Sam Tanenhaus’ An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers was first published in the US in 1998. I read it when it came out and immediately recognised it as not merely one of the best written, but also one of the most important books of its kind. Not only did it present a rounded, fascinating portrait of Whittaker Chambers, one of the most significant figures in the revitalisation of conservatism in the United States (and thus, by extension, across the free world); it also dealt fully with the infamous Alger Hiss case.

You can buy copies of An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers here, via Amazon. I cannot urge you too strongly do so. You will not regret reading one of the greatest biographies written. (There are more details at the publishers' site here.)

The idea for this book came to me in late 1988, a time when the cold war had reached its ceremonial endgame: Mikhail Gorbachev acknowle­dging the autonomy of peoples long after they had liberated themselves, valiant students halting tank columns in Tiananmen Square.

It made for impressive, if occasionally hollow, spectacle, and it inspired a chorus of sweeping pronouncements in the United States. “‘Peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world,” Francis Fukuyama exulted in “The End of History,” the period’s signature manif­esto, published in the summer of 1989, six months before the Berlin Wall came down. At the time it was still possible to think that “the developed world,” having writhed through a century-long “paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war,” had suddenly achieved “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”

It didn’t take long for the gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism. But for a brief period it really did seem that history, if it had not actually ended, had at least momentarily stopped, particularly for baby boomers like Fukuyama (and me), born in the 1950s. The cold war was the only geopolitical reality we knew—or could seriously contemplate—raised as we were on the eschatology of the nuclear “option,” as the experts called it, the same experts who drew up mathematical formulas to explain how many cities we could afford to have vaporized, and which ones, in the event of a “showdown.”

Every child knew the “ultimate apocalypse” was eminently thinkable. We all had watched footage of blossoming mushroom clouds and fictive images of a finger pushing a button. It was thinkable for a more literal reason: it had already happened, twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we knew who had dropped the bombs. It is not a coincidence that in the blackest of black cold war comedies, Dr. Strangelove, it is a homespun American general, not a sinister Russian, who strikes the nuclear match.

In such a climate, politics unfolded as constant low-grade emergency, with occasional oscillations and pulse-quickening alarms: the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the planes shot out of the sky. We were calmly assured, after each bleak episode, that all was being efficiently managed. And perhaps it was. But the stresses showed, most obviously in the near normalization of violence in the 1960s, much of it televised: racial battles in city after city, armed militants storming campus buildings. The first presidential election I followed closely, in 1968, when I was twelve, included two assassinations and a police riot in Chicago.

This was the steep cost of “the twilight struggle,” in John. F. Kennedy’s lugubrious phrase, the contest between the planet’s only remaining great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, lethally well-matched colossi, each geographically vast, each primed, after many years on the sidelines, to dominate the global game. Each also espoused a purifying doctrine, the Soviets’ derived from Marx by way of Lenin, the Americans’ derived from . . . what exactly? Here was the trouble. A nation so new and so devout in its pluralism could offer no theology but itself, the miracle of its existence, in all its superabundance, the same theology our leaders offer today. In those days too our presidents, each in his turn the “leader of the free world,” told us that we were innocent of imperial ambition and desired only that other peoples be free—free, that is, to become like us; this applied not only to the “captive nations” behind the Iron Curtain, but also to the left-leaning social democracies of corrupt Europe. The battle was moral, for “hearts and minds.” Of course this was what the Soviets, though the vocabulary was different, claimed about their utopian project.

So in 1988, my question was not why there had been a cold war, but rather how it had come to assume its curious shape. These thoughts led me to George Orwell, the truest prophet of the "twilight struggle," whose Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in the incubatory stage of the cold war, had foretold much of what was to come: the all-seeing television eye, the creepy language (Orwell could easily have coined "balance of terror," "limited nuclear war," "Mutually Assured Destruction"), the proxy wars staged in distant regions of the globe (Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Congo—the Congo?), the orchestrated paranoia. It was all the more impressive because Orwell’s strength, as everyone knows, was his litera­lism, his English “common sense.” He was not an especially imaginative writer. Yet he had seen with matchless clarity where things were headed, and this in turn suggested his novel had been as much a feat of reportorial study as of invention: his starting point had been a concrete set of facts. But which facts? I grew obsessed with the idea of rewriting Nineteen Eighty-Four, in reverse. Like Orwell I would begin with the year 1948 (a simple transposition of digits had yielded his hypothetical future date) but my account would be factual. It would describe what had actually happened that year. There was no shortage of events to choose from: the Berlin blockade, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the advances of Mao’s Red Army, the formation of Korea’s “Democratic Republic,” the disintegration of governments in Greece and Belgium, and all the rest.

