Posted on 07/01/2013 6:04:30 PM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
We can start with the spoiler. At the end of his newly released and massive revised edition of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Allen Weinstein makes the following observation: "As for the conspiracy theories themselves, we may expect that newer and perhaps more ingenious defenses of [Alger] Hiss may emerge, if only because none of the theories raised during the past six decades has proved persuasive. There has yet to appear, however, from any source, a coherent body of evidence that seriously undermines the credibility of the evidence against Alger Hiss."
There will never be produced such a body of evidence, because Alger Hiss was guilty. The relevant questions today are what his guilt means. On that score, conservatives as well as liberals may have something to learn.
The story is famous and well known to some, but increasingly forgotten by too many Americans. On August 3, 1948, a Time magazine editor and former communist spy named Whittaker Chambers came to Washington, D.C. On that day Chambers testified that Alger Hiss, a former high ranking State Department official and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was a Communist and Soviet agent who had passed secrets to Moscow.
Hiss denied the charge and sued Chambers for libel. The resulting trials and media circus became a sensation in America. At the time and for decades afterwards, the left argued that Alger Hiss was innocent. However, in the last few decades documents released from KGB files have proven that Hiss was in fact a Soviet agent. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearbooks.com ...
Alcohol surely fueled some of his behavior.
“Most of his accusations were spot on.”
Do you want to include his repeated accusations against George Marshall in that list?
McCarthy didn’t develop new information, he used what was learned during the testimony of Chambers and Bentley. If he had stuck to the facts he would not have gotten himself into trouble.
Not one journalist mentioned that McCarthy was generally right, and there were in fact many commies in the government. That's how huge the influence lib "journalists" had even in those days. The Hollywood Ten (who are linked with McCarthy...even though he had nothing to do with them) are revered as saints even though they were mostly commie pigs under orders from Russia.
“I wonder how many at FR have read Whitaker Chamber’s ‘Witness’, one of the great books from the cold war?”
I have.
Standout passage for me: Alger Hiss, on his first day testifying before the House, saying the proceedings were taking longer than he thought, and that he needed to call THE HARVARD CLUB to say he would be late.
Oh, by any chance, did you go to HARVARD, Mr. Hiss?! You’re awesome!
How I loathe all things Harvard.
For example, Supreme Court Justice Kagan. She is the child of a family famous in NYC Communist circles. Her brother was chairman of the CPUSA. Hiss and the Rosenbergs are still saints.
I read it, and the Allan Weinstein book.
A few years ago I read the biography “Whittaker Chambers” by Sam Tanenhaus. Tanenhaus is listed as “writer at large” for the New York Times. I assume he is a liberal. But I thought his book was very objective and leaves no doubt that all of Chambers revelations were true. Tanenhaus won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.
He was a hero. Our government was riddled with Soviet agents, and nobody gave a damn.
He was the only one of a very few who stood up and put himself on the line. I don’t buy the liberal line that McCarthy did it for himself and only his own gain. He took on the powers at the time who all wanted to ignore it because it was inconvenient and impolitic.
It is a liberal smear, put forth by the same media that did a 24x7 effort for nearly four solid years without relief to discredit him.
As for Marshall, it depends on what you mean by a communist “dupe”. Marshall was an intelligent guy, and some of the things he advocated in both war and peace make me wonder why he proposed and supported them. To be kind, I would say Marshall was a liberal dupe.
I knew what you meant, though. It was a telling conversation.
.
Kagan and Sotomayor. We have had some bad characters on the court before, but those two will prove to be the worst, mark my words.
Heh, I don’t think so. I had it on my Freep page as well as my personal home page when his grandson contacted me. I immediately removed it from my Freep page, but as I said above, I had a hard time getting it off of my home page.
For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed. This quote has always seemed Churchillian to me, so evocative of his Finest Hour speech...)
"Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die–to bear witness–for its faith. . . . The communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world" That defines in a nutshell why communism (and liberalism) are evil.
I think I’ll read Witness when I fnish what I am currently reading. I am familiar with Chamber’s story, but it sounds like the book is great writing as well.
Agree about Witness.
A fascinating book about one man who stood up and faced down a enemy of Goliath proportions out to destroy him.
Whittaker Chambers exposed just the extent of the Soviet infiltration of DC in the the 1930s. By the time of the trials in 1949-50, the infiltration was much worse.
And it was real, and it was damaging to this country.
History has shown Chambers,Nixon and McCarthy—all hated by the Left—to have been right.
Reading this thread, I see I really need to read Witness.
The line so perfectly sums up some Liberals I interact with that it is incredible.
Yep, he knows the left from the inside...
There’s not going to be a revolution, and wishing for one is counterproductive. It’s going to be a tough slog. There is no magic pill.
Bump. That was the one book that was, politically speaking, the centerpiece of a great puzzle. It put everything together with continuity, at least for me it did. For the political junkies, it is indeed a must read.
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