Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
Michael Scammell
(New York: Random House, 2009)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

It takes talent to write about someone else's interesting life in a book that is interesting itself. The biographer would have to be, say, an author, scholar and translator. Such a person could write a biography about an intellectual polyglot, polymath, "journalist, novelist, essayist, autobiographer, and writer of scientific speculations" — and Casanova.

Michael Scammell is such a biographer. His new book on Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) took two decades to complete. He has flushed out details that Koestler himself left out — in some half dozen autobiographies. He shares Koestler's long, convoluted life in a thoroughly enjoyable read. The British-born Mr. Scammell comes with top credentials. Currently, he teaches creative writing and translation at Columbia University. Previously, he chaired the Russian literature department at Cornell. His Solzhenitsyn biography won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and English PEN Nonfiction Prize. Translations from Russian include Nabokov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.

Readers of this book should expect quality from him — and will find he delivers. Those who already know Koestler should plunge eagerly into Koestler without hesitation. The uninitiated have the chance to experience the thrill of learning about this extraordinary person — and afterward go diving into Koestler's own books. Darkness at Noon, perhaps his best-known work is just one of nearly 40 books in as many years. Mr. Scammell discusses all the books in Koestler's oeuvre and how they fit into Koestler's life. Who knew that elements in Darkness at Noon came from real-life stories of friends like ceramicist Eva (Stricker) Zeisel? Or how often Koestler wrestled with whether to continue various books in a series — or to keep writing at all?

Throughout the book, Mr. Scammell remains focused on his subject and is either humble or sensible enough to remain out of sight. Neither text nor notes refer even obliquely to himself. He rarely oversteps, superimposes or dramatizes his tale. His approach contrasts sharply with Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1999) by David Cesarani.

Mr. Scammell tackles head-on a charge alleged by British director Jill Craigie (wife of politician Michael Foot) that Koestler raped her — the charge coming a decade after Koestler's death in 1983. He chides Mr. Cesarani for embellishing the facts. After all, Foot and Craigie remained friends with Koestler. They were even guests of honor at his 70th birthday party. Mr. Scammell concludes "the likeliest explanation is that behavior that wasn't at the time seen as rape has since come to be regarded as such." He also says, "Craigie's story and Cesarani's embellishment of it have left a stain on Koestler's reputation far larger than he deserves." His findings support an earlier wrist-slapping by Tony Judt — that Mr. Cesarani allowed his own "present-minded primness" to undermine his scholarship.

Mr. Scammell's approach also contrasts sharply with a biography by Canadian literature professor Mark Levene. His book, Arthur Koestler, written in 1984, opens and closes with brief biographical essays. The remaining essays examine Koestler through his writings, all packaged in a concise 151 pages. Mr. Levene is insightful but too brief to do Koestler justice.

While overall, Mr. Scammell's book does justice to Koestler, there are a few occasions in which Mr. Scammell is less than precise. For instance, he attributes part of Koestler's inspiration for writing Darkness at Noon to "the puzzling success of Stalin's show trials of the 1930s."

Perhaps the Moscow show trials appear merely "puzzling" to Mr. Scammell, but they shook many believers at that time to the core. No book has ever explained the inner agony of devoted party members and admirers as Darkness at Noon did. Reviewing the book for TIME magazine in 1941, Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather), wrote,

It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. More plausibly than any other book yet written, fiction or nonfiction, it gives the answer to one of history's great riddles: Why do Russians confess?

For the most part, however, Mr. Scammell moves through the subject's life with accurate, full detail in digestible, even delicious bites. Despite the book's more than 700 pages, few errata occur and only moments of confusion. (For example, late in the book, the names of some lifelong friends revert inexplicably to earlier forms). Perhaps a shorter, more dramatic prologue would have helped prime readers for Koestler's life story. Moreover, the book might have benefited from the author addressing the following questions at greater length: Why does Koestler remain important more than 25 years after his death? How is he relevant to the circumstances of the 21st century? What has happened to the issues Koestler championed?

Mr. Scammell hardly comments on Koestler's famous support for euthanasia. He does not address Koestler's bold call for "Partition" in the Middle East (in light of today's ongoing negotiations for a "Two-State Solution"). Though he describes instances of Koestler's eurocentric worldview (typical of those times), he does not discuss the implications of such lingering views in today's "Global Village." These are not flaws: one simply wants more from Mr. Scammell himself.

Perhaps better than any other book of the 20th century, Darkness at Noon shows the inner workings of communism. More than a novel of surpassing resonance or negative utopia, it takes its place (alongside Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind) as one of the most influential anti-communist autobiographies.

Koestler remained committed to his own quest for political utopia. Because of this quest, Mr. Scammell considers him an embodiment of the 20th-century man. Certainly, he offers here a compelling personal story of one of the last century's most influential writers. Announced for publication many times over the past decade, Michael Scammell's Koestler has proven itself well worth the wait.

• David Chambers, a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers, is a management consultant.

[This article first appeared in The Washington Times]



Book details:
Library of Congress
Random House
MichaelScammell.com
KGB Bar (previous announcement)

Excerpt:
Random House
New York Times
Wall Street Journal

Book tour:
C-SPAN Q & A
River Run Bookstore (Portsmouth, NH)
British Library (London, UK)

Other reviews:
New York Review of Books
Economist
Times
New Yorker
Atlantic Monthly
Newsweek
American Conservative Magazine (Free Library)
Columbia Magazine
Times of India
The Australian
Los Angeles Times
Wall Street Journal
San Francisco Chronicle
Chicago Tribune
Washington Post
Buffalo News
Slate (Slate.fr)
TPM Cafe (BernardAvishai.com)
The Wire
Commentary
National Review
Jewish Week
Publishers Weekly
Library Journal

New York Times:
Book Review (Scotsman)
Zeppelin Adventure
Podcast
Inside

Online biographies of Arthur Koestler:
Koestler Trust
Encyclopedia Britannica
Wikipedia
Kirjasto
NNDB