Except my history had to take place in America, where the cold war— one side of it anyway—had sprung into being. Also I preferred an event or sequence of events that could be related narratively and on a human scale. And so I found myself examining the case of Alger Hiss, the senior diplomat who in the summer of 1948 had been accused on the floor of Congress, more specifically by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of being a Soviet agent and then had stood trial (twice) for lying about it. From the opening days of congressional testimony up through Hiss’s perjury conviction, in January 1950, the event had attained the scope of a great political trial. There had been a clash of ideas and worldviews, moments of genuine surprise and reversal. And there had been serious consequences. The case had initiated the Red hunts (or “witch hunts”) of the early 1950s, which themselves mirrored postwar purges in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, though of course the outcome in America had been much milder. Political figures like Rudolf Slánský and László Rajk were branded Titoist “spies” when they dared resist Stalin’s clenching grip and then were rushed through mock trials and summarily executed.

In the U.S. the purge had been bloodless. Well, almost. The “atom spies,” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were killed—an appalling and unwarranted fate, to be sure, but one the defendants consciously chose, when plea-bargains were available. Even so the scent of blood had hung in the air. But not in the Hiss trials. There was much posturing, along with naked displays of opportunism, during the congressional hearings, but the trials were models of restraint. Even Hiss’s sentence was surpassingly mild: five years for perjury in a minimum-security prison in Pennsylvania. He was released sixteen months ahead of schedule, a better man for the experience by his own account, and he lived to the age of 92. The very ordinariness of this outcome—and Hiss’s continued presence as a hero-victim of the left—felt right for the story I wanted to tell. It suggested that the case had been absorbed into the larger narrative of cold-war America.

But there were complications. For one, there was strong evidence that Hiss, unlike Slánský and Rajk, really had been a spy (though I was prepared to conclude otherwise, once I began my own in-depth examination of the case). This didn’t bother me terribly much. What, exactly, did guilt mean in the first years of the cold war? Besides, a guilty man is often more interesting than an innocent one. There was also the suggestive arc of Hiss’s public life, the familiar tale of a rapid upward climb— triumph at Johns Hopkins University, then at Harvard Law, secretary to Supreme Court giant Oliver Wendell Holmes, State Department mandarin, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at age 42—followed by a terrible fall. And his private life was rich in misery and shame. He had grown up in Baltimore in conditions of shabby gentility, his family well established but in decline. There were two brutal suicides (Hiss’s father and sister) plus alcoholism (in the Prohibition period, when liquor could kill). Hiss, the survivor, had borne this suffering stoically, but the wounds were deep. Though a gentle man, he now and then revealed his contempt for the bluestockings among whom he had been reared, the “horrible old women of Baltimore.” More telling, at the peak of the Moscow trials he had observed, admiringly, of Stalin, “he plays for keeps.” His most impressive trait, the one outward clue to the Bolshevik within, was his discipline. It had seen him through much.

Yet this same discipline made Hiss, finally, uninteresting, as was glaringly evident during the HUAC hearings. One could understand why he tenaciously maintained his innocence and wriggled out, insofar as he could, from under the mounting evidence. What rankled was his refusal to bring even a hint of imagination to his role. In the tensest moments of the hearings—moments that came as close as any such ritualized event ever can to offering authentic revelation—Hiss refused, time and again, to declare himself, to say who he was and what he really stood for. Instead, retreating behind the boyish grin and well-tailored suits, he took refuge in hedged lawyerly answers, in hair-splitting qualifications, and murky evasions. He was a “flat” rather than “round” character, whose single idea of how to meet the signal crisis in his life was to pose as a Gilbert and Sullivan parody of the civil servant, in almost comical defiance of the truth, for it was well known that Hiss had belonged to the most radical faction of the New Deal in its most experimental phase, when it had included burgeoning leftists enrolled in Communist “study groups” or “cells.” So common was this knowledge that when Hiss was girding for his first HUAC appearance, John Foster Dulles, his sponsor at the Carnegie Endowment and the most conservative of men (later Secretary of State under President Eisenhower), counseled Hiss to admit he’d flirted with radicalism in his youth, like so many others, but had since outgrown it. Hiss, rejecting this advice, instead feigned wide-eyed innocence, testifying not only that he had not been a Communist but, absurdly—with no trace of irony— that he’d not known any Communists. This was not simply the overstatement of a “guilty” man. It was a reverse instance of the abject confessions made by Bolsheviks who had wilted before Stalin a decade before. As they had owned up to crimes they had never dreamed of, so Hiss prostrated himself before his inquisitors, falsifying his past and disguising his actual beliefs. It was impossible not to see in this performance the careerism that had served him so well in his “other” life.

