Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged1 that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir,

“Witness⁷ Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed Leftist herd co-dependence.³ Echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers⁴—whose allegations of Communist conspiracism have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables⁵—Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings⁶ March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly apoplectic,⁷ and equally unwarranted, condemnation, even before getting under way.⁸

David Mamet’s invocation of Witness, and the repeated hysterical,⁹ if groundless, objections to the second round of hearings by Rep.

Chambers was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia, and spent his childhood on the south shore of Long Island, in (then rural) Lynbrook.¹² Upon graduating high school, Chambers left home and worked as a construction laborer on the Washington, DC, rail system, before drifting to New Orleans, and then returning to attend Columbia University between 1920 and 1924,— Under the tutelage of Columbia English professor Mark Van Doren (before Van Doren became an internationally known literary critic and poet¹⁴), Chambers tried his hand at poetry, even completing a book of poems titled Defeat in the Village,— before realizing, “I never could write poetry good enough to be worth writing.”¹⁶ This apprenticeship, however, helped teach Chambers “the difficult, humbling, exacting art of writing,”¹⁷ and he would go on to become an exceptionally gifted writer of prose.

During late 1938, overwhelmed by the horrific actions of the Soviet Communist Party, in particular the Stalinist purges and forced starvation of Ukrainian peasants, and having rejected Communism’s militant atheism, Chambers left the Communist movement.²² The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a watershed event for Chambers, realizing that much of the confidential information about the United States that he had forwarded to the Soviet Union could now be passed to Germany.²³ Thus Chambers, now an ex-Communist apostate, decided to divulge his prior activities for the Communist underground to the federal government. Shortly thereafter, Chambers was able to meet with the head of security at the State Department, A. A. Berle. Although Chambers revealed most of his activities, he withheld the facts of espionage conducted by his cell, largely to protect others, including, notably, Alger Hiss.²⁴ Regardless, it was not until 1948—nine years later—that the information he provided to Berle was acted upon by the government. Chambers was subpoenaed at that time by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to corroborate the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley—the so-called blonde spy queen—who alleged that Soviet espionage was occurring within the US government.²⁵ Chambers corroborated Bentley's allegations, supplemented them with his own, and confronted Alger Hiss on the first day of his testimony²⁶ (eventually all twenty-one names that Chambers provided to HUAC were confirmed by subsequent Soviet archival research).²⁷ In 1950, Hiss was convicted for perjury after two federal trials.²⁸

A naturally gifted linguist, particularly fluent in German, over the years Whittaker Chambers translated into English Bambi, Dunant—The Story of the Red Cross and a number of children's books.²⁹ Chambers joined Time magazine in 1939, initially as a book reviewer, later as a writer and editor.³⁰ He wrote many of Time's cover stories during his tenure, including profiles of historian Arnold Toynbee, vocalist Marian Anderson, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Pope Pius XII.³¹ Chambers, based upon his experience as a Communist and his intuitive grasp of history, displayed a remarkably prescient understanding of the “Cold War” conflict as an editor and writer for Time's foreign news section. He also contributed seven brilliant essays to Life magazine’s 1947-1948 “History of Western Culture” series.³² Compelled to resign from Time during the tumultuous Hiss trials,³³ Chambers eventually became an editor and writer on the staff of National Review, from the latter part of 1957 to the middle of 1959.³⁴ Throughout most of his journalistic career, Chambers continued to operate a farm in Westminster, Maryland, maintaining a dairy herd, raising sheep and beef cattle, and producing various crops.³⁵

This essay will explore what can be gleaned from Chambers’s witness-martyrdom in the struggle against Communism, sacrificing himself “a little in advance to try to win for you that infinitesimal slightly better chance,”³⁶ and applied to the modern threat of resurgent Islamic totalitarianism.

From the time of Chambers’s break with the Communist Party in late 1938, till his death nearly twenty-three years later, Chambers was consumed by the West’s self-abnegation of its own institutions— rooted for two millennia in a belief in the Judeo- Christian God—and their threatened active destruction by the votaries of mass secular totalitarian movements, notably Fascism and Communism. His December 1947 Time magazine book review of Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason, a series of penetrating reports on the trials of British World War II traitors, opens with these observations:

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors—men who from faintheartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like fascism and communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

Modern man was challenged to choose between the traditions of a 2,000-year-old Christian civilization and the new totalitarian systems which, in the name of social progress, contended for the allegiance of man’s secular mind. The promise of the new ideas was as old as that serpentine whisper heard in the dawn of the Creation: “You shall become as gods”—for the first traitor was the first man.³⁷

The case of Dr. Alan Nunn May represented for Rebecca West the bottom of what Chambers characterizes as “a descent into the circles of a drab inferno.”³⁸ Dr. May, a lecturer on physics at the University of London, was a longstanding Communist Party member. Ostensibly volunteering to serve his country, he became the senior member of the British atomic bomb project’s nuclear physics division during World War II. May took nefarious advantage of this position by transferring to Russia samples of uranium 233 and enriched uranium 235.³⁹

Chambers’s review of The Meaning of Treason also compared the violent fanaticism of the twentieth century’s secular totalitarian systems adherents to the votaries of Islam. The modern totalitarians expressed “new ideas” which were “violently avowed,”⁴⁰ and “the hallmark of their advocates was a fanaticism unknown since the first flush of Islam.”⁴¹

Does Chambers’s passing comparison have doctrinal and historical validity, and does it comport with other serious modern assessments?