Online biographies of Michael Scammell:
MichaelScammell.com
Columbia University
PEN
interLitQ
Wikipedia

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Biography:
A User's Guide
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Biography requires insight, argues Dr. Carl Rollyson in his latest book, Biography: A User's Guide. To appreciate the person studied -- to trust the subject of a biography -- the biographer must know the subject so well as to be able to assess the subject's self-honesty. Rollyson discusses this issue on pp. 164-168. The subject is Martha Gellhorn; the biographical form, her letters (collected by Caroline Moorehead); the example, a look at Hiss Case protagonists Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

Rollyson criticizes Moorehead as "ill equipped" to explore and analyze the nature of Gellhorn's perception and trustworthiness. Moorehead fails (in his opinion) to question Gellhorn's own accounts of her life and times. Rollyson, however, is quite ready to make pronouncements. When Gellhorn denies ever having an affair with H. G. Wells, "Moorehead drops the subject." In contrast, Rollyson points out, "Wells himself wrote quite directly" about the affair.

His example from the Hiss Case is even more caustic and merits generous quote:

So, by all means, enjoy Gellhorn's letters, but caveat emptor!... What about this passage on Alger Hiss, written on April 11, 1982:

The man is 77 now, and with hurt eyes, still trying to restore his good name. And though he doesn't understand why Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon were out to kill him, I do; he was the very embodiment of everything they were not and could not be, the educated upper class American, an American gentleman; they hated him. It had nothing to do with Communism; it was like a private vendetta.

This passage can be easily turned on its head: Whittaker Chambers is dead, and the old lefties cannot let go of vilifying him. I know why: he was fat and conservative and worked for Time magazine and had none of Hiss's elegance and education. How could someone as well spoken and with the right opinions possibly be a traitor?

Reducing history to such psychology and ideology is repugnant. There may be a grain of truth to it, but to make such explanations dominate, as Gellhorn does, makes her a very unreliable correspondent. Why didn't Moorehead at least include an introduction that explored the nature of Gellhorn's prejudices and blind spots? (p. 167)

One can only wish that Rollyson would examine the biographies of Chambers (by Sam Tanenhaus and Chambers himself) and Hiss (from Fred J. Cook, William Allen Jowitt, John Cabot Smith, and G. Edward White to son Tony Hiss and Alger Hiss himself).

All this is but one section of Biography: A User's Guide. Rollyson also delves into topics like censorship, libel, fair use, public domain. He peppers the lot with examples from published biographies and assessments of the biographer's art. His tone, while often sharp, is never strident, since the object of his criticism is always the refinement of biography, not the demeaning of others. (Much of the book comes from previously published articles, carefully worked into the book: the Gellhorn narrative comes from the now-defunct New York Sun.)

For anyone interested in writing biography, this book is a must-read: thanks to Ivan R. Dee for publishing it.

Tags: Icerocket | Technorati

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati | whittaker chambers

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

The Terminal Spy:
A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal, and Murger
(New York: Doubleday, 2008)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

The Terminal Spy deals with untraceable assassinations, a terrible tradition in the Russian Federation that comes from the Soviet Union. Assassination is something Whittaker Chambers (among many defecting communists) feared. In today's Russia, it has arisen to international prominence anew with the apparent assassination of Alexander Litvinenko.

From the time of the Russian civil war and the Kronstadt Rebellion,* the Soviet Union engaged in both military and intelligence that included assassination. This ranged from rounding up foreign agents for return to Moscow show trials (or simply execution) to assassinations pinned on others. One such assassination helped motivate Chambers to defect and escpate: the murder of Ignace Poretsky (AKA Ignace Reiss, leading even more directly to Walter Krivitsky's defection).

None of this history appears in The Terminal Spy, but this book does help show a grim cultural continuity in Russia. The history of Russia (like many modern nations) includes the assassination of four czars. However, unlike its recent rival, the United States (which has suffered its share of assassinations of leaders), Russia (under the Soviets) developed modern methods of untraceable assassination as a national science. The Soviets tested this capability in early days on American spy Cy Oggins (a friend of Chambers's -- see review of The Lost Spy). A test of their latest capability in untraceable assassination techniques -- namely, Litvinenko's exposure to Polonium 210 -- is the subject of the present book. New York Times veteran Alan S. Cowell narrates the events leading up to Litvinenko's assassination with a style that follows spy thrillers a bit too closely. Facts are facts, however, no matter how similar to fiction, and The Terminal Spy is a must-read for any interested in the spy business.

* "Kronstadt": see "Louis Fischer's Concept of 'Kronstadt'"

Tags: Icerocket | Technorati

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati | whittaker chambers

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

When Men Were the Only Models We Had:
My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun may have mentioned Whittaker Chambers only a few times in passing in her 2002 memoirs When Men Were the Only Models We Had, but she sheds more light on Chambers and his contemporaries than many others.

For instance, though she clearly disdains Chambers (p. 84), she can admit confidently that, "As an agnostic, I find Maxim's [Chambers's] one of the best definitions of spirit I have ever heard" (p. 85). (The quote from Trilling's novel is "Suppose we say God is the Being to whom things are rendered that are not rendered to Caesar.")

For those interested in issues such as 1930s American intellectuals ("the New York Intellectuals") and 1950s anti-Communism, Heilbrun's books may be easy to miss but is nevertheless essential read. Her observations are important markers of her time -- a graduate student in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, then professor (1960-1993). Heilburn was an academic leader of the generation following her "models": her comments are revealing. For instance, she expresses mere surprise at Trilling's 1975 description of Chambers as a "man of honor." She said that many people found Trilling's description "puzzling, since Chambers was a spy" (p. 84) -- a mild condemnation condemned to her more politically oriented, liberal peers. Yet, why should she feel any different, given her observations that, first, Communism held little interest for her and, second, "no single issue was so central as communism to Trilling's generation" (p. 76)?

