WHITTAKER CHAMBERS died 50 years ago at the age of 60. Much in the world has changed since then. What might he think about world affairs today, were he still alive?

Before commenting, he would catch up on history with books like Tony Judt‘s Postwar. Another would be Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands, which accounts for millions of deaths during Chambers’ most active years. During the same period covered in Bloodlands, he wrote his first major piece for The New Masses, entered and defected from the Soviet underground, and worked at TIME magazine. Always an historian, he would crave hindsight into his own times. Such books would also help explain the demise of Great Illegals he knew and occasionally admired, including Alexander Ulanovsky, Ignatz Reiss, and Walter Krivitsky.

Today’s map of the world might shock him. He would see no Soviet Bloc. Yet quickly he would find Vladimir Putin‘s Russia very familiar. He might revisit his TIME essay on Yalta, “The Ghosts on the Roof.” This time, he would add the Bolsheviks to the Romanovs, as they admire Putin. Or he might renew efforts on his follow-on to Witness, a book called The Third Rome (never completed, though portions appear in the posthumous Cold Friday). To do so, he would have to face the rise of China. How ironic that this strategic nation–once overseen by Alger Hiss in the State Department’s Far Eastern Affairs section–has survived as the last great bastion of Communism. More ironic, China has turned to capitalism in the past few decades and come to rival America itself.

He wrote in Witness: “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.” Today, with Soviet Communism dead and Chinese Communism alive but capitalist, would he conclude that the Chinese have also chosen the losing side?

Our Information Age would probably have limited interest for him–mostly in greater access to books. (Both his children remain avowed Luddites and live in quiet, remote places.) He might enjoy watching Ninotchka again on the small screen, with its many layered meanings that started in his own home: his wife’s family came from Old Russia. However, he would studiously avoid Facebook and Twitter as only so much navel-gazing. (He may have sang like a bird when naming names before HUAC, but he probably could not bring himself to “tweet.”) Besides, to whom would he talk? All the “young men” who knew him in his later years are now dead, too: Henry Grunwald from TIME, Ralph de Toledano from Newsweek, Bill Buckley from National Review. (Veterans like Jeffrey Hart and Garry Wills came after him at NR.)

Changes in the world beyond the West might overwhelm him. So many new nations; so many realignments! Yet today’s map might also remind him of August 1914. No surprise would come from the decline of American empire (the “losing side.”)

Like any euro-centrist of his day, however, catching up with the “Rest of World” might escape him. For instance, his National Review article “Soviet Strategy in the Middle East” (October 26, 1957) speaks only of Anti-Colonialism (in regional terms of “Arab Nationalism”). What would he make of the Islamic aberration that has become “the basis” (a literal translation of al-Qa’ida) of strong anti-Western cultural reaction in this new millennium?

He would soon come to know that American spies since the Hiss and Rosenberg cases have diminished to mere mercenaries (another sign of decline?). Therefore, the return of non-mercenary spies outside the West would very likely catch his eye. Today’s suicide bombers would recall earlier models: Felix Djerjinsky, Eugen Levine, and Egor Sazonov. Of Sazonov, he had written that to protest the mistreatment of fellow prisoners, he had “drenched himself in kerosene, set himself on fire, and burned himself to death” (Witness, p. 6). Why would people of today blow themselves up to harm others, as Sazonov, Stepan Balmashov, Ivan Kalyayev, and other Terrorist Brigade members had, a century ago in Old Russia?

As a grizzled veteran of an earlier form of terror, no doubt he would worry: Have Americans learned nothing about the motives for treason? If we have not understood the experience of the McCarthy Era and the Cold War, how can we possibly hope to understand challenges from the “Rest of World”–like al-Qa’ida? Yet, what can we hope to understand of challenges like al-Qa’ida when so many of today’s “experts” lazily compare for us philosophically mismatched apples and oranges–and avoid a recount of history from “Arab eyes” (to use a phrase from writer Amin Maalouf).

At this point, old glooms might rise up again. Despite publishing the confessional Witness (1952), many Americans, he had felt before, have not understood first why he has served as a Communist spy and then why he defected. Today, he would find many of his (few) admirers appreciate him except for his one-time conversion to Christianity. Most refuse to explore earlier influences, despite the nexus traced in Witness back to the Christian Pacifist movement of the early 20th Century. Nor do many seem to understand his tactical move as an anti-Communist in aligning with Conservatives: they do not see this as political opportunism.

