Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers Case: Recent Books Fuels Revisionist History

Whittaker Chambers famously shared with his family, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and readers of Witness that he had effectively traded himself from the winning to the losing side in defecting from communism.

To congressmen in 1948 and readers in 1952, he offered no immediate explanation for why he believed this. Possibly the context of the times rendered such an explanation superfluous. By the mid-20th century, the Soviets possessed the atomic bomb, Mao Zedong suddenly controlled mainland China, and about a dozen European countries not in the communist sphere prior to World War II found themselves behind an Iron Curtain shortly after it.

About the Author

Daniel J. Flynn

Daniel J. Flynn, the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, is an American Spectator senior editor, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and YouTuber @RightWingWilderness.

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Whittaker Chambers famously shared with his family, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and readers of Witness that he had effectively traded himself from the winning to the losing side in defecting from communism.

To congressmen in 1948 and readers in 1952, he offered no immediate explanation for why he believed this. Possibly the context of the times rendered such an explanation superfluous. By the mid-20th century, the Soviets possessed the atomic bomb, Mao Zedong suddenly controlled mainland China, and about a dozen European countries not in the communist sphere prior to World War II found themselves behind an Iron Curtain shortly after it.