Though Heilbrun did not set out to review The Middle of the Journey, one can only wish that, as an important, early feminist, she had. She examines only the character of John Laskell, touching little on Gifford Maxim and almost not at all on Arthur Croom and wife Nancy Croom. This is our loss.

Her reminisces are important for understanding changes in women's self-perception in the 20th Century. Snuck among other contributions is a thoughtful essay on Lionel's wife Diana Trilling, which contrasts quite sharply with Trilling's public wars with Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman.

Heilbrun starts her book with Clifton ("Kip") Fadiman -- who used to his good fortune at Simon & Schuster to help Chambers (among many others). (In Chambers's case, Fadiman got him translation work, starting with his most famous effort, the translation from German of Bambi.) Fadiman inspired her career, followed now by his daughter, Anne Fadiman. Her two final essays on Jacques Barzun are warm tributes to the only model who became a friend.

(Mentions appear on pages 75, 76, 84-85 -- the name "Whittaker Chambers" does not appear in the index.)

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati | whittaker chambers

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Great Dames:
What I Learned from Older Women
Marie Brenner
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2000)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Marie Brenner, who has penned the amazing, gripping investigative thriller The Insider among other books, put together one book I found rather misleading. Ostensibly, Great Dames is, according to the subtitle, about women she learned from. A few chapters into the book, however, we readers realize she did not know many of them very well. In fact, she relies heavily on anecdotes from others and from her subjects's memoirs. Diana Trilling is a good example, and Brenner's treatment of Whittaker Chambers a good case in point.

Brenner retells a story recorded by Diana in her memoirs, by Sidney Hook in his memoirs, and Allen Weinstein and Sam Tanenhaus in their books. It all happened back in 1938.

After his defection that year, Chambers had met KGB defector Walter Krivitsky, whose denunciation of Joseph Stalin was appearing in serialized form in America's (then) No. 1 magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Inspired by Krivitsky (whom he befriended and admired greatly), Chambers tried to find some means to publicize his insider information about Communist penetration within the U.S. Federal Government. His Columbia friend, Herbert Solow, a follower of John Dewey, tried to introduced Chambers to Dewey at a Halloween party later that year.

This is a sketch of the background that led Chambers to "crash" (Hook, Out of Step, p. 286) that Halloween party. And this party just happened to occur in the Brooklyn home of Marie Brenner's very own aunt, Anita Brenner. (Anita Brenner was a well known Leftist woman writer in the 1930s.) Many of the guests that night were part of what people later called "the New York Intellectuals."

Marie Brenner skips over any of this background. For her, Chambers was just some "Stalinist agent in hiding... coming above ground for the first time" (p. 88) -- you know how such people tend to show up at New York parties...? Ho-hum.

Brenner then cites a harebrained idea that Diana peddled for years: namely, that the Pumpkin Papers came about because Whittaker Chambers hid stolen microfilm in a pumpkin -- because he remembered the pumpkins at that Halloween party all those years ago...

Why did Brenner even mention this incident?

She never explains.

However, what she should have done is dig a little into Diana's claim. The she could have exposed how Diana was just as capable as Lillian Hellman of mucking fact with fiction. Instead, Brenner presents Diana's version at face value. That kind of treatment makes Great Dames seem skin deep.

Given Anita's close ties with the Trillings -- and Chambers -- niece Brenner's presentation seems ignorant if not disingenuous.

"Close ties"?

Oh, yes. Consider: Anita Brenner had articles published in The New Masses in 1933, only a few months after Chambers disappeared as editor-in-chief (recruited into the underground).

Not close enough?

Well, then, there is Anita's fellow-traveling past. In Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own, author (and Marie Brenner's cousin) Susannah Joel Glusker, says:

In the thirties in New York, Anita socialized with the group of Jewish intellectuals who worked at the Menorah Journal, long before they initiated political activities... Last night had dinner at Lionel Trilling's... They were good friends and participated together in radical organizations such as the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, the Non-Partisan Labor Defense, and the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. (pp. 152-154)

That's pretty ho-hum, too, right?

Not really.

Yet the author of Great Dames (she who also penned The Insider) seems to have missed (or overlooked) a wealth of insider information. Can't get much more "insider" than inside the family.

Frankly, if you want to read about an amazing woman, I recommend cousin Susannah's Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own, over Great Dames.

In fact, maybe the next person to read cousin Susannah's book should be -- Marie Brenner...?

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati | whittaker chambers

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
Susan Jacoby
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Susan Jacoby is a gifted writer. She is deft and light. As a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers (who was another gifted writer, if rarely so light), I looked forward to Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. How would she weigh in on the Hiss case?

Her latest book begins with a clever foil. She has her own mother ask of this book about the Hiss case, "Who cares about that anymore?" We should, Ms. Jacoby holds. People today need to avoid the "swift eclipses of historical memory" too common in American culture. They need to care about the Hiss case. Much of today's fissured politics formed back then.

Ms. Jacoby writes in a conversational, even chatty tone that makes reading this slim volume a pleasure. She probably had in mind a book along the lines of the late Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country (1998). However, at critical moments, she appears not to have thought through or stuck to her mission. The results are disastrous.

The main goal Ms. Jacoby sets for herself is noble. "The contradictory historical scripts about the Hiss case reveal much more about conflicting visions of what America ought to be." These scripts are less about "what American communism actually was - or about who Alger Hiss was." However, she rambles rather than guides or glides readers through the six decades since the Hiss case.

The drama features the usual suspects: Mr. Chambers, Richard Nixon, conservatives as demons: Mr. Hiss, Franklin D. Roosevelt and liberals as angels. Ms. Jacoby makes little if any attempt to reconcile contradictions either she or her subjects raise. She quotes Mr. Hiss when he calls Mr. Chambers a "latter-day Jack London," but she herself can only call Mr. Chambers a liar and bumbling crackpot. Such smears come from the days of the case itself. Ms. Jacoby offers no insight into the case or its meaning.

