Witness

Few, who have a firm opinion on the Hiss case will have difficulty in arriving at a critical decision about Whittaker Chambers' Witness. If they feel Hiss is innocent, they will consider the book hogwash. If they feel Hiss is guilty they will hail the book as a testament of faith, a saga of heroism, a magnificent tragedy, a seering political analysis, and a prophetic warning.

Anyone who has doubts about the Hiss case will have doubts about Witness, because after reading 799 pages of Chambers' exceptionally clear, if occasionally frilly, prose, he will inevitably ask: "This is interesting, but is it true?"

Deciding whether or not the author is creditable is the first judgement Witness requires. It is by no means the only one. Even assuming that Chambers' description of the personnel and operations of the Communist underground "apparatus" in the United States during the 20's and 30's is unimpeachable, there is still much in Witness that is unacceptable. Witness is first rate as a spy thriller and autobiography; it is second rate, at best, as political thought and philosophy.

Chambers deserted the Communist Party, partly because his gentle nature could not stomach Communism's inhumanity in practice (it was Communism's humanity in theory that had originally attracted him to the Party), and mostly because he found God. Because he found God, the author comes to the startling conclusion that the Western world, in a fearful state of crisis, must choose between "irreconcilable opposites--God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism." By that reasoning, thinking along Jeffersonian lines, which would involve faith in Man, Mind, and Freedom, would be impossible. And yet anybody knows that it is not impossible. Chambers errs in his assumption that Communism is the logical conclusion of 18th century faith in man. Communism does not build up man, rather it sucks him into a movement where man can lose himself, where he ceases to count--but has a place.

The author's analysis of the peril of the Western world is similarly extreme. "It still did not know," he writes, "or even want to know, two facts that it must know to survive: the meaning of Communism, the meaning of that new breed of man, the Communist." It would seem, however, from what appears in the daily newspapers, that the Western public possesses all the wariness it needs about Communism and that what it needs to know infinitely more urgently, if it is to survive, is the meaning of its own values rather than the meaning of values it has learned to reject almost by reflex.

Chambers, because of his onetime close and highly emotional association with Communism, sees the "Red menace" in the United States wholly out of proportion. "The terrible meaning of the Washington apparatus," he claims, "is that, even in the United States, that stage of the revolution of our times has been reached, 'that decisive hour," which Karl Marx acutely forecast 100 years ago: when 'a small section of the ruling class joins the revolutionary class.'" Yet when did the apparatus Chambers describes function?--during the Great Depression when a sojurn in the Communist Party became almost part of the regular political upbringing of bright young men. At no time does Chambers indicate this "terrible" apparatus got its hands on any important secrets.

This same lack of perspective occasionally results in passages that are magnificent in their display of conceit and paranoia. For example, describing his flight from the Communist Party in 1938, he writes, "I therefore decided to try first of all to smash the secret apparatus by myself." His fear of the violence the Party would commit against his person for his desertion not only led him to write at night with a pistol by his hand but ultimately allowed him to write in Witness: "We traveled lightly and I drove as fast as possible. I knew that the Party had undergrounds in the South. I knew that it had members in the most unexpected places (filling stations and tourist camps worried me most)."

All this extremism is scarcely surprising in view of what Chambers has to say about his origins, which include: a brother's suicide, an irresponsible father, an alcoholic grandfather, and a mad grandmother all in the context of a family which lived in a world of illusory self-esteem.

A leitmotif that plays repeatedly throughout the book is Chambers anger and distress that all "the best people" heaped muck on him and sided with Hiss. The author wastes no opportunity to demonstrate the presence of the socially elite in the Communist camp. He frequently singles out Harvard which he appears to regard as an exclusive sanctuary for the rich and well born.

Acute followers of the Hiss trials claim that on several occasions in Witness, Chambers' story has changed from what it was in the courtroom. But then about the only aspect of Witness that is not likely to be argued is that it is exciting, provoking, and intensely readable. RUDOLPH KASS