Witness is one of the most life changing books I have ever read. I try to re read it every holiday season.
I came around to Witness by way of Ann Coulter, oddly enough. It was her book “Treason” that made me curious about Joseph McCarthy and “McCarthyism”. The more I learned on my own, and the less I leaned on what I had been taught in school and told by the media, the more angry I became
I came to understand that Joseph McCarthy was an American hero. He was slandered and defamed by the same type of people who practice the same types of tactics on their enemies today.
I was one of those people who unthinkingly believed about McCarthy what my teachers taught me in school, and what I saw in the newpapers, magazines and on television.
When I read Ann Coulter’s book “Treason”, I was perplexed. I was puzzled why her account of the famous encounter between Joseph Welch and Joseph McCarthy was so completely and diametrically different from the accounts I had grown up with and been taught.
It wasn’t just a little different, it was COMPLETELY different. So I did what the Internet allows you to do these days: I researched. I obtained the transcripts of the actual hearings, and read them.
Ann Coulter was spot on in her characterization of that hearing, and the others as well. After I read that, I began to read everything that didn’t appear to be completely slanted against McCarthy. I read three separate books on Venona, and then capped it off with the book that was, for me, the most important political book I have read in my life.
“Witness”, by Whittaker Chambers.
I was completely astounded by that book, and it explained a lot of things for me. It explained why the Left viewed Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy the way they did, and why all three of them, Chambers, Nixon, and McCarthy were villified and slandered by a poisonous and biased media.
What is perhaps most disturbing of all is to see that the Left practices the exact same form of character assassination warfare today that it practiced fifty years ago against Whittaker Chambers. Exactly.
I admit freely that it was a disillusioning time for me. To realize that all my teachers, people I had no reason to distrust, fed me a steady diet of falsehood regarding Joseph McCarthy. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever.
The good thing about it is that I now view everything political with a grain of salt, which I think is healthy. I am also now completely biased towards the right of the political spectrum. I have no use for the Left.
This was cemented for me back in 2007 at the Gathering of Eagles down in Washington, D.C.
I saw with my OWN eyes what happened that day, and I watched the news with ten other people afterwards, and was stupefied by the way the media presented it on television. Everyone in the room, all of us who had actually BEEN there and seen what went on, looked at each other in disbelief. I will say that there was not one person who was surprised by it, but...that didn’t mean we had to accept it. That was the first time I had seen on my own, the bias of the media.
I came to fully understand, as one only can when seeing something in reality, just how the media operates. And Whittaker Chambers was a full on victim, persecuted by them. For that, I will never, ever forgive them or take them seriously, ever again. I have often heard that once you see something, you cannot “unsee” it. It is true. I refuse to even watch television or read newspapers. It is all complete crap, being spoon fed in formulations they want us to eat and digest. And I am not participating.
On a side note, I had a website about Whittaker Chambers a few years back, and his grandson (David) politely asked me to remove the text from his “Letter to my Children” which is an integral part (foreward) of “Witness”. It was one of the most profound and moving things I had ever read, and fit the time in a way nothing else had. I understood it was a copyright issue, and readily agreed. But for some reason due to my ineptitude and ignorance of how Apple handled its web page program, no matter what I did, it kept coming up. He kept after me for what seemed like a year or so, and every time I felt like a dummy, because even though I would edit it and make sure it was gone, it kept coming back. Finally, Apple nuked that part of its offerings, and the website went away for good. I was relieved. He understood I wasn’t being stubborn, just inept...:) Seemed like a nice guy. I think he was a Freeper, though I haven’t heard from him for a while.
“Witness is one of the most life changing books I have ever read”
Me, too. I was 15 in 1960, and was reading widely.
Chambers fought Communism even though he thought he was on the losing side of history in this regard. That was a hard thought for me to fully understand at the time.
You don’t have to be a perfect hero to do the right thing. I have a first printing of this important work in my bookcase. ;^)