Tea at Trianon: The Passion of Whittaker Chambers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

The Passion of Whittaker Chambers

From The Avocado:

On August 3, 1948 HUAC (absent Thomas, nursing a bleeding ulcer) convened in the Ways and Means Committee Room for a surprise witness. Bystanders, reporters and congressmen filled the room, which soon became unbearably hot. In shuffled the witness, Whittaker Chambers: a portly, rumpled-looking man in a wrinkled suit, sweaty and exhausted (he’d managed only a few hours of sleep), his voice an indistinct murmur, his face looking haunted as Karl Mundt swore him in. Few onlookers, aside from the reporters, would have recognized Chambers as an editor for Time-Life. More importantly, he was an ex-Communist.

Reading a prepared statement “in a rather detached way, as if he had an unpleasant chore to do,” as Richard Nixon recalled, Chambers dropped a bombshell. “Almost exactly nine years ago…I went to Washington and reported to the authorities what I knew about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists,” he declared. “For years, international Communism…had been in a state of undeclared war with this Republic. With the Hitler-Stalin pact that war reached a new stage. I regarded my action in going to the Government as a simple act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat.”

Chambers summarized his career as a Communist. A gifted but aimless student at Columbia, he befriended Professor Mark Van Doren, who waxed rhapsodic about the USSR (“All the walls are falling down!”). Chambers spent 1923 in Europe, then read Lenin’s Soviets at Work, which impressed him with its forceful picture of Utopia. In 1925 Chambers formally joined the Communist Party, writing for the Daily Worker, collecting dues from members and creating fake passports for the mysterious J. Peters (a Hungarian operative named Sándor Goldberger). More importantly, in 1932 his comrades convinced him to join the Communist underground, adopting several pseudonyms for his clandestine work. (Read more.)