[In the following review of Odyssey of a Friend, Niemeyer explores the enduring impact of the Hiss-Chambers case.]

Apart from the praiseworthiness of Henry Regnery's initiative, what is the meaning of re-publishing Whittaker Chambers' Witness a quarter of a century after the fact? One can probably dismiss as coincidence the simultaneous appearance of an exemplary piece of research, by Allen Weinstein, into the problem of Hiss's guilt. Other, similar efforts may still be in store, for we do feel a periodic urge to rehash this case.

Within the last hundred years, three long-drawn-out trials—those of Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Hiss—have brought into collision formidable political forces. There is a myth that legal verdicts can shape the historical course of nations. I doubt it. Dreyfus—sentenced, degraded, and deported—was eventually tried again, acquitted, and rehabilitated. It once seemed that this legal victory enabled the Left permanently to cripple the French Right. Later, however, Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned and executed, and Hiss imprisoned for perjury, but the Left emerged with its strength and convictions unscathed—in fact, enhanced. The Sacco and Vanzetti case, legally closed, remains morally and politically open. Hiss, after his prison term, was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar, and his innocence remains an article of faith to true progressive liberals. So we find that legal decisions do not move political mountains, at least not against the Left; one may leave the picking of fine legal points to the historians.

Leaving aside its account of the case as such, what has Witness now to say to the nation? Its message is not, I think, philosophical. The philosophical problem of Communism has been adequately vented for many years. If it is no longer on the agenda today, one cannot expect the re-publication of this book to beat new life into inert minds. I would submit, then, that the relevant contemporary context is the appearance of the Russian cultural heroes, led by Solzhenitsyn, fighting their way out “from under the rubble.” Against the light of their faithful and militant suffering, there appears in our past the silhouette of Whittaker Chambers.

Why had we not noticed him before in his true significance? The answer lies, partly, in the history of the case. Chambers, having broken with Communism and failed to take his fellow Communists along, finally attacked publicly the apparatus to which he had belonged. But after that fateful committee hearing of August 25, 1948, Hiss mounted a gigantic campaign to destroy his accuser. The hunter became the hunted. For years Chambers was subjected to slander, innuendo, defamation, to hints of insanity, alcoholism, perversion, instability; all so that the eventual sentencing of Hiss could appear as the tragic fall of a knight in shining armor, while the sinister villain escaped all formal punishment (though remaining under a permanent cloud). The liberals to this day hold that the jury got the wrong man; others accept the verdict while ignoring Chambers.

In a deeper sense, though, this country was unable to fathom the motives of either Hiss or Chambers. A man of Hiss's education, achievement, connections, and personal presence simply could not be a Communist, and, even if a Communist, never a traitor. On the other hand, a man of Chambers' checkered past—with his disheveled appearance and emotional temperament—could be anything: traitor, informer, villain, psychopath—a weirdo. Neither an educated man's adherence to Communism nor a Communist's defection from the “faith of a lifetime” was understandable to more than a select few.

There were other reasons as well. Hiss struck everyone as the epitome of the impeccable American college man. Chambers, by contrast, seemed somehow un-American. He spoke and read a number of foreign languages, among them fluent German, and even Romani, the Gypsy idiom. He was at home in history as Americans typically are not. Details of ancient Greece and Rome were living and real to him. He knew intimately the stories and characters of Russian revolutionaries, even those of the past. Beyond that, the whole of history, the concept of preordained destiny, preoccupied him constantly, unlike most Americans, who have never fed on Hegel. This side of Chambers' personality impressed even his fellow Communists so strongly that Hiss later showed genuine astonishment on learning that Chambers was indeed an American. Had Chambers not worked in the Communist underground and had he not been smeared beyond recognition by the Hiss forces, the history books might have described him in terms like those used of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.

In Chambers' case, there was also what one can only call an obscure beginning. And his perceptions of his early circumstances were shaped by a lively imagination, both moral and historical. He was wont to project concrete events and observations onto a large scale of metaphysical meaning. Thus, in the early Twenties, two experiences hit him hard. On a trip to Europe, he “found Germany in chaos, and partly occupied; northern France and parts of Belgium smashed to pieces.” It seemed to him that “a crisis had been reached in Western civilization which society was not able to solve by the usual means.” The second experience was the profound disruption of his family. “We were not a family. My father was not my father. My mother was not my mother.” He himself withdrew to the woods. The general estrangement finally drove his brother to a despairing suicide. “The malady of the life around me and the malady of the life of my family were different manifestations of the same malady—the disorder that overtakes societies and families when a world has lost its soul.” It was then that he cast his lot with the Communist Party and, to serve it more completely, left college.

