"I Was the Witness"

When readers picked up their copies of the Saturday Evening Post this week, they hardly recognized the magazine. For the first time since 1899, the Post (circ. 3,998,158) had no picture on its cover. Instead, it carried an announcement of "One of the Great Books of Our Time: Whittaker Chambers' Own Story of the Hiss Case." The Post thought Chambers' Witness so important that it had paid $75,000 for serial rights to the book, due to be published in May and already a Book-of-the-Month Club choice. The Post, which calls its series "'I Was the Witness" will run ten installments, 50,000 words,* the longest consecutive serial in its history. For the first installment, the Post boosted its press run by more than 100,000, came out on newsstands a day early to catch extra sales.

Chambers, a onetime senior editor of TIME, has been writing his book and working on his Maryland farm since 1950, when his testimony convicted Hiss of perjury. His story begins with an eloquent letter to his teen-aged son and daughter, who did not learn of his past as a Communist courier until the Hiss case opened with his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the letter, Chambers explains to them--and to the world--why he became a Communist, why he left the party in 1938 and what the real issues were in the Hiss trials. To many people, he says, the Hiss case has become just "another crime drama in which the props [were] mistaken for the play . . ." Actually, the trials were a battleground on which "the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips . . ."

Man Without God. "I was a witness. I do not mean a witness for the Government or against Alger Hiss ... A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something ... It was my fate to be, in turn, a witness to each of the great faiths of our time."

Chambers first turned to the Communist faith because "the revolutionary heart of communism ... is a simple conviction: It is necessary now to change the world. [The communists'] power is the power to hold convictions and to act upon them. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die--to bear witness--for its faith . . . The communist vision is the vision of Man without God ... It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. The vision is a challenge . . ."

All Communists, says Chambers, are aware of the terrible suffering that the practice of their faith and denial of God imposes on millions of people. And most of them succeed in ignoring or suppressing that awareness. But to some there comes a time when they hear screams in the night --screams "from the execution cellars ... from the torture chambers . . . from . . . the freezing filth of subarctic labor camps." For "there persists in every man, however he may deny it, a scrap of soul." The communist who does not stifle that scrap of soul begins to lose faith in his vision of man without God. Chambers records that his own loss of faith began on "a very casual" occasion. He was watching his daughter at her breakfast.

"My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear--those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: . . . They could have been created only by immense design. The thought was involuntary and unwanted ... If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God." Ultimately, Chambers did complete the thought, because "the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind's."

Walk Through the Woods. Chambers concludes his letter: "My children, when you were little, we used sometimes to go for walks in our pine woods . . . You used instinctively to give me your hands as we entered those woods, where it was darker, lonelier, and in the stillness our voices sounded loud and frightening. In this book I am again giving you my hands. I am leading you, not through cool pine woods, but up and up a narrow defile between bare and steep rocks from which in shadow things uncoil and slither away. It will be dark. Before you understand the meaning of the journey, I may not be there, my hands may have slipped from yours. It will not matter. For when you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wise."

*The book itself is some 200,000 words.

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