Partly, his old-school Marxist discipline silenced him during the hey-day of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Partly, his early death helped opportunists in the rising Conservative and Neo-Conservative moments to cast about post mortem for intellectual saints like Chambers and Lionel Trilling.

We have missed the chance to hear him grapple with Daniel Ellsberg‘s Pentagon Papers or today’s USA Patriot Act–speaking as a defector from Joseph Stalin‘s totalitarian policies. (Here you will find no speculation: their circumstances are too specific and too complicated for even the simplest surmise.)

In closing, lurking in Whittaker Chambers’ mind on this day, 50 years after his death, would likely be one of the last major political events of his own time: the farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower on January 17, 1961:

As we peer into society’s future, we–you and I, and our government–must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. (text-PDF/audio/video)

The farmer, the intellectual, the revolutionary, the spiritualist in him all agreed wholeheartedly back then–and would agree now. Just as great doubts would continue to gnaw at his mind about the losing side.

David Chambers is a writer and publisher living in Reston, Virginia. He is the grandson of Whittaker Chambers.

WHILE THE TERM “Religious Right” is one of the most frequently used terms in the political lexicon, notably since the rise of what is usually referred to as the Evangelical Churches, the Political Left is alive and well and a strong crutch for the Democratic Party… During the first term of the Eisenhower administration, the role of American churches in politics became a major issue and helped precipitate the campaign to defame and censure Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Joseph Brown Matthews (pictured) was an important witness for McCarthy, testifying before Congressional committees and had the advantage of personal experience as an organizer for communist front organizations before World War II. He took pains to explain that naïve and busy people of good will — including many clergymen — were often duped into signing petitions and lending their names to what appeared as ostensibly good causes,  unaware that the leading personalities in these organizations were fronting for the Communist Party.

In June 1953, Matthews was appointed as McCarthy’s research director and in July published an article called “Reds in our Churches“ in the [then] conservative American Mercury magazine. In it, Matthews referred to the Protestant clergy as “The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States.” The result was a public outrage at Matthews as well as “his boss,” Senator McCarthy. Time Magazine led the charge against Matthews and what it called “this astounding and inherently uncheckable statement.”

Reds in Our Churches

His authorship of the controversial article “Reds in Our Churches “exposed sophisticated communist manipulation to promote religious dissension in the United States. McCarthy’s critics seized the opportunity to label his efforts as a “Crusade against all Protestant ministers,” a view that Matthew certainly had not intended.  In his Mercury article, he specifically pointed out that the great majority of all clergy in America were loyal but that a highly visible minority operating under the guise of “social justice” lent the support of the Religious Left to a variety of “liberal” causes. Exaggerated and inaccurate commentaries about his intentions were used to get many U.S. congressmen to lend support to censure of McCarthy as an extremist.

J. B. Matthews was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1894 and attended Asbury College. He became a Methodist missionary in Java after which he returned to the United States and studied in several different seminaries. He then joined the faculty of Scarritt, a Methodist training college in Nashville, Tennessee where he became the center of a “scandal” due to the fact that he had held an interracial party at his home where Whites and Negroes had danced together. He was a brilliant linguist, but as a missionary, his sympathy for Indonesian nationalists made him unpopular with the Dutch administration in the islands and the executives of his own mission. In spite of this background, which would certainly be labeled as “liberal” today, Matthews was pilloried in the press as “a McCarthyite” following his article in the Mercury.

After his tour of missionary work, Matthews settled in New York City where he became an “avowed Socialist” and the executive secretary of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He wrote that “The policy of a united front with Communism was the way to end the war,” and, due to the popularity of these views with the Roosevelt administration, he was chosen as the first head of the American League Against War and Fascism.

He later would label this organization and his own participation in it as “probably the most successful ‘front’ ever organized by the American Communists.” He wrote a book, Partners in Plunder, in which he attacked several of the mainline Protestant Churches — notably the Episcopal and Presbyterian denominations — as being in the pocket of millionaires J. Pierpont Morgan and Andrew Mellon respectively.