If there was a British equivalent to Hiss it was the Cambridge spies. Like him they were at once audacious and craven, and their radicalism, like his, was bound up with the resentments and antagonisms not of the proletariat but of the social-climbing middle class. The parallels were clear enough to one of the Cambridge Five, Donald Maclean, who reportedly confessed to Cyril Connolly, “I am the English Hiss.” Orwell, again, had grasped this phenomenon at its root. “It was only after the Soviet regime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it,” he had written in the mid 1940s. And, he was certain, they were impelled by a “secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.” The romance of the proletariat, in other words, faded before ambitions fed by the private history of hidden injuries and accumulated abasements. And it is no less true today: The intellectual left still nurtures the dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the lash.

But if Hiss disappointed, his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, did not. To reread transcripts of the hearings and the trials—as well as contemporary reportage, including Alistair Cooke’s tour de force, A Generation on Trial—is to be startled by the almost mesmeric force Chambers exerted in his role of reluctant informer. This was partly because, in addition to being the prosecution’s chief, and on key matters, its sole witness, Chambers was also, in the language of the day, a “self-confessed Communist,” a courier for the Soviet spy network who still seemed morally trapped within the nimbus of his crimes. That such a man existed in the flesh and, what was more, had come tumbling into view from the gilded pinnacle of the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, was itself a remarkable fact at a time when the home-grown “Communist menace” still consisted, in the public mind, of immigrant Jews or shadowy figures like the Comintern official Gerhart Eisler, who had sneaked out of the country, aboard a liner headed for Poland, while awaiting trial in New York. Whittaker Chambers was one of the few American Communists his countrymen had laid eyes on, and a curious specimen he was, with his risibly WASPY name, the toad-like somnolence of his physical being, the cadaverous-looking dark suit too long in the sleeves, the wry half-smile, verging at times on a smirk, hinting at arcane, hideous truths available to him alone.

Strange that such a man had been a Communist spy, stranger still that he was an “old-stock” American and also an intellectual—indeed much more of one in the traditional humanistic sense than Hiss. A gifted litera­ry man and largely self-taught linguist, Chambers had been a published poet in his twenties, had translated Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel from the German and mastered French sufficiently well to have been commissioned to translate the last volume of Proust. When FBI interrogators showed him the final report they had written after grilling him for many months, Chambers had scrawled on the last of its many pages the concluding line of The Inferno (E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle). “He spoke Gipsy!” his long-time friend Meyer Schapiro, the great art historian, told me in 1990, the astonishment still fresh.

Not that this earned Chambers much respect. It is almost impossible to convey the robustness of Chambers-hatred when I began writing this book, nearly thirty years after his death and forty years after the Hiss verdict. Though few remembered the details of the great case, many still had a vivid picture of Chambers, the turncoat and snitch. They blamed him for the rise of Richard Nixon, who as a thirty-five-year-old “freshman” congressman ingeniously stage-managed the HUAC hearings, and also of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose first carnal bleats—“I have here in my hand a list of 205,” etc — came fifteen days after Hiss’s ­sentencing in the winter of 1950.