She claims, "It is not my intention to re-examine or re-evaluate actual evidence in the Hiss case." Instead, her book serves to expose her own prejudices more than explain the relevance of the Hiss case to this generation. She does not recommend other works on the case. (Perhaps she did not read enough to make such recommendations?)

She does not footnote all-too-often oblique references to sources, left or right. (Perhaps she wants to avoid "naming names"?) Most important, she sets off altogether on the wrong foot, seeking to explain the Hiss case only with an eye for Alger Hiss, not Mr. Hiss and Mr. Chambers, the two people at the center of the case. The left hand knoweth better than the right - because it knows better how to select history?

Ms. Jacoby's aim is to "to re-examine the rise of the New Right in the 1980s." "The intellectual architects of the Iraq war during the administration of President George W. Bush ... cut their teeth during Reagan's two terms of office in the 1980s." So that is why Ms. Jacoby had to drag us through decades of Hiss case debate - to harangue the Bush administration. If so, she should have stated that upfront. Certainly, she is not even-handed: She makes no such attack on Democratic administrations.

Throughout runs a concern about American anti-intellectualism. This makes the book her third work on that topic. Among nine previous books, Ms. Jacoby's previous two, Freethinkers (2004) and The Age of American Unreason (2008), examine American intellectual history more broadly. However, in this volume, she appears loath to delve into more specific topics like the Hiss case itself. Slim is not always good.

"The fictions, slurs, distortions, and inaccuracies about Hiss, some of them are sloppy," she quotes one source saying. Unfortunately, Ms. Jacoby has added to all of the above, copiously. Some of the book's errors jump out of the page. Chapter 2 opens with "On August 2 ..." when the event under discussion occurred Aug. 3, 1948. It was an important date: The Hiss case started that day. Also, the "Pumpkin Papers" (the microfilm portion) did not make the news in November 1948 but December, an error she repeats several times. No detail is too small to hack: Mr. Chambers' brother Richard was not an older but younger brother.

This book could never serve as a review of the Hiss case or its impact because its sloppiness undermines the credibility of the author's arguments. At least when it comes to errors, however, Ms. Jacoby finally achieves some semblance of balance - she errs almost equally about Alger Hiss.

Perhaps strangest is this book's omission of new findings by another recent Yale publication. Spies (May 2009) opens with the bold chapter title, "Alger Hiss: Case Closed." It claims to seal the coffin (if not bury the grave plot) on Mr. Hiss' guilt. Nothing from "Spies" appears in Ms. Jacoby's book. According to "Spies" co-author Harvey Klehr, Yale's editor Jonathan Brent offered her access to the book's new findings. Apparently, Ms. Jacoby took a pass.

Overall, it is distressing to read this book. Clearly, Ms. Jacoby prizes secular, liberal intellectualism. Yet her book is compromised by the very type of bias she claims to despise in her intellectual opposites.

Ms. Jacoby finds no middle-ground audience, either. As a point of reference, Mr. Hiss defines her political spectrum. He is "a bogeyman for the right." He is a "delusion for the extreme left." "Right" and "extreme left" leave Ms. Jacoby's middle decidedly left of center.

In today's America, right reads not left, nor left read right. Who then will talk to the masses between extremes? I will, claims Ms. Jacoby at the beginning of her book, aiming at "people in their thirties, forties, and fifties." Swiftly did her own memory eclipse in this volume. Quickly she winds up preaching to one half of the choir - left only, please.

"What each side truly hates is the other's version of history," she notes. Sad to say, she is as guilty as the rest.

• David Chambers, a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers, is a management consultant.

[This article first appeared in The Washington Times]



Syndication: History News Network - 2009.05.25 | Oxonian Review - 2009.05.25 | New Nixon - 2009.05.23 | Front Page Magazine - 2009.05.23 | Renew America - 2009.05.22 | Tea at Trianon) - 2009.05.22

Other Reviews and Mentions: C-SPAN Q & A (text transcript, video) - 2009.07.26 | Washington Post - 2009.05.31 | Washington Times - 2009.05.22 | FrontPageMagazine - 2009.05.22 | Oxonian Review - 2009.05.18 | The Australian - 2009.05.09 | New York Times - 2009.05.07 | The Nation - 2009.05.06 | The American | In Italia - 2009.05.01 | National Association of Scholars - 2009.04.29 | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 2009.04.19 | Sacramento News Reviews - 2009.04.03 | National Post - 2009.03.28 | New York Observer - 2009.03.24 | IntelNews - 2009.03.23 | TruthDig - 2009.03.20 | North Star Writers Group - 2009.03.10

Promotional articles by Jacoby: Oregonian - 2009.03.28 | Los Angeles Times - 2009.03.22 | Powell's - 2009.03.21

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

The Lost Spy:
An American in Stalin's Secret Service
Andrew Meier
(New York: W. W. Norton, August 2008)
Official website: thelostspy.com
Lauren Kim: dust jacket designer
(Reviewed by David Chambers from a galley copy provided by the publisher)

In 1992, Boris Yeltsin held out a dossier with a file inside to an American official:

It was a file recently retrieved from the archives. The prisoner, Yeltsin said, was an American, who, even though innocent of the crimes he had been charged with, had been killed. Here at last, he added gravely, was evidence of the crimes of the past: a U.S. citizen executed without cause on Stalin's personal orders... He turned the pages of the Oggins dossier slowly, letting the horror sink in... "Likvidatsia"... The American prisoner, he said, had been liquidated. (p. 274, 276)

More sinister still are the detailed revelations in The Lost Spy, an admirable and gripping read. Anyone interested in American activity in the Soviet underground during the 1920s and 1930s should snap up Andrew Meier's new book right away. The Lost Spy can and should be the nation's first choice for an end-of-summer read -- replete with extra chilling chills, since this espionage thriller is no potboiler but a true story.



