Witness
October 14, 2007
Reading project #2 for the summer just past was WITNESS by Whittaker Chambers, 50th Anniversary Edition. I had some dim recollection of hearing about the microfilms hidden in a pumpkin and the Alger Hiss spy trials in the 1940s, but, after all, a 9-year-old can only be expected to remember so much. So I opened the 800 page paperback with anticipation. I was on a roll after finishing Victor Hugo’s 1500-word classic, Les Misérables.
In a forward, William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say about Whittaker Chambers.
I first met Whittaker Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published Witness. When the preface of Witness appeared as a feature in the Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Alger Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss’s innocence had once been a fixed national conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition.
In a second forward, Robert D. Novak stated,
The death of Alger Hiss at the age of ninety-two on November 15, 1996, provoked bizarre responses from people who should have known better.
…It is remarkable that, nearly a half-century after Hiss’s conviction, well-informed and presumably prudent people could still harbor any doubts that Hiss, as a senior State Department official, had in fact been a secret agent of the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence. Yet Mr. [Peter] Jennings and Mr. [Anthony] Lake represent many others who cannot fully accept the reality that Alger Hiss was lying and Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth.
Chambers 
Hiss
So what did I think? Well, author Chambers could have used a good editor and proof reader, but that aside it is a captivating autobiography. Chambers was a more-or-less practicing Quaker who was naive enough to testify without a lawyer at his side, believing that words of truth made their own witness. Hiss, on the other hand, was surrounded by advisors, legal and otherwise, and talked way too much. He was a name-dropper, saying that any man (himself) thought highly of by all the movers and shakers in Washingtom just must be telling the truth. Not, as it turned out. Here’s a story where the good guy came out on top.
Two more reflections that may or may not whet your interest: Chambers opened his story in “Forward In The Form Of A Letter To My Children.”
[The Hiss Case] was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial … . Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith, and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
My next comment is that the most riveting parts of the book are nothing but barely edited transcripts of congressional investigations.
Mr. Hiss: (Said this…)
Mr. Nixon: (Said this..)
Hard to believe, perhaps, but the knowledge that these were not words put in the mouth of a protagonist by an imaginative author has impact. He really said that!
Recommended reading, nonetheless. It’s a fascinating part of our history when Soviet Communists had much influence in Washington, and we did not want to believe it until an unexciting Quaker sacrificed himself on the altar of truth.
Dave, glad to be part of the American Experiment.
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October 8, 2007
There aren’t many of us still around who can read the title of this article. In fact, I don’t blame you if you are bored stiff by dots and dashes. When I received my first amateur radio license in 1947 (I think), I had to pass a code test at a speed of 15 words-per-minute. From the Wall Street Journal I learn that there is one Chuck Adams who is busy translating novels into Morse code. Aren’t you impressed?
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Nostalgic for simpler days, retired astrophysicist Chuck Adams is translating classics of boys’ lit into a language he fears is going the way of kit radios and marbles: Morse code.
Holed up in his high-desert home crammed with computers, radio receivers and a very patient wife, Mr. Adams uses homemade software to download online books with expired copyrights, convert the typed words into Morse code tones and record them on compact discs he sells on the Internet.
Several years ago, as I walked along on my daily save-my-heart stroll, I wondered if there were any remnants of Morse code still lodged in my memory bank. I started dah-ditting street signs along my route. It was slow going at first, but after a while it came back to me. At first I had to stop to recall the Morse code for certain infrequently used letters, but after a while I had my translation speed up to, maybe, 5 wpm.
Many of those who still know Morse code test their skills with a German computer game called Rufz, the standard for determining world transcription-speed rankings. Players listen to coded, five-character call signs, combinations of letters, symbols and numbers that identify individual license holders. The faster and more correctly they type them, the more points they score. (Transcribing regular text is much slower.)
Last month in Belgrade, Goran Hajosevic broke 200 words per minute — an extraordinary pace. Mr. Adams is tied for eighth in the world, at more than 140 words per minute.
I ham radio’d away using CW (continuous wave, read Morse code) for several years, but I never reached real proficiency, topping out at perhaps 30 wpm.
Dave who has a tendency to lie about some things.