I had doubts about Whittaker Chambers, too. I was aware of him chiefly because of my longstanding interest in the intellectual world of the 1930s-50s. Many of the period’s best writers had known him, but few had anything good to say about him. Saul Bellow once wittily remarked that Chambers had done more public harm as the culture editor of Time than as the accuser of Alger Hiss—a judgment colored, no doubt, by Chambers’s having rather hilariously dismissed him one or two days into a film reviewing stint at Time magazine in 1943 when Bellow was a postulant freelancer, recommended for the job by their common friend James Agee. (In later years Bellow often related this incident, with retrospective delight, and a version of it appears, in veiled form, in his novel The Victim.)
Chambers’s relationship with another major figure, Lionel Trilling, was more complicated and ambiguous. The two had a history dating back many years, beginning with their days together at Columbia University in the 1920s when both were undergraduate contributors to the campus literary magazine. Chambers was the more mature writer (as Trilling readily conceded; the mentor they shared, the poet Mark Van Doren, agreed). But he also burned with extra-literary hungers. He was, Trilling later recalled, “the first person I ever knew whose commitment to radical politics was meant to be definitive of his whole moral being, the controlling element of his existence.” And there was a shocking physical emblem of his Otherness, his gruesomely decayed teeth (not fixed till he got to Time; they would provide a source of absurdist byplay during the Hiss confrontation). “That desolated mouth was the perfect insigne of Chambers’s moral authority,” Trilling wrote. “It annihilated the hygienic American present—only a serf could have such a mouth, or some student in a visored cap who sat in his Moscow garret and thought of nothing save the moment when he would toss the fatal canister into the barouche of the Grand Duke.”

The two reconnected in the 1930s when Chambers, after some years in the “open” Communist Party, joined its conspiratorial underground, and was doing industrial espionage, while Trilling, safely nestled in the outer orbit of fellow-travelers, observed Chambers’s revolutionary escapades with mingled amusement and awe. The Middle of the Journey (1947), Trilling’s penetrating novel about the 1930s Left, includes a character modeled on Chambers— a Communist defector shunned in New York intellectual circles by his former acquaintances when he reemerges from the Soviet underground, precisely as Chambers had been shunned when he quit the Party in 1938. A decade later, when the Hiss case went to trial, one of Hiss’s lawyers, scouring literary Manhattan for witnesses who might impugn Chambers’s character, approached Trilling but was sent away with the words, “Whittaker Chambers is a man of honor.” In his last years Trilling seemed embarrassed by this remark and studiously put distance between himself and Chambers, explaining that, yes, he had known Chambers for many years, and yes, he believed he had told the truth about Hiss, but Trilling and Chambers, of course, had not ever been “friends.” In fact, the two had been close enough for Chambers to sound out Trilling’s wife, Diana, herself a formidable writer and critic, for “secret work” in 1933. “I knew that I was not going to do what he asked of me,” Diana Trilling later wrote. “Yet I was enormously flattered that he thought me capable of such an assignment and I was ashamed to refuse him. . . . I felt greatly complimented.”

Here then was the truth about the intellectuals and Chambers. They admired him even as they recoiled from him. They were engagé; he was thoroughly enrolled in the revolution—and preparing for the moment when he would be summoned forth to play a historic role, the role, as it happened, of witness, or scourge. It was one for which he was superbly cast, with his gravid air of fatalism, of persecution and guilt, of tormented secrecy and penitential disclosure. Even so the charges he made against Hiss (and others) came forth reluctantly. And, more remarkable still, he perjured himself repeatedly on Hiss’s behalf, until Hiss, in a ghastly miscalculation, dared him to produce evidence that would substantiate his charges.

That Chambers’s disclosures were truthful we now know with certainty, confirmed as they were by documents released from Soviet and American intelligence archives in the 1990s, cited in this book. And very few now seriously argue that Chambers’s testimony was inaccurate in any meaningful way.

Today Chambers compels new interest, because of his second historic role, as a principal founder of modern American conservatism. In fact there were hints of it in his Time period, for example in his historical fable, “The Ghosts on the Roof,” published in March 1945, a month after the Yalta summit. At the time the Big Three accord was almost universally praised, and an enfeebled Roosevelt (weeks away from death) had gone before Congress to summarize all that had been won. But the clear victor, plainly, was Stalin, still a wartime ally and a hero to many. In Chambers’s analysis, whimsically put in the mouths of the murdered royal “ghosts” of the 1917 revolution, Stalin was the latest and most audacious of Russian czars, “greater than Rurik! greater than Peter! For Peter conquered only in the name of a limited class. But Stalin embodies the international social revolution. That is the mighty new device of power politics which he has developed for blowing up other countries from within.”