Matthews was regarded by many in the clergy at the end of World War II as the Communists’ No. 1 fellow traveler. A major change in his political outlook occurred soon afterward as a result of an industrial dispute and strike at Consumer’s Research, an organization where he had become a Director and Vice-President.  Employees of the firm went on strike, defying Matthews who had called upon them to reach a settlement. He became embittered, and convinced that the workers’ demands had been fomented by the Communist Party.  For Matthews, the workers’ grievances were a front and morally “they were mutineers.” He also was particularly aggrieved at what he regarded as the automatic “liberal” reactions of some of the same mainline churches he had previously attacked for being subservient to the very wealthy.  Matthews regarded himself as the victim of a Communist plot and went on to become the chief investigator for Martin Dies’ new House Committee on Un-American Activities.

If one wants to understand the censure motion against McCarthy in the Senate, much of it has to do with a backlash of influential politicians, predominantly belonging to the mainline Protestant churches, who were stung by what they perceived to be a wholly irresponsible and demagogic charge that these churches harbored potential traitors. White House operatives close to Eisenhower jumped on an opportunity to eliminate McCarthy for his embarrassing revelations about upper class appointees inherited from the previous Democratic administrations with dubious links to the USSR and the Communist Party that Eisenhower had seen fit to retain.

McCarthy, falsely accused by the Left of anti-Semitism

McCarthy, falsely accused by the Left of anti-Semitism, had taken the lead in demanding to know why the Voice of America had cancelled its Hebrew language broadcasts at precisely the time when anti-Semitism was at the top of Stalin’s agenda and the “doctor’s plot” in the USSR and Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia had pointed the finger at “subversive Jews” within the Communist bloc who had been charged with links to American imperialism….

It is necessary to take a brief detour into the increasingly leftward tilt of the Religious Left among mainline Protestant denominations (The Death of Protestant America by Joseph Botturn in FIRST THINGS, August/September, 2008), and the career of Senator Joe McCarthy to really understand the irrational behavior of so many American Jews, as part of the Religious Left, who court their enemies and spurn their friends and has passed on from one generation to the next since 1932.

Contrary to almost universal opinion among the so called “enlightened” supporters of the American Jewish Left, Senator McCarthy evinced no anti-Semitism whatsoever throughout his career. Their vilification of him is a classic example of “guilt by association,” the same charge ‘liberals’ continually hurl at detractors of Obama. Among Irish-American Catholics who were profoundly anti-Communist and therefore supporters of McCarthy and his role in the Army hearings, there were undoubtedly some anti-Semites incensed at what seemed to them as the preponderant presence of many Jews among Democrats and those who espoused a militant anti-anti-Communism. The American Jewish liberal establishment fell prey to this guilt by association and in 1954 the Conference of American Jewish Rabbis condemned McCarthy and “unanimously” called for him to be stripped of his committee chairmanship.

McCarthy’s close associates and advisers were Jewish — Roy Cohn, G. David Schine, Alfred Kohlberg and columnist George Sokolsky. McCarthy’s investigation aimed toward exposing communists and their sympathizers did not single out Jews. No anti-Semitic statement or act has ever been alleged to have been committed by Senator McCarthy. Much of the anti-McCarthy sentiment that resulted in his being censured by the Senate and President Eisenhower had to do with his revelation that among the most prominent subversives his research correctly uncovered, were a high percentage of major figures who were appointees of the Roosevelt and Truman administration and were arch-WASPS — with Ivy League educations and representing some of the most elite families at the top end of American society, including several notable Protestant clergy of the mainline churches.

McCarthy’s attack on Left-wing activists

Jews were not involved at all in this controversy but many had been upset at the sight of Jewish writers, film producers and directors who had also appeared before the House un-American Activities Committee and easily believed that McCarthy’s anti-Communism had run amuck and defamed American Jews as a group as well as the Protestant clergy. It is simply impossible for many liberal Jews today to accept that there was more than a grain of truth in McCarthy’s attack on Left-wing activists (in the same vein as the charges against Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger today) who hid behind their clerical collars, nor can many of these same Jews believe that there was considerable prejudice against McCarthy by refined, wealthy and polished Ivy League types in Congress and the White House — for his Catholicism, Irish-Midwestern background, frequent grandstanding, boorish behavior, and hard drinking….

