[In the following laudatory review of Notes from the Underground, Buckley describes the friendship between Chambers and journalist Ralph de Toledano, asserting that the letters “beckon to sensitive readers who care about great feats of literary expression.”]

Readers drawn to this book [Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960] will come in looking for yet more from the numinous pen of Whittaker Chambers, and they will find his special idiom abundantly there. But they will have also absorbing material from Ralph de Toledano. “You are essentially a poet,” Chambers wrote him in 1958. “Hence I suspect that, like me, your grasp of pretty damned near all is intuitive.” Chambers was ever so gently discouraging Toledano from publishing a book on atomic espionage, which advice Toledano—a poet, but also a working journalist—did not take, suffering the displeasure of a press critical of any enterprise that focused on domestic subversion (has any book on clandestine domestic Communist activity—ever—been welcomed by the establishment press?). The friendship had taken root when Toledano covered the Chambers-Hiss trial for Newsweek. From it, much that is wonderful issued. Mutual support and affection, and a correspondence lovely and heuristic. Here are the letters from Chambers—the master—but also from Toledano, the young, learned poet/activist who in these letters records many things, among them the early disillusionments, personal and professional, of an arrested career.

Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Chambers, published earlier this year, did magisterial things. The reader inquisitive about one of the great exotic sensibilities of the postwar world is left thoroughly satisfied by the narrative of Chambers's life, and confident—the successful biographer's supreme gift—that he now knows something about the character of the subject. Yet Tanenhaus suffered one handicap, the inexplicable refusal of Chambers's son, who controls copyrighted material, to permit direct quotations from unpublished Chambers writing. The result was a little more desiccation than Tanenhaus would otherwise have settled for in his grand work on the extraordinary life and drama of Whittaker Chambers. Ralph de Toledano produces this volume athwart the son's disapproval, but with an undeniable dispensation: it was the explicit wish of Chambers that, some day, the correspondence should be released; which now it is, almost fifty years after the young press editor of Newsweek befriended the dislocated senior editor of Time, being tried for slander and libel—the plaintiff, Alger Hiss. It was a melodramatic encounter with historical consequences, a trial as charged with drama as those of Galileo and Dreyfus. Chambers lived to write his great gift to the West, Witness; and to write such letters as these which, with Toledano's, are the poetry of friendship.

Toledano had become a close friend also of the other principal in the trial, Richard Nixon, the guiding hand of the congressional committee that had activated the confrontation. After his book on the trial (Seeds of Treason, a gripping best-seller written with Victor Lasky) Toledano wrote several other books, among them an admiring biography of Nixon. Toledano was now feeling (in the late Fifties) the increasingly mordant pressure of politically hostile colleagues at Newsweek (under Malcolm Muir). There are sentences and paragraphs in his correspondence with Chambers, the senior writer who had been dropped by Time, about professional insecurity. Toledano was soon transferred from New York to Washington, where Newsweek could more readily exploit its correspondent's closeness to the Vice President. A wonderful bit relates to Nixon's desperate and hilarious attempt to appease the persistent interrogations of hostile reporters. President Eisenhower had had his heart attack and now other illnesses. What loomed was the quite awful probability that Nixon would soon occupy the White House, either because Ike was dead or because Nixon would succeed him after the election of 1960. In a moment of high exasperation with an insatiable press, Nixon at one point instructs Toledano to compose appropriate answers to requests for written comment. You know my thinking, Nixon tells Toledano, and I trust you to compose my thoughts in your own language. An economical arrangement for Nixon, and valuable job insurance for Toledano, whom Nixon served as a professional lifebelt.

Then the balloon burst. In an annotation, Toledano explains what brought on the angry letter from Chambers. “Newsweek asked Nixon, whose election to the Presidency seemed set, if he would mind if I were fired. Nixon's answer was: ‘I'm not the editor of Newsweek.’” Toledano passes on this betrayal to Chambers, who, hugely discreet whenever writing about the Vice President, replies with an allegory. Nixon is the Lion. The rest (Chambers included) are the mice. At this kind of thing Chambers was inimitable.

The world is rather sensibly ordered, I think, among lions and mice. But I have little respect for, I question the wisdom of, the Lion who seems not to grasp the workings of that order—its necessary compensating interactions. Or who forgets what mice meant to him in the inglorious days, and may mean again. A Lion may also look at a mouse, in that rather astigmatically majestic way lions have of surveying the universe. … [But then the services of the mice can prove critical.] If he doesn't know this, I think the Lion has forgotten that even summer days are interspersed with, and sometimes terminated by, the night of the hunter. Then the Lion may roar: “Mouse! Mouse!” but finds he is lord only of the closing jungle, or a veldt whose false peace dissembles the nets no mouse will gnaw him free of, while the treacherous forms circle softly in.

The mice finally did Nixon in, though that came 16 years later, 13 years after Chambers died.

It is a very beautiful book, in which the despair of Chambers is set down again and again, but it does not cloy. Chambers illuminated the horror of the revolutionary movement he had once espoused, but his impatience was never greater than with those who failed to understand the singular reach and appeal of the Communist vision to which he had succumbed. In one letter to Toledano he reproduces a paragraph that had been removed from Witness as “too strong,” in the opinion of his editor. With the kind permission of the literary editor of NR, I reproduce it above, together with a second take on the same theme from this book: perfervidly eloquent statements of what it was that Communism meant for so many, in its early days back when Chambers enlisted in its behalf. That passage, and so many others by Chambers and by Toledano, beckon to sensitive readers who care about great feats of literary expression, and will welcome gratefully this volume.