I’ve been a devoted reader of National Review, the magazine that galvanized America’s modern conservative movement and ultimately helped make Reagan president, for most of its 65 years since William F. Buckley, Jr. launched NR in 1955. When the magazine recently ran a long piece about Buckley’s close friend Whittaker Chambers that for some reason didn’t even mention Bill, it seemed an omission in need of correcting.
The article by Peter Baehr, a university professor in Hong Kong, “Whittaker Chambers through the Eyes of Rebecca West,” also struck me as insufficiently honoring of Chambers’ self-sacrificing heroism in helping awaken our country to the irredeemable evil of Communism and the insidiousness of its threat to our whole way of life as a free people.
With that same evil and that same insidiousness now spreading in the American psyche by way of cultural Marxism at home and Chinese Communist advances worldwide, the Buckley-Chambers alliance of the 1950s has lessons for us today, it seems to me. Since National Review hasn’t seen fit to publish my letter to the editor about all this, I am posting it here.
To the Editor: I join all who love history, politics, and our country in thanking Peter Baehr for his perceptive essay on what Rebecca West made of Whittaker Chambers, and he of her ("Communist Mystic," April 20). It sent me back not only to Chambers’ book on the Hiss case, Witness, but also to his later anthology, Cold Friday, and to Bill Buckley‘s collection of their letters to each other, Odyssey of a Friend.
While the Buckley-Chambers angle may have been outside the scope of Baehr's reflections, the record is incomplete if we fail to note that Whittaker Chambers helped WFB found National Review, and that the two men’s deep friendship solaced each other to fight on for freedom in those dark days when the left was making out Joseph McCarthy far more of a monster than Joseph Stalin.
Obviously a man of contradictions, a flawed man, Chambers was also a great-souled man and a brave American patriot. He was a vital link in the chain of heroes who ultimately helped America win the Cold War. His fatalism—misplaced, thank God—in wondering if he was leaving the winning side to join the losing side, should only make us admire him more. He was determined to do the right thing, the humane thing, whatever the cost. Will we see his like again?
Will we? The answer is in some measure up to each of us, not of course by duplicating his circumstances, but by making the most of our own circumstances as fuel to burn white-hot in the struggle to preserve liberty.
And with so much extra time for reading in this spring (soon to be summer) of lockdown and staying home, I recommend all three of Whittaker Chambers’ gripping books (the third in collaboration with William F. Buckley, Jr.) as follows:
Witness (1952) https://tinyurl.com/yav78ydq
Cold Friday (1964) https://tinyurl.com/ya84ob8v
Odyssey of a Friend (1969) https://tinyurl.com/yaaxkqs2
William F. Buckley, Jr., generously befriended me when I was an aspiring political writer in the 1960s. He signed this sketch for me in the 1980s.