the forbearance of chambers biographer, sam tanenhaus, for not mentioning this embarrassing fact in his long and thoughtful review of my book in "the new republic" last winter. came in himself, i look this up, did refer briefly but only obliquely to chambers and the second point of his memoir published in 1972. for canon took a couple of pages to say that it followed the chambers case carefully of course entry early. but still was unsure as many people work in 1972. of who to believe in that case, who is telling the truth. of course, we know the answer to that question much more clearly now, thanks not only to sam's biography of chambers, but also to the courageous scholarship of allen weinstein and the others who have followed his pioneering work. today, nobody can reasonably doubt the truth in the light,

particularly of the evidence that has surfaced from soviet sources in the last 20 years or so. although as a friend pointed out to me the other day, you can still get in trouble if you stand in the middle of certain sidestreets in upper manhattan and shouted out, alger hiss was guilty. [laughter] what's so strongly struck me in reading "witness" for the first time, however, i think was less how well it holds up in the light of recent scholarship. that i had expected. what i had not expected in reading this book were what seemed to me a number of theory similarities between the personalities of whittaker chambers and demand that i have spent a lot of time with recently, not just recently, for the last three decades, george f. kennan.

these reside i think in the fact that neither chambers nor can fit categories. they did not fit the compartment. it did not fit the pigeonholes that we too easily seek to put personnel is if you. it just didn't fit. cannon house wrote of chambers, he wrote a unique blend of pilgrim and political revolutionary. he goes on to say that chambers contemporaries never stopped quarreling about him. he was a fascist, to some a martyr, the most a mystery. but now here's tanenhaus on kennan. one is hard-pressed to think of another public individual so consistently driven not merely to revive himself but also to repeat himself, agonizingly at times with result that his words

can be summoned today in defense or in rebuttal of almost any foreign policy position. while kennan can be capped and almost any light. kennan has become his admirers but also his detractors. so this got me to thinking about plutarch. recovery to thinking about parallel lives. it got me to think about what would happen if you just as a kind of brief intellectual exercise or friday afternoon think about the parallel lives of george kennan and whittaker chambers. if chambers and kennan would each like so few others, how much would they like each other? and that's what i'm going to spend the rest of my time talking. chronologically, they are only close in part. chambers as most of you know was born in 1901. kennan in 1904. but chambers lived only to the

age of 60. kennan lived to the age of 101, and hence the delay in the publishing of the biography, the source of apologies to me from the subject of the biography. [laughter] kennan and chambers are closer it seems to me and having had difficult childhoods marked by family tragedy. for kennan, it was the death of his mother two months after he was born. for chambers, it was a suicide of a beloved brother in his 20s. both chambers and kennan had ivy league education. chambers at columbia. kennan at princeton, but neither in the years that followed ever felt part of any establishment. both men were afflicted with a deep cultural testament that was rooted not enforcing another world war. it went back further than that, really deeply in the 1920s and

the post world war i period. they were periods of optimism in the lives of chambers and kennan, but i would say for chambers it's his period as editor at time in world war ii. i would say for kennan, it's his year at the national war college and in the early days of the policy planning where he was able to make it work as he wished with the total support of general george marshall who had become secretary of state. these periods of optimism were fleeting for both men. both men sounded the alarm about soviet intentions. chambers to the roosevelt administration as early as 1939 with no visible results. kennan to the roosevelt administration through the diplomatic reporting from moscow in 1944-45, which he also felt to have been ineffective.

both men found themselves as result isolated from many of their contemporaries, ostracized for having gone out on these limbs. although kennan's indication of course came far more quickly and far more painfully than that of whittaker chambers. neither took satisfaction in vindication, however. self congratulations for both men, both atypically in the modern age, was almost impossible. that's remarkable in the 20th century. one reason for this was religious faith, which became deeper for both of these men as they aged. but that faith resided in the city of god, not the city of man. that faith minimal expectations for what beyond bearing witness could be accomplished in this life. both men that are profoundly the the capacity of their naïve,

