Fellow-Traveling with the Lost Boys of Long Island (Part 1)
Waiting for the Man with Whittaker Chambers
I am just old and square enough for Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers to have occupied a tiny but persistent place in my mental landscape from some time late in my childhood.1 I remember the Hiss perjury and espionage case being re-litigated in the newspapers and magazines after the end of the Cold War. I had no strong or well-formed opinions on the matter, but to the best of my recollection, I had the impression that Hiss, the State Department luminary, was probably guilty of something, and at the same time that Chambers, the ex-Communist informer, was an unsavory sort of snitch and of course Nixon was irredeemably bad.
The story came up here and there over the years, and I must have learned of Chambers’ almost totemic status on the political right. But I didn’t give him much thought until the Know Your Enemy guys interviewed his biographer Sam Tanenhaus earlier this year. The story he told was not of a plaster saint or of a an ignoble rat, but of a profoundly melancholy and awkward figure, whose turn on the stage of U.S. history happened unwillingly and with very unhappy personal consequences.
Sam and Matt, the KYE hosts, are pretty intellectually generous to their ideological foes by the standards of our time, but I can’t remember them ever liking a conservative figure as they seemed to have liked Chambers. So I got a copy of the book and subjected myself to the full scale of the surprise it contained. Part doomed Steinbeck protagonist, part Freudian case study, Chambers bounced between his Long Island hometown of Lynbrook and Manhattan, with detours to Washington road crews, New Orleans dock work, and post-World War I Europe. He put in a few busy but academically desultory semesters at Columbia before giving up on college, enduring the suicide of his beloved brother, and drifting into the young Communist Party, where he could put his work ethic and gift for obvious prose to work for the cause of humanity. The rest is very weird history.
Tanenhaus writes a compelling and empathetic portrait of an honorable man of tender moral impulses whose defining flaw was weakness.2 He appears mostly to have wished to be used by stronger, less scrupulous, more serious men, and in the end that was the only thing he truly succeeded at. First it was the Communist Party, which he joined out of a deep psychological impulse that he aimed at the legitimately terrible injustices of his society. The Party then used him not for a glorious campaign of world liberation but for the vicious factional fighting within the USSR and, eventually, the geopolitical imperatives of Stalin’s post-revolutionary regime.3 Then it was the new faith of anti-Communism. He embraced it out of an understandable revulsion at what he had seen and done, but its political leaders turned his sincere self-reproach toward their longstanding goals of rolling back the New Deal, stalling the growth of union power, and frustrating the movement toward civil rights for Black Americans.4 It was a good stroke of luck for Chambers that he was remembered by National Review founder William F. Buckley, a much younger man who combined a great deal of money and a generous nature with the ethical and intellectual depth of a debate-team captain. Together, they helped establish the rhetorical vices of the New Right: more fluent than learned and more sonorous than profound, requiring a mastery of its own clichés but never more than an apprenticeship with the world’s facts.5 Chambers stepped away from his own rescuers after a few years, noting the doctrinaire rigidity of the new venue and its disdain for accommodation with the world as it is. Shortly before he died, he re-enrolled in college and was planning to catch up on what he had missed while chasing history. One can only feel sympathy for a person who, with better circumstances and better judgment, might have been remembered—or at least decorously forgotten—as something other than a traitor twice over.
But he was, implausibly enough, remembered, and sixty years after his death and a quarter-century after his definitive biography, he lives on as a cautionary tale for anyone who experiences enough recognition in his story to read to its end. There is a terrible danger in projecting one’s own internal struggles into the world. Both as a Communist and as an anti-Communist, Chambers seems to have been incurably susceptible to the pathetic fallacy, imagining that fundamentally grubby geopolitical contests were cosmic struggles over good and evil. Neither revolution nor reaction contains any deep mystery; they just are what they look like, people killing for power and profit. Chambers, and those who swam in his wake, tended to obfuscate the Western side of the Cold War as representing “Christianity” or “freedom,” two terms that never had more than a rhetorical relationship to the actual stakes. When our guys killed nuns or put journalists in jail, it was fine because it was the other team’s nuns and journalists. Like epicycles fastened onto the orbits of the Ptolemaic solar system to account for the appearance of planetary retrograde motion, “freedom” could be used to mean the exact opposite in Mississippi or Guatemala or Hebron if that’s what we needed it to mean. We even invented a distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” in order to clarify which massacres were necessary and which were symptomatic of something bad. Chambers was right about the self-duping of America’s liberal intelligentsia, first about Stalin and then about the presence of espionage in the executive branch. Chambers revealed that elite’s endemic (and enduring) credulity in the face of resumés and manners like those of the poised Hiss (and the disdainful contrasts drawn between him and the undistinguished Chambers in the liberal media then and after still rankles in Tanenhaus’s account). But that was the only thing Chambers was right about, and it just made him into a different kind of dupe.6 He was fortunate to have died too soon to have seen his former magazine’s response to the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
And that was the deeper danger of outsourcing one’s moral responsibility to “history” and its tougher, greater agents: that it leads to tolerating, or even endorsing, heinous crimes in the name of some kind of necessity. We’ve been in the midst of a nightmarish lesson in this very process, since October 7, as both the most unhinged advocates of the Palestinian cause and then the most unequivocal supporters of the Israeli state have defined the category of “non-combatant” out of existence and authorized violence without limit or end. Charity obliges us to assume, as one would of the 1920s Communists buffeted about by the rise and fall of factions and the shifting of party lines, that they know better, and perhaps away from the heat of the moment they would even say as much. But this makes their failure all the more dreadful. It is the terrible liberation that comes with dissolving your very humanity in the acid bath of causes, nations, or party lines. If you manage to salvage anything of yourself in time, the process of healing can only come with great pain. History even pursues its would-be agents after their deaths. When the National Review Institute honored a Brexiteer and a straw plaintiff in an anti-union court case with its “Whittaker Chambers Award,” the descendants of Chambers wrote that Whittaker would not have approved and demanded that they remove his name from the award. Sixty years gone, he was still better than his handlers.
This is probably due to reading my parents’ copy of Lillian Hellman’s memoir Scoundrel Time. Hellman’s account has apparently been criticized but anyway I’ve forgotten almost everything about it except one of the best author photos of all time.
It seems clear to Tanenhaus that Chambers, remarkably, impeached his own initial testimonies for the sake of protecting Hiss from the consequences of Hiss’s espionage. And it’s not the point of the book but Tanenhaus does give us one of the more thoughtful and respectful portrayals of Richard Nixon I’ve read.
A running joke in the history of U.S. and U.K. espionage for the Soviet Union is that the Communist handlers were always suspicious of the moles because the moles didn’t work for money and the handlers couldn’t believe that anyone would work for the USSR out of purely idealistic motives.
One recurring element in the history of civil rights after World War II is how often opponents avoided talking about race per se and focused instead on desegregation and civil rights activism as instruments of Communist subversion.
Tanenhaus is said to be working on a biography of Buckley, and I imagine if he finishes it, it will be very good. But Buckley’s writing was barely quoted, or even really mentioned, in his own obituaries.
It came out too soon to include Chambers’ Witness (though it references the Hiss trials), but Isaac Deutscher’s critique of the writings of ex-Communists got them dead to rights. The ex-Communist, he writes, takes up the defense of capitalism with “the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard for truth, and the intense hatred with which Stalinism has imbued him. He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed.”