And the Whittaker Chambers masterpiece, Witness.

Excerpt from an Amazon review of Witness by T. Graczewski.

“Witness” makes the Red Scare of the early 1950s much more palpable and understandable for twenty-first century American readers. The conspiracy that Chambers details in “Witness” is stunning in its scope and audacious in its aims. Today, McCarthyism and HUAC are largely seen as stains in American history, embarrassing hysteria that recklessly and needlessly ruined hundreds of innocent lives. That may be true, but reading “Witness” will present that episode of American history from a fundamentally different perspective and under a far different light…

If Chambers’s testimony is to be believed – and there are no reasons not to, as far as the historical record shows – there really was a vast Communist conspiracy afoot to manipulate American foreign and domestic policy, a conspiracy that reached to the highest levels of multiple government agencies. Again, the charges Chambers makes and the evidence he advances to support it is jaw-dropping.

Nixon on Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss

It helps that Chambers is a writer of genius. “Witness” has been called one of the best-written and most important autobiographies of the twentieth century – and I can see why. At nearly 700 pages in length, it is neither a short nor breezy read, but the prose is elegant and the story is utterly captivating, a monumental piece of twentieth century non-fiction.”— Amazon Review

From Witness

“What Communist [in the Soviet Union] has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of the Lubianka, from all the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton. They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist State. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or flogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps.”— 1952

Strong language warning

Personal Note: I was present as a reporter / news director in the East Room when Chambers’ son accepted the Posthumous Medal of Freedom Award from Ronald Reagan on behalf of his father in 1984. I was actually there to interview Norman Vincent Peale a personal friend of the Station owner I worked at (WPUT / WRVH AM, NY). SH.