gullible country, united states, to survive in a sinister world. both were at the same time and in their own way deeply dedicated american patriots, whose own lowly acts of witness illuminated the country's past to survival through this horrible century. their despair, however, was so deep that both not only contemplated suicide, but actually took steps to make it possible. as chambers described it in "witness," it was the day he went to a garden store in lower manhattan and picked up a killer which actually was sinai based, and took it home and opened the can and try to mix it with the right amount of water and throw a towel over his head and breathe the fumes and hope to wake up not waking up. but he was saved by his own

shortsightedness. he could not read instructions on the can, and so got the proportions on. for kennan, it was during his brief ambassadorship in moscow in 1952. when the situation was so grim that kennan insisted that the cia equipped them with suicide pills, lessons the event of war he would in turn as nazi germany in 1942, but he took torture, so that's the purpose of the suicide pills were in his case. he didn't use them. he told me he flushed them down the toilet eventually. but that he ordered them i think is completely significant. both men in later life preoccupied themselves and, indeed, overwhelmed anybody who would read them or listen to them, with great fears. and dining great fears in capital letters. chambers, that the new deal and all that followed from it was part of some kind of gigantic

communist conspiracy. kennan, the nuclear weapon could not be developed and deployed without placing at risk the face of the earth. both significantly i think were farmers. chambers in maryland, kennan in pennsylvania. finding in the physical labor associated with the profession that led to limited refuge that made life and especially family life possible. and finally both were great writers. even if the writing is repetitious. that prose, their prose, kept the ideas compelling against time and space. and as ronald reagan was suggesting, it will do that in the future. which is to say that each man produced classical works that will be read as far as we can see in the future. one of which, of course, we celebrate here today. now, in his review in the new criterion, jim pearson who i

think -- is jim here? he is on the way i guess. jim pearson summed up kennan in a single sentence, and a congressman which i never came close to achieving in my book. kennan was quote an independent thinker of the first order who come at a critical moment in history, saw something clearly that others saw but through the haze. and by an act of singular intellectual courage, earned absolution, for any misjudgments he may have subsequently committed. i hope jim would not mind if i changed only two words in that quote, to let some of whittaker chambers. who, through an act of singular moral courage, earned absolution for any misjudgments he may previously have committed. thanks for your attention.

[applause] >> thank you very much. and mr. evans, we'll go into about 3:45 with questions and answers. >> thank you. first of all, it's a pleasure to be back. i had many a class in this building and i'm pleased to say it's exactly the same as it was 60 years ago. [laughter] some things do not change. further touch of nostalgia, i was a freshman year when god and man at ale came out. i read it at the time. everyone was in a complete roar against it, although no one had read it. [laughter] for i did read and said this is exactly what is going on here. and so that was my introduction to bill buckley. home again that when i still an

undergraduate, he was a friend of mine for those many years, until he passed away recently. and i, the last time i took the train up from washington to connecticut it was to see bill at stanford some years ago. body is to take it all the time to come back and forth the we lived outside washington at the time to new haven. and i always enjoyed riding the train. lee and i talked about this earlier. the only problem was, if you had to go through new york, and i'm always reminded of a little girl who was trying to say the lord's prayer, got confused and said, lead us not into 10th station. [laughter] and truer words were never spoken. it was a little better than that. anyway, i read, since i did read

"witness" shortly after it came out, it came out when i was a sophomore, 1952, i didn't read at the time but i have read and reread it many times since because it's a book that rewards careful study. and i approach it, have approached it, and there's a new book that i co-authored the just came out, in which chambers emerges as sort of a central character, which was not my intention when i began. but the more i looked into matters, the more i realized that chambers was a critical figure in almost too many sentences to list. his book is among other things, apart from a celebrity marriage and its tremendous gift of language is a history of the domestic cold. one of the best. it is not on a history, it is a

source. he was himself a primary source. all of you and i had to go to the primary sources. that's very risky to rely on secondary sources. he was himself a primary source. and i would say was also from his book is a guide for the perplexed. there are benchmarks of judgments there to stand us in good stead to this day, in addition to information that he provides. as i dove into some of these things myself, using some primary sources, mostly fbi files, i realized the centrality of chambers to the whole domestic cold war story. not only his case but others. and the more i learned about his travails and his service and his sacrifice, and the more i learned to him about the nature of the internal problems in our

