Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers Revisited

Alger Hiss (1950)


Whittaker Chambers

[From article]
Communism was in its ascendancy at the time, and Chambers ascended with it. As a writer and true believer, he sufficiently impressed his superiors that they asked him to go underground in Washington D.C. and organize a high level ring of federal bureaucrats working on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Prominent among those bureaucrats was Hiss. A Harvard Law graduate, Hiss would rise through the ranks to become a special assistant in the State Department, an adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, and one of the principal architects of the United Nations. After World War II, he was named president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
[. . .]
Chambers had chosen to change sides in the great ideological conflict of his age and of ours, a conflict he described as “Almighty Man vs Almighty God.” Stalin’s lethal, large-scale purges in the late 1930s helped open Chambers’ eyes.
Upon rejecting the “left’s vision of Man without God,” Chambers came to see Christianity as the one force powerful enough to resist communism.
[. . .]
Chambers felt obliged to let the Roosevelt administration know how thoroughly its ranks had been infested with high-level Soviet agents. He met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle and shared his information. Berle’s efforts to alert his superiors went nowhere, and Chambers retreated into anonymity for the next nine years.
In 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) came calling. Now settled in as senior editor of Time magazine, Chambers had little desire to expose his own past or to testify against his friend, but his conscience obliged him to do so. Hiss made the ordeal much harder by denying he ever knew Chambers. The media believed Hiss, and President Harry Truman promptly dismissed the case as a “red herring”
Indeed, so well esteemed was Hiss by the media and the liberal establishment that HCUA would have dropped the case altogether had not freshman Congressman Richard Nixon convinced his colleagues that Hiss was lying. For this breach of political etiquette, Nixon would not be forgiven.
[. . .]
Hiss would eventually be convicted of perjury -- the statute of limitations having expired on espionage -- and would serve nearly four years in a federal prison.
[. . .]
It was, not invariably, but in general, the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.
I came across this paragraph days after the media unloaded on Giuliani for daring to say the obvious about the Harvard Law grad in the White House, namely that he does not love America, at least under any useful definition of the word “love.” When Giuliani followed up, saying, “From the time he was nine years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist,” he was introducing evidence to people who had long since snapped their minds shut about Obama. Most, even in the media, had likely never even heard of Davis.
[. . .]
As to why our progressive betters respond as they do to the truth tellers in their midst, Chambers nailed that as well:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/what_whittaker_chambers_tells_us_about_the_age_of_obama.html

March 2, 2015
What Whittaker Chambers Tells Us about the Age of Obama
By Jack Cashill