[In the following essay, McGurn addresses the repercussions of the Hiss-Chambers case, particularly on the conservative movement in the United States.]

Twenty-three years after his death, thirty-two years after the publication of Witness, and thirty-six years after he first appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the name Whittaker Chambers still provokes. On the one side line up the stout-hearted partisans of Alger Hiss. To these people, whose resolute faith in the innocence of Mr. Hiss puts to shame that of the American bishops in divine Providence, Chambers is the black villain. He is the man who ruined everything and, in the process, bequeathed to us Richard Nixon. To the other side, which includes the current occupant of the White House, Chambers is reverenced as a founding father of conservatism in a country borne of the Enlightenment. In a nation that, as philosopher William Barrett has put it, “cannot grasp the passion of an idea,” this was no small feat. When on March 26, 1984, President Reagan awarded Chambers a posthumous Medal of Freedom—America's highest civilian honor—he acknowledged a personal respect at the same time he formally recognized the public debt to this sadly misunderstood man. For in the midst of a deceptive calm, this fat and disheveled little Quaker had issued from his Maryland farm what remains an eloquent and searing indictment of our curious century.

“I was a witness.” With these four words, Whittaker Chambers summoned the attention of a dying and still uncomprehending civilization. Witness is the flesh made word: under the harsh glare of television floodlamps, in the darker and deeper recesses of his own mind, and amid the prurient smiles of his inquisitors, Chambers breathed the fullness of life into a dusty legal term. The book's pages consequently touch upon all elements of the human condition—petty sinfulness, humor, heroism, treachery, grace—all molded with a delicate literary sensitivity into a narrative that questions this existence. In its whole, it is not unlike an epic poem.

The facts—or, I should say, outline—of this story are by now stale. On August 3, 1948, Chambers, a senior editor at Time and an admitted ex-Communist agent, reluctantly agreed to tell the House Committee on Un-American Activities what he knew about the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. Among those he named was Assistant Secretary of State Alger Hiss, who later challenged Chambers to make his accusation away from the privileged hearing room, out where they would be subject to libel claims. A few weeks later Chambers did just that on a segment of Meet the Press, and, after an embarrassing delay (embarrassing for his friends and supporters, that is), Hiss finally filed suit. It was at this point that Chambers produced sixty-five pages of stolen government documents and the spools of microfilm immortalized as the “pumpkin papers.” Primarily on this evidence Secretary Hiss was convicted nearly two years later for perjury.

Such is the bare-bones story of the great Hiss-Chambers case; as plots go, somewhat commonplace. Yet some three decades later it is a story that continues to be read and whose ultimate truth, if denied, nonetheless still rises to assert its claims on the human mind. It continues to do so in great part because of that whiff of the transcendental. As Chambers wrote, “Men do not ask to live, they only ask for a reason to live.” Whether it be of a Saint Paul exhorting skeptical Greeks in the Athenian market, a Hermann Göring refusing to recant even at Nuremburg, or a Buddhist monk immolating himself in the streets of Saigon, there is the insistent suggestion of something larger than the base facts. In this case, matters were complicated by the witness's frank assessment that he was joining the losing side, his refusal to indulge in the usual balms and consolations even the most courageous of us often find necessary.

When a man wets his finger to the winds and then rushes to catch up with the march of history, the world well understands. But when a man willingly steps out of this march to cast his lot with the vanquished, there is a sort of madness. This is the path Chambers freely chose, and indeed much of the world did find the life acts of this queer little man rather wide of the mark. But if there is irony in a bohemian ex-Communist's charging a very paradigm of Ivy League respectability with treason, time has allowed an even stranger twist: the failure of legions of educated men and women to accept the obvious: Alger Hiss was guilty. Books have been written, articles published, talk-shows recorded, all insisting the contrary, but not one scrap of evidence has been produced to support these claims; such evidence as has been produced confirms the original verdict. Yet the voices remain shrill.

This of course is to be expected in an Age of Reason, a time of so many facts and so little truth. One has only to think of the plodding, gray New York Times—“the paper of record,” as it is drilled into us—with its armies of editors, reporters, and columnists grimly piling up fact after fact but remaining obstinately impervious to any meaning in the human spectacles they so earnestly record. More than a century ago Newman wrote an entire book about the human mind's special affinity for the Truth; a more relevant book today would address the mind's peculiar capacity to refuse it. Life has been reduced to an intellectual formality: when the clash between reality and ideology comes, reality is made to yield.

