The Lesson of Cowardice
Chambers goes all the way back into childhood to tell his story. The biography even extends to his first day at school and the important extracurricular activity learned that day. The next chapter opens with no contextual set-up, just a confession. Then a metaphor which that cowardice taught:
“I ran away from my first fight. In those days I did not know that courage is the indispensable virtue.”
Why Country Folk Distrust City Slickers
Whitaker Chambers was a rabid anti-communist; a full-fledged member of Team McCarthy despite not being a support of McCarthy specifically The book is not merely an autobiography, but a screed and within polemical hysteria can be extricated vitally important information. Such as, for instance, why a very common societal stereotype exists: why does there remain even in the 21st century such a stark ideological divide between rural and urban America. A lot of it can be traced back to the anti-communist propagandizing of the 1950’s:
“Communism is a faith of the cities, and can look upon the countryside only to organize, that is to say, to destroy it.”
Alger Hiss
The name Whitaker Chambers will forever be linked to Alger Hiss, the man he accused of being a communist agent who had infiltrated the United States government. Hiss was eventually convicted after one hung jury, but the evidence has always been considered sketchy at best. Even today, it is not entirely clear. Then and for the rest of his life, however, Chambers was fully convinced:
“Alger Hiss is only one name that stands for the whole Communist penetration of Government. "
Nixon
The Alger Hiss investigation hurtled a little known and even less respected Congressman from California named Nixon into the front ranks of the Republican Party. Chambers and Nixon are also inextricably related though in a different way than Chambers and Hiss. After first admitting to liking the future President, Chambers ends a chapter on not just a metaphorical note, but a rather disturbing bit admittedly beautifully constructed imagery:
“I left Nixon, feeling, in addition to all else that I felt, like a very small creature, skirting the shadows of encircling powers that would not hesitate to crush me as impersonally as a steam roller crushes a bug.”
The Baltimore Incident
Perhaps unwittingly, Chambers potentially gives a clue in the book to his state of mind toward his nemesis, Hiss. It is a strange interlude; shocking in both its brevity and the intensity with which Chambers writes of it. It is a comment of purely figurative content almost utterly lacking in genuine offense which is made by Hiss during conversation which Chambers then proceeds to expend an entire page upon in deconstructing as evidence of the darker layers of sinister personality lying beneath the façade Hiss presents to the world:
“`Baltimore,’ Alger once answered, `is the only city in the country so backward that it still lights its streets by gas. It’s a city of dying old men and women.’”
