Book review and Analysis: Whittaker Chambers “Witness”



Book review and Analysis: Whittaker Chambers “Witness”

It is inauspicious that the departed is so sincere and unhumorous, differently they could be capable to relish the huge sarcasm of the eminent perspective carried by Whittaker Chambers in the justly pantheon of the twentieth century champions. I mean think of it just for a moment, Whittaker, who passed one-half of his lifetime as an epicene Communist undercover agent, was as well a guiding light of "TIME" and the "National Review", an acquaintance of Richard M. Nixon and Buckley, was granted a posthumous medallion of liberty by President Reagan and caused several conservatives' end-of-century listings, both for this medal and for his personal act upon. That has a reasonably interesting resume by anybody's measures.

Whittaker would be an epic anatomy to the justly even if he had acted nothing else but to charge Alger Hiss of being a Communist undercover agent. This activity, so factious that it even recalls through our government nowadays, assisted to delineate the Cold warfare time period, impelling people to opt positions amongst anti-Communists, on the one incline and communists, communist well-wishers and companions, and Anti-Anti-Communists on the other, and successively inuring the lines amongst the inclines as the country steered into an era of elongated ethnical civil warfare, from which we have eased not genuinely came forth.

But Whittaker didn't just aggress one-person. With his publication "Witness" he announced warfare on Communism and the USSR and explicated in no unsure conditions merely what the battle was about, what was at risk, the techniques that the other incline were employing, and the sincerity of aim which would be postulated to overcome them, and at the same time, he assured a life history which for some reason contended to connect almost all of the compositions of modernism in one gloriously messy narrative of personal abjection and despair, abided by political and spiritual salvation and redemption. And to acme it all off, not only does the narrative has all of the components of a thriller and a court play, the writer only manages to compose magnificently.

Whittaker begins the book out with a foreword in the manner of a letter to his kids which attempts to explicate why the publication is essential and why their father acquired such ill fame in the 1st berth. It is worth mentioning a largish chunk:

In the year 1952, when the his composition was brought out, we were just 7 years moved out from the second world war, in which F. D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill had confederate the West to the USSR in the battle versus Nazism. The eminent help which he furnished in this publication, in his news media for TIME magazine like the inventive Ghosts on the Roof (1945), and in the Hiss Case, was, along with Churchill in his Fulton, MO address of 1946, announcing "an iron curtain has come down across the celibate", to drive home the recognition that the warfare versus Communism, although "Cold," was even as practically a "twilight battle" as the warfare versus national socialism had been. For the following 4 decades, the West, fundamentally the U.S.A., would engage in this warfare with assorted degrees of decision and fecklessness, and would sooner or later win it, cheers, suitably, to President Reagan, a close modern-day of Whittaker, who had been revolutionized by him, as meditated therein medallion of liberty.

It acquired a decade for Whittaker's' charges to be brought ...