The Lost Spy retraces the careers of Isaiah ("Cy") Oggins and wife Nerma Berman Oggins, two Americans who joined the Soviet underground in 1926, soon stationed in Europe and the Far East. In 1938, the Soviet government asked Cy Oggins to "remain" in Moscow. In February 1939, they arrested, sentenced, and sent him to the Norilsk gulag. When his sentence ended, the Soviets decided to liquidate him, rather than send him back to an America amidst HUAC investigations that might take interest in him. Wife Nerma had taken their young son home to the States and remained silent on the subject for the rest of her life (like many wives of liquidated spies). The Ogginses had all but disappeared from history -- until former TIME correspondent Andrew Meier picked up their trail.

Meier has written this book despite enormous challenges. Even after years of exhaustive research, large gaps remain in the story. How then to tell it? Meier chose to follow a commercially successful approach, namely, to create drama and rely on his own artistry as a storyteller to draw in readers and fill in the gaps. The drama does little to harm the accuracy of the story of Cy and Nerma Ogginses.

Given adequate material, the author does not fail as storyteller. He retells well the chance encounter of the undercover Cy Oggins and unexpected friend Sidney Hook, based on Hook's own autobiography, Out of Step (1984). Meier deserves praise for the research into this chapter: this is a true "find" that has been lying within reach ever since Cy's name first reappeared in 1992 (described by Meier in the book). In fact, wherever he found good material, Meier manages to spin a good yarn, however short -- such as the tale of children's book illustrator Irwin Shapiro, whose bizarre picture book The Gremlins of Lieutenant Oggins (1943) may have served as coded warning to communists and fellow travelers.

Nevertheless, the book suffers a bit from divided focus. It begins with the author and how he became interested in the story, then introduces the son of his subjects, professor emeritus Robin Oggins. From there on, the narrative shifts back and forth in timeline, not always smoothly, between Cy Oggins's time in detention and the course of his and wife Nerma's lives before and after his arrest and death. Sometimes, not even good writing can weave enough thread to cover patchiness. Again, Meier does not fail to capture drama where possible, whether the surprising demise of Cy Oggins or the last glimpse of Nerma Berman Oggins.

The book takes a negative, dismissive tone of Whittaker Chambers. There is pointless disparagement from the very first mention: "Whittaker Chambers, disheveled and overweight even as an undergraduate" (p. 85) -- what end does such a leading line serve, other than notice of bias? No surprise then that the book cites Tony Hiss, son of Alger Hiss, in its acknowledgements.

John Chambers, son of Whittaker Chambers (and my father), goes unlisted. As Meier wrote me recently:

I did not contact your father. I had thought of it early on at first, but heard from a few historians that he did not enjoy such encounters -- and out of respect for his privacy, I declined to pursue the matter.

Meier was right about my father, who until very recently has been the sole -- and reticent -- spokesperson for the Whittaker Chambers Family. Indeed, my father has declined all research interviews since publication of Sam Tanenhaus's book Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997).

Nevertheless, even without cooperation from the Chambers Family, The Lost Spy might have achieved more had the author not allowed this prejudice to deflect his research. The reason for that is simple: Cy and Nerma Oggins knew Whittaker and Esther Chambers rather well. Both couples knew Sidney and Carrie Hook. Cy and Whittaker knew each other from Columbia. They studied under the same professors, such as George C. D. Odell. They studied and taught within the same network of workers' schools. Nerma and Esther knew each other, too, from the Rand School, from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), and from The World Tomorrow, a pacifist magazine edited by Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law, the Reverend John Neville Sayre. The couples form doppelgängers: how easily they could have traded places, the Ogginses staying in New York, the Chamberses off to Berlin. Most people thought the polyglot Whittaker Chambers was a European operative anyway.

Meier could have drawn out comparisons and contrasts between these two couples much more deeply -- an open invitation which this reviewer has begun to address already.

(The Ogginses relationship with Walter Krivitsky also merited more discussion. Krivitsky's book In Stalin's Secret Service is the reference point for Meier's subtitle to The Lost Spy: "An American in Stalin's Secret Service." Again, the ties to Whittaker Chambers might have helped draw out more. After reading the long passage in Whittaker Chambers's autobiography Witness [1952: pp. 459-463], one wonders: did Krivitsky and Chambers talk about Cy Oggins among others?)



Importantly, The Lost Spy demonstrates that Whittaker Chambers's fears of liquidation were all too real -- Cy Oggins gruesome death is proof. Poisonings and other assassinations emanating from Russia continue to the present day: President Viktor Yushchenko in Kiev (2004), ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko in London (2006), American intelligence expert Paul Joyal in Adelphi, MD (2008). Former KGB spy Oleg Gordievsky warned of continued poisonings -- only to be poisoned himself, along with, it seems, British intelligence chief Alex Allan.

Other Reviews and Mentions:

• Tribune Magazine - 2009.09.17
• Sunday Herald - 2009.03.15
• Telegraph (Cy Oggins) - 2009.03.13
• Literary Review (UK) - 2009.03.01
• Wesleyan University - 2008.12.16
• Washington Post - 2008.12.07
• New York Times (Isaiah "Cy" Oggins) - 2008.11.07
• Eleutherotypia (ENet) 2008.11.01
• Washington Times - 2008.10.26
• The Real Barack Obama - 2008.10.26
• The John Batchelor Show - 2008.10.26
• Raleigh News & Observer - 2008.10.12
• TruthDig - 2008.10.03
• Publishers Weekly - 2008.09.29
• Wall Street Journal - 2008.09.25
• Power Line - 2008.09.21
• Weekly Standard - 2008.09.14
• News Observer - 2008.09.09
• NPR - 2008.09.08
• Reverbiage - 2008.09.08
• Chicago Tribune - 2008.09.07
• Los Angeles Times - 2008.09.07
• Book Forum - 2008.09.00
• Los Angeles Times (LAT Envelope, Daily Press) - 2008.08.25
• This and That and More of the Same - 2008.08.25
• Washington Post - 2008.08.24
• Richmond Times-Dispatch - 2008.08.24
• New York Times (Shanghai Daily, U.S. Chamber of Commerce) - 2008.08.22
• Instapundit - 2008.08.16
• Boston Globe - 2008.08.10
• Publishers Weekly (CD - audio) - 2007.07.14
• Publishers Weekly (book - text) - 2008.06.09
• Denver Post - 2008.05.30
• Library Journal - 2008.04.01

