“Witness” was first published by Random House in 1952, at the height of the Cold War. A 50th anniversary edition was published with a new forward by renowned political author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008). Buckley met the author, Whittaker Chambers, two years after the publication of the book and employed Chambers in 1957 as a senior editor for his National Review magazine. While the book has been reprinted since then, the last reprint occurred in 2014 by Regnery. Interested readers can find it in many forms, everything from a first edition to an e-book.
Part autobiography and part commentary on the idiosyncrasies of communism, “Witness” primarily spans the years 1937 to 1949. Before the main text, Chambers included “A Letter to My Children,” largely warning them of the evils of communism. The title to the book’s first chapter is “Flight,” describing his escape from the ideology, which Chambers believed in for a time. The “Letter” is both poignant and harsh. And, as he states up front, although written to his children, it’s for adult readers as well.
In “Letter,” Chambers refers to “Witness” this way: “It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live. It is about what the world calls the Hiss-Chambers Case, or even more simply, the Hiss Case. It is about a spy case.”
He provides an overview of what the book is about: primarily a focus on a case against Alger Hiss, a government attorney who had once served in the Justice Department. In February 1945, Hiss even attended the famous Yalta Conference, where Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill met during the wind down of World War II. Chambers, who was working as a senior editor for Time magazine in 1948, was a well-publicized main witness in the espionage trial involving Hiss.
While Chambers begins his first chapter focusing on his flight from communism, the book also takes readers back to his childhood and how he came to join the communists. It is not until Chapter 11, after Chambers defected from and denounced the ideology, that he zeroes in on the Hiss case and the trial called by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In it, Chambers brought to light Hiss’s involvement in espionage and produced documents to prove it, resulting in Hiss being sentenced to five years in prison.
Through his postcommunist life, Chambers leans into a growing faith in God, writing in Chapter 11: “I prayed that, if it were God’s will, I might be spared that ordeal [of testifying].”
Further, Chambers ends his book with a chapter titled, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” with a return to focusing on his children, most specifically his son. “I want him to understand, when he lifts up his eyes, that against the range of space and cold his soul, and his soul along, is life for which, in the morning and the evening, he gives thanks to God to Whom it ties him.”
And, prior to these words he leaves his son and readers with a mandate regarding the fight between good, which he clearly conveys as freedom, and evil, which is undoubtedly communism: “Evil only can be fought.”
