WHOSE WITNESS?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 751, 4 December 1953, Page 5

WHOSE WITNESS?

Sir,-David Hall’s review of Witness warns of the danger that. because the book-is brilliantly written it "will make one accept anything Chambers asserts as truth" and continues that it is a question of whether it "succeeds in making what he would like to be true ... come true for us." This implies that some of what Chambers says is not true, Is Mr. Hall providing an example of this when he writes, "After all Hiss went to jail for perjury not treason?" Is he suggesting that although the books calls Hiss a traitor he was not a traitor? There is more in the book than brilliant writing which convinces a reader that Hiss was a traitor and the fact that he was not tried for treason does not prove he was not a traitor. The reviewer continues, "Most of us . find it easier to believe that Hiss was ‘a Communist who tried to lie his way out of his youthful peccadillos rather than that he remained, in sympathy and in action, an adherent of Communism up to the present." Presumably this is another example of something Chambers would like to be true. I, for one, do not find it easier to believe Mr. Hall’s version. Hiss went to extraordinary lengths to lie his way out of a peccadillo and Chambers makes a strong case for allegations of treason sa are neither peccadillos nor etic’ ul We are warned not to overlook ‘the historical fact of the almighty campaign to smear Dean Acheson and the Democratic Party, but the smear campaign of the Hiss supporters against Chambers demands our attention too. ' Mr. Hall does not do Chambers justice by comparing him with Trotsky and Kirvitsky when commenting on Chambers’s fear of Communist violence. Mr. Hall should remember that Chambers cites examples of minor figures who suffered violence, I note with interest Mr. Hall’s view that the book. shows Chambers as "searcely a stable personality." This is a mild version of a view of Chambers made use of ad nauseam by Hiss’s lawyers at the trial. Was it not his stability which enabled Chambers to survive his home life, the confusion and bankruptcy of the depression and liberalism in politics, the extreme ‘solution Communism, until he became a witness? In my view Mr. Hall, like many others, by conceding Chambers his sin- cerity damns him with faint praise. This book says you must take sides, make up your mind, and many of us would prefer the ideas, implications and warnings contained in this book to be watered down and explained away. ~

M.F.

M.

(Hamilton).