Witness is the true story of a simple communist living in America, recruited by the Soviet Government to join an underground “apparatus” that included Alger Hiss, an assistant to the Secretary of State of the United States.  After serving his godless masters faithfully for years, Chambers experienced an epiphany, made a harrowing escape and publicly accused Alger Hiss of treason.  A darling of the liberal elite, Alger Hiss, then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, denied the allegations.

Two trials followed, with Chambers providing compelling testimony against Hiss and their former apparatus.  With the liberal media, the elite establishment, Hiss’ powerful friends and a misinformed public against him, Chambers health and faith waned.  At his lowest point, he considered suicide, but his young son intervened and made him promise: “papa, papa, don’t ever go away.”  With renewed resolve and a strengthening faith in God, Whittaker Chambers stood for the truth and exposed the Communist infiltration of the United States Government.

Here is an excerpt from Witness:

I have sought, too, to report, more painfully, how out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century, which is unique in the history of men for two reasons. I t is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God.  And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form, so that the characteristic experience of the mind in this age is a political experience. At every point, religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men—those who reject and those who worship God—becomes irrepressible.  Those camps are not only outside, but also within nations.

The most conspicuously menacing form of that rejection is Communism.  But there are other forms of the same rejection, which in any case, Communism did not originate, but merely adopted and adapted.

Until 1937, I had been, in this respect, a typical modern man, living without God except for tremors of intuition.  In 1938, there seemed no possibility that I would not continue to live out my life as such a man.  Habit and self-interest both presumed it.  I had been for thirteen years a Communist; and in Communism could be read more clearly, with each passing year, the future of mankind, as, with each passing year, the free world shrank in power and faith, including faith in itself, and sank deeper into intellectual and moral chaos.  Yet, in 1938, I gave a different ending to that life.

In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral.  They give men the heart to suffer the ordeal of a life that perpetually rends them between its beauty and terror.  If my story is worth telling, it is because I rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of life in our time—the revolutionary ending and the success ending.  I chose a third ending.

I am only incidentally a witness to a weak man’s sins and misdeeds or even the crimes that are implicit in the practice of Communism.  In so far as I am a true witness, it is because twice in my life I came, not alone, for I had my wife and children by the hand, to a dark tower, and, in a storm of the spirit, listened to that question that was both within and without me: Who if I cried out, would hear me from among the orders of the angels? And because each time the question was answered.

The rest of this book is about what happened—translated into the raw, painful, ugly, crumpled, confused, tormented, pitiful acts of life—when I heard the first and second cry.

Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying his espionage activity and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.  He went to his grave in 1996 still professing his innocence, and the liberal elites in the media did their part to portray him as an innocent victim of Chamber’s lies.  After Hiss died, Peter Jennings of ABC News erroneously asserted that secret KGB files had confirmed that Hiss never worked for the Soviets.  In fact, just the opposite was true.  The Venona transcripts of secret KGB messages released in the mid-nineties (and ignored by the media) verified that Hiss had been a Soviet spy until at least 1945.

I recommend reading Witness.  Not just because Whittaker Chambers was a brilliant writer and compelling story teller, but because his story of the bitter battle between those who put their faith in God and those who put their faith in man is as relevant today as it has been since time began.  The same evil that threatened our freedom then, threatens it today, and the same godless elites that tried to destroy Whittaker Chambers for telling the truth, have convinced most of you that George W. Bush is a failure and that women like Sarah Palin aren't fit to lead.  We all need to be witnesses for the truth if our Constitution and the freedom that it guarantees are to survive.


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