That Mr. Hiss continues to declare his innocence even after these many years and a spell in the clink is not surprising, since if he was a Communist that is exactly what he ought to be doing. Such protestations in fact make him a good deal more admirable as a character than if he really were innocent. And that many continue to believe these protestations is not surprising, either, though it involves a long walk through the theater of the absurd: “a man named George Crosley,” “forgery by typewriter,” “the missing car,” and sundry other implausibilities. People who believe these things believe them because they want to believe them and because they have the uneasy (and quite correct) suspicion that if Chambers was right about Alger Hiss, he was right about the other thing.

“The other thing,” of course, is God, the central focus of Witness and, in more understated fashion, his other writings. Looking into the steaming cauldron of twentieth-century thought, this ex-Communist found that it all boiled down to one question: God or Man? As Chambers saw it, Communism was not so much an outside threat as a manifestation of the larger problem of materialism. If the West really believed, as a good number of its leaders apparently did then and still do today, that all it had to offer the world was physical prosperity, then to that degree it had already accepted the underlying premises of the Marxists. To that same degree libertarians, socialists, liberals, and not a few conservatives stood indicted. This was the full witness of Chambers, and many non-Communists saw very clearly that to accept this Quaker's testimony meant that the goals to which they had devoted their lives were misguided, partial causes at best. The Left saw this immediately, but slowly it dawned on some parts of the Right as well.

No doubt Chambers stiffened the resistance against him by the unequivocal line he took, virtually forcing people to choose. The modern mind simply recoils from the overtly spiritual. Even someone who has no disagreement with Chambers here (myself included) can find the constant references to God and faith discomfiting at times. Like others of the age, I had sought to accept Chambers's writings on purely rational grounds, effectively circumscribing his testimony to the parameters of a cheap trial. In much the same way we try to read Solzhenitsyn apart from his Christianity, a Procrustean attempt if ever there was one. In both examples it can be done, but the heart is lost in the process and we are left clutching nothing more than yesterday's yellowed news pages.

Modern critics of Whittaker Chambers, especially those of an ahistorical bent, tend either to lump him in with Senator Joseph McCarthy (whom Chambers did not appreciate) or to make him into a right-wing zealot, eager for the martyr's glory. In both cases the view derives from a common error of abstraction: reading Chambers they confuse his analyses (of Communism, for example) for his choice of tactics. His loathing of sentimentality, together with his experience in the Stalinist underground—as a spy and not as a theoretician—gave him a deep respect for the practical. If there were any saint Chambers would have admired, it would be Thomas More, who sought every possible way to accommodate his king and went to the gallows only when it was inevitable.

This is the politics of maneuver, the very phrasing of which shows how far we have come from considering it the art of the possible. It does seem that Chambers put too much emphasis on the problems of technology (accepting too uncritically the impersonal materialist thesis?), and perhaps his view of the struggle concentrated too much on the extremes. But in the area of agenda, he revealed himself to be a poker player. As he explained:

Escapism is laudable, perhaps the only truly honorable course for humane men—but only for them. Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up basic principles. And of course that results in a dance along a precipice. Many will drop over, and, always, the cliff dancers will hear the screaming curses of those who fall, or be numbed by the sullen silence of those, nobler souls perhaps, who will not join the dance.

The revolution is always betrayed in the end.

In this sense Ronald Reagan stands as the finest fruit of Chambers's thought. Certainly he has made no bones about the influence Witness had on him. And in Reagan's autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, Chambers is the only conservative quoted. The affinity is real. Reagan, like Chambers, does not shun the harshest words about the evil of Communism; that much everyone recognizes. Over and above this, however, they share the concomitant recognition that the evil must be practically confronted. This element, illustrated in Reagan's record (e.g., Poland, China, the KAL 007 incident, etc.) has in fact irked many of Reagan's conservative supporters, with varying degrees of legitimacy. The important point is that there is no inherent contradiction between recognizing Communism as totally evil and dealing with Communist leaders: the former is an intellectual assessment and the latter is a practical judgment.