The decision was not primarily intellectual. It was made on moral grounds, as was his later break with the Party. He once answered the question of what a Communist is by pointing to his three heroes: Dzherzinsky, who in a Czarist prison insisted on cleaning the other prisoners' latrines because he felt that it was the duty of those who had reached the highest stage of development to perform the lowliest tasks; Levine, who, when informed by a Bavarian court in 1919 that he was “under sentence of death,” replied: “We Communists are always under sentence of death”; and Sazonov, who was so deeply outraged by the flogging of prisoners in a Czarist prison camp that, in protest, he set himself on fire and burned to death. When Whittaker Chambers joined the Communists he opted, as he said, “against death and for life.” A strong faith ties Communists “by a secret oath … a simple conviction, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weakness of the body, and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, [that] it is necessary to change the world.” It is the “vision of Man without God.”

Morally, Whittaker Chambers never changed. What did change was his image of Communism. The “sublime vision,” the answer to the “world's crisis,” first appeared to be perfection; for, as Burke said, “criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination.” Moreover, Whittaker Chambers was not one to leave enthusiasm to the imagination. He threw himself, head and heart, into the practical service of this great moral vision. In this respect, Alger Hiss had the same character.

Through his connections with American and Russian Communists, Whittaker Chambers gradually discovered the ugly reality veiled by the “sublime vision.” A Communist girl told him, incredulously, of her pro-Soviet father's defection: “You will laugh at me—but you must not laugh at my father—one night—in Moscow—he heard screams.” Chambers said to himself: “Those are not the screams of a man in agony. Those are the screams of a soul in agony.” After many similar observations and reports, the awakening: “I did not know what had happened to me. I denied the very existence of a soul. But I said: ‘This is evil, absolute evil. Of this I am a part.’”

As the hold of his Communist faith slackened, he gradually came to see God. First in sudden wonder at his child's delicately designed ear. The awareness of design led him to the Designer. Then there was a sequence of events so improbably and unexpectedly fitted together that both he and his wife could only call them “providential.” And so: “In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral. If my story is worth telling, it is because I rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of life in our time—the revolutionary ending and the success ending. I chose a third ending. In so far as I am a true witness, it is because twice in my life I came, not alone, for I had my wife and children by the hand, to a dark tower, and, in a storm of the spirit, listened to that question that was both within and without me: Who, if I cried out, would hear me from among the orders of the angels? And because each time the question was answered.”

Here we must pause to say, in the face of the “memorable story,” a word of criticism—not to belittle Chambers but to account for the public's failure to recognize him for what he was. The book is called Witness. Chambers did bear witness before the New York Grand Jury. But it is his book that is meant by the title Witness. And in the book, Whittaker Chambers bears witness to himself. That does not convict him of falsehood, but it leaves inevitable flaws. At crucial moments of the story, the mood becomes melodramatic, the language even, at times, maudlin. At those moments the spell of truth recedes, and the reader wonders about the story's writer. The other point of criticism is that Chambers, like all ex-Communists, carried away a wound that never healed, like Ransom in That Hideous Strength. History remained for him always a hypostasis, something like a divine or demonic entity beating its dark batwings over the time of mankind. Thus he could say to his wife: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” Though he did become a devout and loving Christian, he never learned to live in hope.

That said, let us dwell, in justice, on the price he himself willingly paid through his suffering. The Hiss case is not primarily a drama of two personalities, but of clashing political forces, embodied in the United States and the Soviet Union. The clash occurred on American soil and within American institutions, and one is terrified on observing the Soviets' ability—without any military presence, in time of peace—to mobilize massive power by maneuvering into battle positions not merely their U.S. Party members, but large elements of the American press, the academy, and even the government. This overwhelming “hideous strength” wore down Chambers' endurance. Determined as he was to allow himself to be destroyed, the frightful moral and intellectual isolation eventually drove him to attempt that suicide which he had earlier contemplated but rejected. The attempt failed, not from inadequate preparation but from involuntary movements he made in his sleep. Having come face to face with death, he, like Dostoevsky, emerged with his faith and strength restored.

Whittaker Chambers describes the West as “having lost the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because ultimately it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil.” He adds: “This failure, I, too, shared with the world of which I was a part.” The same failure accounts for the widespread inability in the West to realize the force of demonic faith that drives the totalitarian movements, as well as the hellish agony of those who try to make their soul's escape from its claws. Solzhenitsyn and his friends have faces graven with the lines of deep suffering and eyes shining with new life. The German conspirators against Hitler paid with their lives after having given witness. Thank God that our country is not unrepresented in this noble company. While we look in sorrow on the long list of our losses of nerve and failures of wisdom in high places, we also have Whittaker Chambers, who bore his country's honor.