Chambers the Cassandra could be heard also at key moments in the Hiss case—most memorably when he and Hiss were at last brought together publicly, and Chambers was asked (by Nixon) about rumors that his accusations arose from some obscure personal animus (involving, it was speculated, both mental illness and homosexuality). Rather than attack his attackers, Chambers accepted the burden of moral guilt and recast it in the rhetoric of high sacrifice: “The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we all are fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of historic jeopardy in which this nation now stands, so help me God I could not do otherwise.”

It was classic Chambers down to the echo of Martin Luther (“ich kann nicht anders“), fraught with suppressed melodrama. In one sense he was not an intellectual at all. He was not a systematic thinker, in contrast with his friend James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist reborn as right-wing sage whose analysis of modern bureaucracy, The Managerial Revolution, was a source text for Orwell, and whose aggressive “rollback” doctrine provided the theoretical basis for today’s preemptive “war on terror.” What Chambers had was imagination. No one ever spun cold war poetry as he did, reams of it, first in Time and then in his memoir, Witness. He was the first great technician of the new era’s magnificent cant. At the time very few saw this. Rather, they noticed the cant, but not the magnificence, partly because Chambers’s tone was distinctly old-fashioned. Though steeped in the Modernists, he was untouched by them. His models were St. Augustine, Victor Hugo, above all Dostoevsky. And his preferred contemporaries were the ideologues-philosophes Koestler (a reciprocal admirer), Malraux (ditto), and Camus. When I began serious work on this book and sent letters to writers who might have known him, the most telling reply came from Czeslaw Milosz, who as it happened, had not met Chambers. Still, he wrote, “I have always felt great sympathy for him and thought about his tragic life. He suffered much . . . and was excluded from the circle of people worthy of having their hands shaken.” The only full acknowledgment Chambers received in his lifetime came in the spring of 1959, two years before his death. In the summer he traveled to Europe at the urging of Koestler, who arranged for him to meet Manès Sperber, the great Galician novelist (and ex-Communist) and introduced him to Margarete Buber-Neumann, the daughter-in-law of Martin Buber and friend of Milena Jesenská, beloved of Kafka (the two women had been together at the Nazi death camp in Ravensbrück). “So there we sat and talked,” Chambers wrote in a letter to a friend. “Then, we realized that, of our particular breed, the old activists, we are almost the only survivors.” It is fitting that of all Chambers’s English contemporaries it should have been Rebecca West, herself driven by ideological furies, who deemed Witness, published in 1952, one of the great modern autobiographies, “so just and so massive in its resuscitation of the past.”

Written in the immediate aftermath of the Hiss case at the urging of James Agee, Witness is indeed a towering memoir, but it is more urgently a spiritual manifesto and a call to moral arms. Chambers had completed the arc of disenchantment—his last shreds of patience with the left destroyed by the Hiss case—and now stood defiantly on the right. He was all for America now, but betrayed himself in his prose, which as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. noted in a review, exuded “an un-American . . . or at least un-Anglo-Saxon intensity.” This did not lessen its impact on postwar conservatism—among the movement’s writers but also among its political figures, keenly responsive to Chambers’s distillations of large ideas into quotable oratory and to his oddly sonorous invocations of the apocalypse. The Second World War, he wrote, “simplified the balance of forces in the world by reducing them to two.” This was more or less what most Americans, including American intellectuals, believed in 1952. But Chambers typically went further, embracing a Manichean dualism, though even this had its Marxist angle. As a practiced revolutionary he knew—as did Lenin and Trotsky, for all their fealty to “historical materialism”— that political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.

American conservatives, in their prolonged moment of ascendancy, which looks now to be ending, excelled at the politics of stark polarizing choice, beginning with the presidential election in 1968 of Alger Hiss’s prosecutor, Richard Nixon, who in the years following the case remained Chambers’s friend and in some sense his disciple. It was Nixon who shattered the “consensus” politics that had prevailed during the first twenty-odd years of the cold war and contrived a strategy of divisiveness in which the “silent majority” of God-fearing, law-abiding citizens seized the whip from the unbelieving elite—the people who (in Nixon’s view, not entirely wrong) had never forgiven him for exposing Hiss. Another Chambers disciple, Ronald Reagan, posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom (the nation’s highest civilian honor) and more than once startled aides by reciting passages of Witness from memory. Its tonalities are audible in the scripts Reagan wrote for his popular radio addresses in the 1970s, when he was mounting his run at the presidency, and also in his notorious formulation “the evil empire,” derived from Chambers’s description of Communism as “the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.”

