Whittaker Chambers in Books

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Reviews books with Whittaker Chambers tagged either as Subject, Actor, or Mention

C-SPAN: Cold War Era Spies

C-SPAN 3

C-SPAN 3 aired “Cold War Era Spies” with new insight into the spy activities of Whittaker Chambers in the early 1930s, before the Hiss Case — more at WhittakerChambers.org.

History’s Witness: Interview on Whittaker Chambers

In an interview syndicated in The American Conservative from Australia’s National Observer, American author Elena Maria Vidal discusses why we hear about McCarthyism and its excesses but not so much about the Hiss case.

(Full article)

Whittaker Chambers Remembered

In an interview published in Australia’s National Observer, American author Elena Maria Vidal discusses why we hear about McCarthyism and its excesses but not so much about the Hiss case.

(Full article)

Chambers on Reinsch on Chambers: Muffled—or Strangled?

Muffled—or Strangled?


Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary
By Richard M. Reinsch II
(Indianapolis: ISI Books, 2010)

(Reprint from “Letters: Muffled—or Strangled?,” published in the January 2011 issue of The New Criterion)

To the Editors:

I enjoyed your review (“He heard the screams,” November 2010) of Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary, by Richard Reinsch. I offer comments, as a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers who has studied his life and writings.

I agree with the book’s reviewer. Gary Saul Morson says: “Where Chambers writes with passion and palpability, Reinsch offers fuzz. His prose muffles the screams.” Morson cites “SparkNotes” depth. He finds the “appalling” prose “irritating.” And there, he stops. He calls the author’s efforts “accurate . . . if simplistic.”

I would go further. More than muffling Whittaker Chambers’s intellectual thought, Reinsch strangles it. He narrows Chambers’s vistas to his own private passion: conversion passages in Witness (page 83). Fixation aside, nothing is new. There is no insight, key, or cipher to unlock Chambers’s thought. Like Michael Kimmage’s The Conservative Turn (2009), Reinsch raises no challenge to the view of Chambers set forth by William F. Buckley, Jr. He even shirks the task posed to himself—to “weave together” strands of Chambers’s thought (page vii). Instead, by ignoring vast areas of influence and thought, he renders readers as ignorant as himself. Reinsch leaves Sam Tanenhaus unchallenged too. Tanenhaus sacrificed accuracy for a Vanity Fair approach, which helped make his biography [Whittaker Chambers: A Biography] a bestseller. Reinsch ditches insight for personal bias.

Of course, bias mars most books on Chambers, Hiss, and the Hiss Case. These books, left-wing and right-wing alike, grind axes—they add little, and nothing new. Instead, by and large they recycle previous works. To date, no work has examined the life or thoughts of Chambers an Sich. Thus, none discerns why the Hiss Case unfolded as it did. Nor does any book relate Whittaker Chambers to today: they remain mired in the Cold War. Yet we live in a time of spy networks and bomb-wielding assassins. Our world is not unlike that of the young Whittaker Chambers.

Whittaker Chambers, by Richard Reinsch

He heard the screams


Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary
By Richard M. Reinsch II
(Indianapolis: ISI Books, 2010)

(Reviewed by Gary Saul Morson)

(Excerpts from “He Heard the Screams,” published in the November 2010 issue of The New Criterion)

Why do otherwise decent people embrace ideologies that entail the killing of millions? What is the appeal that made so many people, especially intellectuals, support Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao? Whittaker Chambers argued that if we are to combat the most monstrous evil in the history of the world—totalitarianism, as invented in the twentieth century by Lenin—we must understand what draws some people to it and makes others incapable of countering, or even understanding, its appeal.

[…]

It is no surprise, then, to learn from Richard Reinsch’s biography Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary that Chambers was deeply influenced by the greatest counterrevolutionary thinker of modern times, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, too, had once been a revolutionary conspirator, for which he had served four years in a Siberian prison camp. Both counter-revolutionaries rethought their convictions, embraced God, and became innovative conservative thinkers.

[…]

Chambers famously wrote that, in breaking with Communism and testifying against it, he was joining the losing side. I am not old enough to remember that testimony, but I do remember when both liberals and conservatives thought that the Soviet Union would soon outproduce us and, most likely, take over the world by the sheer power of example. So far as the Soviet Union goes, that thinking turned out to be completely mistaken. But, as Reinsch points out, Chambers’s point still holds. There are two ways in which freedom can lose—not only by challenge from without but also by gradual erosion from within. Freedom loses when people no longer value it. As recently as twenty-five years ago, most college professors I knew still believed in democracy, free elections, and free speech, even for their opponents. They stood up for Salman Rushdie. Now most have such contempt for hoi polloi that they do not see the point of allowing them to spread their ignorant lies. The rest of the faculty, who do cling to outmoded ideas of freedom, are embarrassed to express them.

Reinsch’s biography prompted me to read Witness for the first time. I discovered in it what I do not hesitate to call one of the great autobiographies of world literature. I could teach it alongside the autobiographical parts of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and even Tolstoy’s Confession. Chambers thinks deeply and commands a unique and powerful style.

For that very reason, Reinsch’s treatment falls short. It’s not that he gets Chambers wrong. He’s accurate, but in the way that one of the better editions of SparkNotes conveys an accurate, if simplistic, version of a great author’s “message.” Part of the problem is Reinsch’s appalling prose. In one characteristic passage, he explains that

Chambers never charged his nation’s leaders with possessing overt sympathy to Communism. Rather, the Western leaders were unable to understand an enemy who pursued immanent ends with transcendent fervor due to their own paucity of spirit.

I had to read this sentence three times before I realized that, despite the syntax, “paucity of spirit” pertains not to the enemy but to the Western leaders. Such sentences make reading this book an irritating experience. Where Chambers writes with passion and palpability, Reinsch offers fuzz. His prose muffles the screams.

Gary Saul Morson is Chair of Slavic Languages & Literature at Northwestern University.

(Please click here to read the complete article)

Sam Tanenhaus: An Un-American Life

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

Despite the new title, this book is merely a reprint of the American edition of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1988).

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