Features February 1997
Whittaker Chambers: the judgment of history
On Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus
No one who has, even once, lived close to the making of history can ever again suppose that it is made the way the history books tell it. With rare exceptions, such books are like photographs. They catch a surface image. Often as not, they distort it. The secret forces working behind and below the historical surface they seldom catch.
—Whittaker Chambers, Witness , 1952
You have not come back from hell with empty hands.
—André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers, 1952
Nearly half a century has passed since the fateful day in January 1950 when a jury in a Federal court in New York City found Alger Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury. That verdict effectively confirmed the charge brought by Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, his former comrade in a Soviet espionage apparatus in...
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