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Declassified:
50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History
Thomas B. Allen
(New York: Random House for National Geographic, 2008)
(Reviewed by David Chambers from a galley copy provided by the publisher)

To have 50 of the most important top-secret documents in history summarized in one handy reference book is an excellent idea. As Spy Museum director Peter Earnest states in his introduction, "More than simply listing and describing these fascinating documents, Thomas B. Allen gives us a context, a picture of the world at times in which they were created and in which they were to play a pivotal role." (p. 11) However, if Mr. Allen's treatment of the Pumpkin Papers is any indication of the rest of the book, it renders little of its intended service.

Mr. Allen does bring out some important points to remember about the Hiss Case, now 60 years later. For instance:

The Pumpkin Papers also introduced a little-known member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, California Congressman Richard M. Nixon. His face appeared in numerous newspapers as, magnifying glass in hand, he examined the films... [Alger Hiss'] case also boosted Richard Nixon's career since the latter's connection with the Pumpkin Papers gave him national publicity." (pp. 124, 125)

The microfilm contained information that was essentially worthless, even at the time of their collection in the 1930s.

Overall, however, Mr. Allen's three-page treatment of the Hiss Case misleads more than summarizes succinctly either by short-changing significance or by actually entering error in such short space.

Mr. Allen opens with a reproduction of a State Department letter dated January 11, 1938. This importance of this letter deserves far more discussion than the author gave it. This was not just one of the "Pumpkin Papers."

First, the date makes this one of the documents supporting the Justice Department's indictment and conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury--namely, that he had known Whittaker Chambers well after the last year he stated (1936).

Second, the letter comes from U.S. Army Colonel Joseph W. Stilwell, an important figure in the history of America's foreign relations with Communist governments. Mr. Allen states:

Stilwell...was a military attache, gathering intelligence in China at a crucial time. Chinese Communists, led by Mao Tse-tung, were fighting Japanese invaders while Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were often on the sidelines of the battle. Stilwell's observations at that time would be of great interest to Soviet supporters of Mao... (pp. 123-124)

This summary understates the implications of Stilwell's name on that document. Stilwell's long-time criticism of U.S. ally Chiang Kai-shek would influence a U.S. State Department white paper (1949) on the Chiang regime, which led Truman to end all economic and military support, followed by the fall of the KMT government, the victory of the People's Republic of China and Mao Zedong, and Chiang's flight to the Island of Formosa to found the Republic of China (Taiwan).

While Mr. Allen mentions that Alger Hiss joined the Far Eastern Affairs section of the State Department (p. 124), he does not mention the Republican argument after 1949 that Hiss and fellow Communist spies helped the U.S. to lose China to the Communists.

This section has numerous inaccuracies in little space:

"Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers, who claimed his accusation would be confirmed by hidden documents" (p. 123) -- In August 1948 on several occasions Hiss challenged Chambers to allege his Communist Party membership in public. On August 27, 1948, Chambers did just that on Meet the Press. A month followed before Hiss filed a suit in the Federal Court of Baltimore.

"Some of the Chambers documents had been hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft in the Baltimore home of a relative" (p. 123) -- Chambers asked his wife's nephew to hide all the materials (his "life preserver") in his home in Brooklyn. On November 17, 1948, Chambers' lawyer presented typed and handwritten pages to Hiss' lawyers during a pretrial meeting, hence their name "Baltimore Papers." These were the critical documents of the Hiss Case.

"Chambers's charges targeted a man [Alger Hiss]" (p. 124) -- Chambers did not target Hiss. He received a subpoena to testify before HUAC on August 3, 1948, and he named Hiss among nearly a dozen names of Communists he knew in the Federal Government. In fact, Chambers had named three times that number on September 2, 1939, to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle (who chose not to pursue the matter).

"Charges of espionage were dropped" (p. 124) -- The statute of limitations for espionage was three years at that time. Chambers had testified about events only up to 1938, so the Justice Department after 1941 could take no action for espionage against anyone involved.

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Legacy of Ashes:
The History of the CIA
Tim Weiner
(New York: Doubleday, 2007)
Official website: LegacyOfAshes.com
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

This book does not mention Whittaker Chambers by name, but the mention about Alger Hiss is noteworthy:

When McCarthy privately told Dulles face-to-face "that CIA was neither sacrosanct nor immune from investigation," the director know its survival was at stake. Foster Dulles had opened his doors to McCarthy's bloodhounds in a public display of sanctimony that devastated the State Department for a decade. But Allen fought them off. He rebuffed the senator's attampt to subpoena the CIA's Bill Bundy, who out of old-school loyalties had contributed $400 to the defense fund of Alger Hiss, the suspected communist spy... (p. 106)

Reviews:
Economist, Mother Jones, NPR, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Spy Wars:
Moles, Mysteries & Deadly Games
Tennent H. Bagely
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)

The Hiss-Chambers mention is noteworthy:

Alger Hiss was another beneficiary of willful neglect of the obvious. His secret collaboration with Soviet Intelligence was known to Western authorities long before he moved up to play a substantive role in conferences where America's posture toward the Soviet regime was being worked out, and more than a decade before he was finally brought down before a court... Why do we fall prey to hoaxes, deceptive tricks, lies, and misrepresentations that seem obvious to others less emotional or less involve? Why, once duped, do we then hang on to our misconception, sometimes against the evidence of our senses? Why, when supplied with that evidence, are we more likely to attack its suppliers -- a Burtsev, Bukharin, Marton, Sneevliet, or Chambers -- instead of the deceiver?> (pp. 272-273)