The aftermath of the Matthews incident still casts a long shadow over American politics. The Religious Left today, as then, is so determined to support what it perceives as the pursuit of “social justice” that it has often lent support to those whom it automatically regards as the “oppressed and downtrodden” — whether illegal immigrants who defy the law and even pro-Jihadi Muslims anxious to win additional privileges and special considerations under the guise of tolerance.

Read the full article at Canada Free Press

by F.C. Etier

“Glenn Beck attacks Sandra Bullock over donations to Haiti and New Orleans…” Can you imagine the fallout from a headline like that?

A nationally popular activist/commentator attacking an acknowledged hero that recently won major awards would raise eyebrows in each of their camps — and stir up a mushroom cloud of controversy.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy delivered a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950 in which he attacked Secretary of Defense, author of the Marshall Plan, and eventual Noble Peace Prize recipient, George Catlett Marshall. McCarthy’s speech was published in book form in 1951 as America’s Retreat From Victory. The subtitle was The Story of George Catlett Marshall. It only seems logical that if you’re going after someone with the stature of a Sandra Bullock or a George C. Marshall, you better have your ducks in a row. Certainly the analogy with Beck and Bullock was fictitious, but McCarthy’s attack was not.

McCarthy’s speech revealed little known — and well documented — facts about the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Marshall’s Secret Past

According to McCarthy, a friend warned, “Don’t do it, McCarthy. Marshall has been built into such a great hero in the eyes of the people that you will destroy yourself politically if you lay hands on the laurels of this great man.” Did the senator throw caution to the winds? His reply, “The reason the world is in such a tragic state today is that too many politicians have been doing only that which they consider politically wise — only that which is safe for their own political fortunes.” McCarthy pressed ahead, encouraged by a 1943 article in the New York Times magazine by Sidney Shalett. Shalett quotes Marshall as having said, “No publicity will do me no harm, but some publicity will do me no good.” McCarthy says in the book/speech, “This perhaps is why Marshall stands alone among the wartime leaders in that he has never [as of June 1951] written his own memoirs or allowed anyone else to write his story for him.”

Thorough Research

Throughout America’s Retreat From Victory the reader will notice that McCarthy makes most of his more noteworthy (alarming/controversial) points by quoting other authors. Under the heading of “Source Material”, Appendix A lists more than two dozen bibliographical references from such authors as Winston Churchill, General Omar Bradley and General Claire Chennault….

Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune (later to become president of the White House Correspondent’s Association) published a story in the American Mercury titled, “The Tragedy of George Marshall.” According to Trohan’s story, in 1933, Marshall, a captain at the time, via an intercession of General Pershing, asked Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur if he could be “fast-tracked.” Marshall’s record lacked sufficient time with troops so he was put in charge of one of the Army’s finest regiments (the Eighth; Fort Screven, GA) to prove himself. In less than a year under Marshall’s command, the Eighth Regiment dropped to one of the worst in the army, making promotion impossible. Six years later, President Roosevelt placed George C. Marshall in command of the entire United States Army….

Consistently quoting credible sources and using documented research to make his points, McCarthy leads the reader through a series of events managed or strongly influenced by Marshall to assure the fall of Eastern Europe and China to Stalin and  the communists. The situation reached a terminal point in Tehran where Marshall and Stalin defeated a stubborn Churchill in what McCarthy describes as “the most significant decision of the war in Europe,” “…to concentrate on France and leave the whole of Eastern Europe to the Red armies.”

McCarthy chronicles Marshall’s efforts through the Yalta and Potsdam meetings and the post war “Marshall Plan” to diminish American influence.  McCarthy details a complicated and far-reaching conspiracy, naming names….  In the end, Marshall finished his career as Secretary of State, won a Nobel Peace Prize and died a hero.  McCarthy was censured by the U.S.Senate and died in Bethesda Hospital supposedly of liver complications from long-term alcoholism.  In the seventies, stories surfaced that the “power elite” had taken McCarthy to Bethesda to “get rid of him,” prompting his supporters to advise avoiding Bethesda.

Ironically, a 1997 report by liberal Senator Moynihan’s commission on government secrecy vindicated McCarthy’s claims of Communist infiltration.

Read the full article at F.C. Etier’s site

Read McCarthy’s book online