with his organic ill health and his intellectual commitment to the futility of all meliorative action in the Cold War. I talked with him about the magazine I proposed to publish and asked whether he would join the staff. To my astonishment the answer was yes—he would consider doing just that. We corresponded through the summer. He was to make up his mind definitely during the fall, after we visited again.

  I made the mistake in one of my letters of expressing exorbitant hopes for the role National Review might play in political affairs. He dashed them down in a paragraph unmatched in the literature of supine gloom, sentences that President Reagan, who was in awe of their eloquence, and defiant of their fatalism, publicly recalled more than once. “It is idle,” he rebuked me, “to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”