Second mention:

If American are not alone in suffering this form of blindess, they are particularly predisposed to it. Whittaker Chambers wrote of that "invincible ignorance, rooted in what was most generous in the American character, which because it was incapable of such conspiracy itself, cold not believe that others practiced it. It was rooted, too, in what was most singular i the American experience, which because it has prospered so much apart from the rest of the world, could not really grasp... why [Communists] acted as they did." (p. 274)

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Blacklisted by History
M. Stanton Evans
(New York: Crown Forum, 2007)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

This book, which defends the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, has some interesting quotes about Whittaker Chambers. Regarding infiltration:

As to the purpose of such infiltration, Chambers made a couple of further points that in subsequent security debates would be too much neglected. First, that the Communists with whom he worked were, either directly or indirectly, agents of Moscow, albeit with varying levels of commitment, and that the whole operation was managed by Russian or other foreign commissars to whom Chambers as middleman reported. And second, that the object of the infiltration wasn't merely to filch secret papers, though his did occur, but to place people in position of trust where they could affect the course of policy in favor of the Soviet Union.(p. 53)

Regarding pro-Soviet policy-makers in the U.S. Government:

As the postwar diaspora suggested, and as FBI agent Guy Hottel observed to Director Hoover, large number of the Bentley people had moved, or were moving, to policy-making jobs that wold affect the shape of things to come in the dawning East-West struggle. They were often well placed to guide or implement decisions, not simply kibitz as others did so. And people actually making policy, rather than learning about it secondhand, generally, doens't have much time--or need--for spying. As Whittaker Chambers had pointed out, it was the policy making that counted.(p. 134)

Regarding a pre-1948 source of Soviet infiltration:

Soviet Espionage in the United States, November 27, 1945. This is a remarkable report of fifty pages, single spaced, that ties together the Bentley data, COMRAP/CINRAD, Amerasia, information from defectors (including Victor Kravchenko and Whittaker Chambers), and other bureau sources. It shows that the FBI, at the threshold of the Cold War, had a detailed, comprehensive understanding of Soviet-communist operations n the United States. (p. 139)

Regarding post-Hiss Case attitudes:

There was evidence of hostility to anti-communist spokesmen and leaders. Employees of the French-language service [of VOA] testified that, when Whittaker Chambers' Witness appeared and a proposal was made to review it on the air, the head of the section had said, "Whittaker Chambers is a psychopath. Don't touch him with a ten-foot pole." (p. 463)

Reviews:
C-SPAN2 BookTV, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Heritage Foundation, National Review

(Mentions Whittaker Chambers on pages 52-53, 54, 71, 77, 91, 101, 111, 123, 125, 129, 134, 139, 141, 157, 307, 319, 335, 342, 374, 463, 508, 522n 609, 610)

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

An Un-American Life
The Case of Whittaker Chambers
Sam Tanenhaus
(London: Old Street Publishing, 2007)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Despite the new title, this book is merely a reprint of the American edition of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1988). Even the new prologue appeared as an article in The New Republic ("Athwart History"). Save the money, and read the article online (or print out a copy to stick into the American edition). Tanenhaus' analysis in the introduction about the Bush 43 presidency applies as well to the newly republished book: "distressingly little has changed."

Reviews:
Financial Times
The Times
Guardian, Spectator
Future Cities Project

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

How the Cold War Began:
The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies
Amy Knight
(New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Sovietologist Dr. Amy Knight approaches the politically charged Hiss-Chambers Case on the side of Alger Hiss. For her, Whittaker Chambers was one of many tools in the hands of the FBI to attack the administration of President Harry S. Truman. She presents Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and others involved in pre-McCarthy investigations to be victims, equally and alike.

Like a number of others who write about the case from either side, she also shapes her narrative according to prejudiced views. She carefully (or not) selects or omits facts, then presents unproven conclusions. Then of course there are outright errors (unintentional or not). Such shaping works particularly well for her when referring to the Hiss-Case in this book on Igor Gouzenko.

Examples:

Page ix - Error: Lumps Whittaker Chambers with Elizabeth Bentley as testifying before HUAC from January 1947 to July 1948, when Chambers did not appear before HUAC until August 3, 1948

Page 212 - Selectivity, Omission: Intimates that Chambers dredged up the Pumpkin Papers (which Dr. Knight avoids naming on numerous occasions) at the instigation of HUAC member Richard M. Nixon; omits details about the Hiss-Chambers Case -- like Hiss's slander cases against Chambers, for which Chambers produced the Pumpkin Papers; avoids mention of the contents of the Pumpkin Papers, including handwritten papers by both Hiss and Harry Dexter White

Page 213 - Selectivity: Cites differences in Chambers's defection date (1937 and 1938) as fact a point most pro-Hiss writers have already accepted, namely that people have a hard time remembering specific dates ten years after the fact (recently conceded by the pro-Hiss Susan Jacoby in her book Alger Hiss and the Battle for History -- Chambers later described his defection in detail in Witness

Page 214 - Omission: States that both Bentley and Chambers were "prone to contradicting earlier testimony" when in fact Chambers only contradicted himself one time of any note, viz., when he admitted that his Washington apparatuses had engaged in espionage, thus knowingly exposing himself to possible indictment for perjury (and why the Department of Justice indicted Hiss instead of Chambers receives legal explanation by G. Edward White in Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars)

Page 300 - Selectivity, Omission: Lumps Chambers again with Bentley by characterizing both their FBI and congressional interviews as follows: "Their stories changed after almost every interview they had..."

