Thirty years ago, Random House brought out—with more than a little reluctance—Whittaker Chambers’s memoir, Witness. The reluctance was hardly surprising; after all, Random House had at the time a spotlessly liberal reputation, one to which the publication of a book by Chambers could easily have done irreparable harm. Indeed, Bennett Cerf once admitted that upon being told by one of his editors that “Whittaker Chambers was downstairs and wanted to talk about a book . . . [my] first reaction was ‘Get him out of here.’ ” The editor in question managed to talk Cerf around, however, and Chambers wound up leaving behind two chapters for him to read. “They were superbly written,” Cerf later told an interviewer, and so he promptly found himself caught in a dilemma.
I didn’t know what to do. Since I consider myself a liberal, publishing Whittaker Chambers seemed shocking to me at first.
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