The Neglected Witness

Earlier this week at National Review Online, John Fund reported on conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt’s clash with Karen Finney. Challenged on her knowledge (or lack thereof) of Cold War history, Finney—who currently is a host for MSNBC, but whose hats have included head of communications for the Democratic National Committee and press secretary for Hillary Clinton—refused to acknowledge that Alger Hiss was a communist spy.

The refusal of many on the Left to finger Hiss for what he was is a well-documented fact—almost as copiously documented as the fact of Hiss’s guilt.

I suggested a couple reasons for these refusals in my response to John over on NRO’s Corner (shameless plug), but I want to reiterate the last point, which is not my own. It comes from the man chiefly responsible for unmasking Hiss, the unassuming Whittaker Chambers, who chronicled the ordeal of his break with communism in his wonderful autobiography Witness. Chambers says this about the countless people he knew who were unwilling to accept the clear evidence before them:

Thus men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism, in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves, except that it was just the Communists who were likely to be most forthright and most dedicated in the common cause. . . . Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made.

I touched on this in my post last week, but Chambers, of course, says it—and everything else—much more eloquently.

There is an abiding and unmistakable kinship between Communism, socialism, and modern liberalism—unmistakable, at least, to those with eyes to see. Chambers was one of those, and his insights, painfully won, remain potent.

Witness is a tome—my copy weighs in at 800 pages—but, like a great piece of poetry, every word is picked and placed just so. The result is not only one of the great historical documents of the twentieth century, and one of its great works of literature; it is a lovingly crafted testament to the great tragedies—and, perhaps more important, the intimate triumphs—of life in our age.

The refusal to accept the facts about Hiss is, by extension, to call Chambers a liar—which is, in the long run, the much greater wrong.