security situation in the 1930s and particularly in the 1940s, although he gave most of his testimony about the '30s, he was still around in the '40s, as you know. he was consulted often by the fbi in the '40s. i realized, i formally what i call about that problem, evans law of inadequate paranoia. [laughter] which says that no matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it and it's always worse. [laughter] that was certainly the case with the penetration of our government by agents of the soviet union, fellow travelers come on all of which fronts chambers was most instructive. and he made these points that have been confirmed repeatedly by the new information. one was the extent, this event alluded to by the previous

speakers, of the penetration. it was formidable. it without i formidable in terms of numbers but in the level of penetration. the remaining many of these agents and many, many posts of power. alger hiss was just one of them. he was not alone. another was white, treasury department. another was korea in the white house. these are three top soviet agents at very high levels in our government. the second point -- let me just follow it up with it. all that that he told his dad he intimates in "witness" is confirmed over and over again. the records in the soviet union, the decryption's which were secret messages sent back and forth between the moscow bosses and their agents over here, which was broken by our cryptologist back in the '40s. there were other records from the soviet union, papers which

have recently come forth, defecting kgb agent who names many of the suspects that he knew about from kgb records in moscow. and most of all the fbi file, of which there hundreds of thousands of pages on these cases, on hiss, on white, and a bevy of other of the suspects who were in the government, during the third and fourth, particularly during the war when the soviets were our allies. all of this over and over again confirms everything chambers had to say. indeed, goes beyond what changes had said because he did not know what everything the fbi knew. the fbi knew what he knew but he didn't know what the fbi knew. the second major point that spins off of that was chambers assertion, which this book is about, that's the real issue was

not spying. that's what all the movies are about, that for all the cloak and dagger images are. it was policy influence. what these people are doing come in some cases with greater success than others that often with great success was to tilt american policy in the cold war in favor of the soviet interests. and he made that point very strongly in "witness," and it's been confirmed by everything that i've seen in my recent study. this book contains case histories, case studies from pearl harbor, what happened in china, what happened in yugoslavia, what happened in poland, the plan for turning germany into a cow past year, the approval of slave labor as reparations to moscow approved at yalta and the yalta

conference hiss was a major factor. operation keelhauled was truly an -- .co do so these can also agree to at yalta. those are examples, others i know that those are the ones i do know of, in which pro-soviet operatives within our government tilted policy in favor of the communist interests. final point that chambers made over and over again in "witness" and is confirmed by everything else written and i've seen since, which contributed to his -- in a very rose to the. is very pessimistic, and with good reason. he knew a lot and he could meet other people to believe it. he was a cassandra, and he comes as professor gaddis point2.com he made revelations about this problem not in the '40s but in 1939, to the assistant secretary

of state. nothing was done. he named hiss then in 1939. that was ignored at the time in the war, and the pro-so the atmosphere. nobody here such things. he then ran into greater efforts of concealment and misrepresentation when the case surfaced in, almost a decade later, 1940. this made him extremely pessimistic. and there's kind of a pervasive sense of doom in the final chapters of witness, which was personal, the suicide attempt had been mentioned. for chile did not succeed, but also society. he thought we were doomed. he thought the free world was doomed. and the reason, one of the reasons he thought that was he believed that the were people in the government who knew very what was going on and would do nothing about it. and he was right in this respect, how white is hard to

gauge, but he himself was in considerable peril when he made the revelations he did. went before the house committee on august 1948, testified in public against hiss and others, things that get said in private long before the fbi. the fbi knew this in 1945 at the latest. everything chambers 748 the fbi knew in 1945. we have the records to show that. no one would do anything about it. not only that, but when he went before the house committee and the white house that day, august 16, 1948, the meeting at the top levels from the attorney general and various white house aides, planned to indict chambers for perjury. they were not going to indict hiss. they were going to indict changes. that persisted well to the end of 1948.