Nevertheless, this “dance along the precipice,” as a form of Realpolitik, is not without its external pressures. For one thing, like Mr. Nixon's détente (which, as presented in his latest book, The Real Peace, is merely common sense), a purely pragmatic policy may not be inspiring enough to hold water: this is what makes the supplemental rhetoric a necessity. In other words, Chambers and Reagan are complements—one argues theoretically, the other works practically. Without the latter nothing could be done; without the former we would not know what to do. Quite naturally, there will always be some tension between the two.

The irony of it all is that these subtle distinctions between the world of the mind and the world that is derive from the man who in the leftist canon crudely divided the world into “bad” Communists and “good” non-Communists. Today we take the noble Communist so much for granted that we overlook Chambers's primary role in giving that to us. The entire thrust of Witness is that Alger Hiss was just such a Communist, that he was noble in all but his premises. In Cold Friday and his other writings (for Time and in William F. Buckley's Odyssey of a Friend) Chambers is obsessed with the complexities and contradictions of human existence. No one who has read his “Letter to My Children” at the beginning of Witness could ever accept the notion that Chambers divided the world into black-hats and white-hats.

Nevertheless, the world does not well suffer its prophets alive; it prefers them confined to the faded pages of aged tracts where they can do no mischief. Nobody knew this better than Alger Hiss. Whatever his grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory, of the question of nationalism and the worker, of philosophy in general, Hiss knows the ways of the world, and in 1948 he knew exactly what a comfortable nation did and did not want to hear. It was evident from the first moment he appeared before the committee: rattling off his long list of references; feigning outrage at the very suggestion of impropriety; later, suddenly, recalling “a man named George Crosley”; and using all the other grand theatrics that characterized his public testimony. Often forgotten is that until the last moment there was an even chance that Chambers would be indicted instead of Hiss.

All this Chambers bore, though it twice moved him to despair. He bore the bitter attacks, the besmirching of his character, and the attempts to discredit him by the very civilization he was endeavoring to salvage. Most of us, I should think, are inclined to see the spectacle in this way: Chambers moved from wrong to right, from bad to good, from man to God; why, of course he was bound to triumph. It is a seductive view, complete with a comfortable Disney ending. It is also wrong. Aside from the question of whether Chambers triumphed, there is the deeper problem, that he himself realized from the start. What if, he asked himself, it were God's will that he be destroyed? “I did not suppose that those words, ‘All will be well with you,’ implied my happiness, for I never supposed that what man means by well-being and what well-being means to God could possibly be the same. They might be as different as joy and suffering.”

Such is not the tone of a triumphalist conservative; it is rather the pessimism of the healthy believer. “Reality,” he once wrote, “is the only freedom,” and he might have added that the belief in the reality of God keeps man from investing his faith in something else, keeps him sane, out of mischief. No one is more unreasonable than the rationalist, condemned to play the right game with the wrong rules, turning the world topsy-turvy. An age that puts its trust in the efficacy of Brut after-shave and Listerine mouthwash at the same time it intellectually claims to reject miracles is something to behold. Men who believe in God and have their doubts about man are curiously labeled romantics, while those who dismiss God and put their faith in the perfectibility of man make the wild claim to the word skeptic. Whose face does the madman see in the mirror?

Much has happened but little has changed in the more than thirty years since Hiss's conviction. In purely personal terms, Fortuna has had her usual fun: Richard Nixon, a key committee member, resigned the presidency in disgrace; Chambers himself died of a heart attack little more than a decade later, only Alger Hiss has done well for himself, lionized and feted on the campus circuit, even restored triumphantly to the New York bar a few years ago. And where Chambers had difficulty getting people to believe that a man could be a Communist for noble reasons, today a youthful Communist Party membership is the political equivalent of a log-cabin birth. Yet where Chambers had stared down into the harsh truths of our day, he has been proved right: can anyone say the West today is stronger?

In the letter to his children, Chambers called Witness “a terrible book,” terrible for what it reveals about men and the world they have fashioned. Peering into the vague and disparate mass loosely considered to be Western civilization, he saw in its fits and starts the death throes of a weak-willed society. “In our age,” he would later write, “hope must be grasped by the throat.” The man who could write such words is not going to produce pleasant books. It is enough that he should write true ones. That Ronald Reagan deemed it important enough formally to recognize this long after the battle is one of the happier consequences of Chambers's labor.