There are other factual problems in the book. Dr. Knight seems to disbelieve that Walter Krivitsky met his death at the hands of Soviet agents. She states that he committed suicide (pp. 4-5). She does acknowledge that at least one of his claims proved true--that a young British aristocrat in the Foreign Ministry was a Soviet mole (Donald Maclean of the Cambridge Five). Of course, Krivitsky also predicted that Stalin would form a secret pact with Hitler--but rather than mention that, Dr. Knight only mentions that interest in Krivitsky dwindled after the Soviets changed sides to oppose Nazi Germany.

(Mentions of "Whittaker Chambers": pages ix, 3, 61-62, 91-92, 194, 300, 212-215, 267, 329n7)

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

The Making of the American Conservative Mind:
National Review and its Times
Jeffrey Hart
(Wilmington: ISI, 2005)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

Subtitled "National Review and Its Times," this book mentions Chambers but has so few details as to wonder why his headshot appears on the cover. There are some interesting observations, such as:

After this May 1957 editorial there followed passionate articles by Bozell, Meyer, and Schlamm honoring the heroism of McCarthyin facing down a host of enemies and fighting the good fight. Burnham's "Third World War" column, in this context conspicuously, avoids the subject of McCarthy altogether and discusses the kind of military organization suitable to the nuclear era. If National Review could be said at this time to be at all divided because of the hint of disagreement in the editorial just cited, what held the two sides together was a shared perception of the profound evil of communism. All saw it not as an "adversary" but as an enemy. The senior people at the magazine knew what Koestler and Orwell knew, and what Solzhenitsyn would make plain to the world in The Gulag Archipelago. Chambers, we know from Witness, had experienced the deepest pit spiritually, but he wanted to fight intelligently and pruduently, gathering allies, and he was no populist much less a populist swinging wildly. (p. 87)

Another, pithy mention:

Whittaker Chambers, on the evidence of Witness, was some kind of Kierkegaardian Protestant, his faith a chime heard in the midnight of nihilism -- though he called himself a Quaker. (p. 109)

Reviews:
New York Times, Dartmouth Review, Washington Monthly, New York Sun, New Criterion, Reason, Commentary

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......

Ex-Friends:
Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer
(New York: Free Press, 1999)
(Reviewed by David Chambers)

It is hard to gauge a book like Ex-Friends by someone like Norman Podhoretz particularly with its claims to the "New York intellectuals." On the one hand, he knew them and claims to have been a part of them. On the other, he seems to know them little or to do little solid research about them. Case in point: his ex-friends Lionel Trilling and wife Diana Trilling.

Podhoretz writes of these ex-friends:

I have already said that neither Lionel nor Diana Trilling had ever been a member of the Communist party but that after a brief spell of intense fellow-traveling in the early 1930s they had become very fierce in their anti-Communism. Indeed they (and especially Diana) were at least as fierce as any anti-Communist intellectuals in sight. (p. 106)

This passage rings strangely--because Diana Trilling had said in her own memoirs, published some half decade earlier (and reviewed by Podhoretz's wife, Midge Decter in Commentary, which Podhoretz edited for more than three decades) quite clearly:

Lionel and I had become Communists through the persuasive reckoning of Sidney Hook at Yaddo but one did not have to be indoctrinated by so gifted a dialectician to turn to Communism as the cure for our failed economy... Under Hook's guidance, Lionel and I bowed to historical necessity and embraced the new revolutionary faith. (The Beginning of the Journey, p. 194-195, 183)

It is disturbing to see Podhoretz continue the same myth about "card-carrying Communists" propagated by Senator Joe McCarthy. Diana herself explains:

To this day we still speak blithely of "card-carrying Communists," as if in the eaerlier years of this centry to have been a dedicated Communist mean that one had to be a member of the Communist Party. Actually, only a small minority, a handful of Communist sympathizers, were Party members. The great majority were fellow travlers, people who in one or another degree were committed to the Communist cause and who, whether they were wholly conscious of it or not, took their direction from the Party but did not submit to its discipline. This was how the Soviet Union wanted it. (Trilling, pp. 179-180)

According to Diana, she and Lionel were Communists. In fact, "Lionel's and my intimacy with the radical movement of the early thirties... made anti-Communists of us" (p. 181) -- a history which Podhoretz does not present as clearly or accurately.

There are several mentions of Whittaker Chambers. In one instance, Podhoretz argues against "the political corollary of the antisecularist position (held most prominently by Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr.)" (p. 70) -- a rare example of Chambers' name preceding Buckley's (and perhaps an effort by Podhoretz to earn yet a new "ex-friend" -- if Buckley ever was a friend, or if he was not an ex-friend already by 1999).

Perhaps of greatest interest when mentioning Chambers is Podhoretz's reminder of the use of "Kronstadt" by Louis Fischer in The God That Failed (1949) -- the moment in which "belief in the Soviet Union as a utopia-in-the-making had been shattered" (p. 105). Sadly, Podhoretz does not quote what became for many disillusioned Communists (including Whittaker Chambers) the defining moment of their lives:

What counts decisivelly is the "Kronstadt." Until its advent, one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether in one's mind and yet refuse to attack it. (The God That Failed, p. 204)

Instead, he demeans Fischer's by offering up his own, derivative interpretation, saying "The summary I provide of these 'Kronstadts' in my own book The Bloody Crossroads< and which I am more or less producing here, was my own." (p. 105, footnote)

As a final note, Ex-Friends is heavily a reworking of previous material:

A briefer and somewhat different version of Chapter One originally appeared in Commentary under the title "My War with Allen Ginsberg." All the rest is new, though a few bits and pieces were adapted from some of my previously published writings. (p. 235)

To write the book, Podhoretz received grant monies from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, not to mention the Hudson Institute and Commentary (for reprint permission).

(Mentions on pages 70, 77, 105, 109, 173-174)

Reviews:
National Review
New York Review of Books
New York Observer
Weekly Standard
New York Daily News
H-Net
Washington Monthly

Tags: | #whittakerchambers | | Icerocket | Technorati

Back to:
Whittaker Chambers in Books
WhittakerChambers.org

Read More......