for the point, hard to tell all this in 10 minutes, the rewriting of the cold war history in 10 minutes as professor gaddis knows it is difficult. and lee knows this thing. hiss, just a point about hiss. hiss was far more important than it's ever been appreciated. far more important i would say than some of the very good history appreciate because they didn't have the records. one of the problems in terms of writing cold war and other history is getting at the primary sources. one would think that a primary source would be an official government publication, as in the case of yalta. the yalta documents, a book of a thousand pages long, and all, the minutes of the meeting at yalta, what happened in terms of the aftermath of yalta, and we discussed some of that in this book. unfortunately, when newspapers were compiled the state department did not have the primary records on all of them,

and among the papers they did not have with the papers of the secretary of state. when he left the state department in july 1945, he took his papers within. they then vanished not in a sinister means, just they were taken away and not returned. state department did not have them when it published the yalta documents. the result is that many revelations that are in those papers have been secret for low these many decades. these papers it turns out are at the university of virginia in charleston. and i was able to get them there and you'll find many things they are that are not in the official tell the compilation but the main thing that i want to stress is that they show the role of hiss farm extension of anything that is in the official compilation. hiss was probably the one

american at yalta who knew what he was doing. and i say that an almost literal sense. the secretary of state had been there for two months at the time of the altar chosen novice and he knew almost nothing about foreign policy. president roosevelt distressingly, the record shows almost did. very, very confused on many issues. alger hiss was not confused. he knew what he was doing, and he was the person at all the paper, had all the documents, all the cables went through him. he was all over the place. that is in the stettinius papers, very little of it is in the yalta document. finally, i'm almost done, chambers says something very somber, very pessimistic, very defeatist really. he said that he was leaving the winning side, communism, for the losing side.

it was the one thing about which he was wrong. he was wrong. what convinced him that he was right about that was the unwillingness of people in authority to hear the truth. they deny the truth. they it toward the truth. they censored the truth. and this came to the floor in a grand jury session in 1947 and 1948, were all these communists and soviet agents were paraded in to testify. alger hiss, harry dexter white, the list is long. they're all in this book. all of them were allowed to walk. they were allowed to walk because the prosecutors in the justice department said there was only one witness against them and that's elizabeth bentley was another witness and, therefore, we cannot convict these people. they let them all walk. they could've had hiss then. the other witness that they could've had was chambers but they refused to call them, it is only when he got called after u.s. meetings in the summer of 40 after they let all those

people go they broke the case and led to the conviction of alger hiss, and have the minutes of those grand jury sessions and the fbi records pertaining to them. that changed the course of history. whittaker chambers not only lived history and wrote history, but he changed history. and we, to this day, i do think fully appreciate how important he was in this pivotal episode where he broke through the cover-up and the concealment to bring about the indictment and conviction of alger hiss and the history after that was changed dramatically. my time is up. i thank you for yours. [applause] >> thank you, mr. evans. thank you panelists. we have about 50 minutes for questions, but before i ask you

to come down and speak into the mic, let me also welcome governor daniels to our conference today. [applause] >> the mic's already, and your questions are welcomed. right behind you if you don't mind. >> and go ahead. yes. i just wanted to ask a question and a microphone. thank you. >> okay. this is really in the nature of an observation. i was very much appreciative of professor kennan's comparison talk. i have to say that, as i was listening to the chambers material, i was rather struck by another possible comparison, extraneous to the conference, but i thought, rather gently,

lance armstrong. and he we have another case of an extremely charming man, righteously continuing to profess his innocence in the face of a very large body of contrary evidence. now, that evidence comes mostly from his teammates who are men of integrity, not as charming as lance armstrong himself. in the case of alger hiss, we have whittaker chambers. and those of you who have seen the pictures of these two men will have to be struck by the enormous difference in their appearance. hiss, you know, albanian, well-dressed. chambers, he shambles, he is

poorly dressed. his clothes don't really fit. he has bad teeth. so he is certainly not a charmer. and it seems to me, though this is a very small sample, that it behooves us to think that we need to be wary of charm. [laughter] because it may be that slaughter wins the day. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you. thank you. any comments? [laughter] mr. evans because i just want to say, everything you said is true. someone who is more than charming -- [laughter] i appreciate, i appreciate your observations. i might say it wasn't just chambers. there were five witnesses. nathaniel