The epithet “evil empire” sent shudders through much of the civilized world when Reagan first uttered it in 1983. But he was speaking in terms the Soviets themselves understood; he gave voice to the binary theology that joined the two great powers in their elaborate ­death-struggle. Schlesinger, no admirer of Reagan, writing in 1985, pointed out that the Soviets too saw “the enemy as unchanging and unchangeable, a permanently evil empire . . . Each regime, reading its adversary ideologi­cally rather than historically, deduces motive from imputed essence and attributes purpose, premeditation and plan where less besotted analysis would raise a hand for improvisation, accident, chance, ignorance, negligence and even sheer stupidity . . . Moreover, ideology, if pursued to the end, excludes coexistence. How can we compromise with evil without losing our immortal soul? Ideology summons the true believer to a jihad, a crusade of extermination against the infidel.”

The danger too was in overestimating the adversary. In the 1980s, when Chambersian absolutism was very much in vogue, the official view of the Reagan White House was that the USSR was not only “permanently evil” but indestructible, growing in ambition and in charismatic might even as the evidence oppositely pointed to a dysfunctional econo­my, a political spoils system rotten with corruption, republics seething with ethnic hatreds, satellite countries in rebellion. But when the collapse came the Manichean belief that America had singly “won” the cold war seemed vindicated. Our theology had triumphed. Even so forceful a thinker as Francis Fukuyama, updating the dialectic, though along Hegelian rather than Marxian lines, credited the triumph to “the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately remake the material world in its image.” Since then Fukuyama has acknowledged he and his fellow neoconservatives were wrong, with terrible consequences. For the fiction persuaded them to inaugurate a new cold war, even though no suitable adversary, and no empire at all, exists for America to struggle against.

Chambers, unburdened by intellectual discipline, also came to re­cognize the folly of the dualism he had espoused so vividly. He was in fact among the first on the right to interpret the death of Stalin, in 1953, and the rise of Khrushchev, as signaling a new phase in the “twilight struggle.” In yet another of his volte-faces, the most unexpected of all, Chambers refashioned himself into a liberal in his last years. He became a defender of civil liberties (including Hiss’s when he was denied a passport) and of the Keynesian policies promoted by John Kenneth Galbraith. He ardently opposed the arms race, which struck him as an exercise in madness. And he came to see that the theology of Americanism was empty. Nations must scrub themselves before they seek to cleanse the souls of their enemies. “It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization,” he wrote his friend William F. Buckley Jr., the young intellectual leader of the nascent postwar conservatism movement, in 1954. “It is already a wreck from within.
That is why we can hope to do little more now than to snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flower pot 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 . . . that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”

Meanwhile, the Manichean Chambers remains a towering presence on the right. In July 2001, the Bush White House, eager to polish its ideological credentials, paid homage to Chambers by holding an event in commemoration of his hundredth birthday. The speakers included William Buckley and Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist best known today for his subsequent role in the Valerie Plame affair, which led to the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s top assistant I. Lewis Libby. The president did not attend, but two of his speech writers, Michael Gerson and David Frum, did, a fact that resonated some months later when, following al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, Gerson and Frum composed the phrase “axis of evil,” ushering in the new counter-jihad.

By then it was plain that “the war on terror” would be fought in precisely the terms Chambers had spelled out in his bleakest phase, the lonely period following the Hiss case; his heirs had settled on an immovably absolutist course. Chambers had furnished the text for this too, in Witness: “In this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed. It is our fate to live upon that turning point in history.”

Substitute “Islamo-fascist” for “Communist” and it is distressingly clear how little has changed. The worldview Whittaker Chambers outgrew is, alas, the one that guides us today. It is a punishing irony, and one can imagine all too easily how he would have greeted it: with the sly half-smile of one who knows better.

Sam Tanenhaus
New York, November 2006