SOURCE: Howe, Irving. “God, Man, and Stalin.” In Irving Howe: Selected Writings, 1950-1990, pp. 19-25. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

In the following essay, originally published in The Nation in 1952, Howe explores the role of religion and Chambers's approach to Stalinism in Witness, and deems the autobiography disjointed, historically inaccurate, and often hypocritical.

That Whittaker Chambers told the truth and Alger Hiss did not seems to me highly probable. Personal tragedy though their confrontation was, it had another, almost abstract, quality: the political course of the thirties made it inevitable that, quite apart from this well-groomed man and that unkempt one, there be a clash between two men, one a former Communist who repudiated his past and then, as his Witness testifies, swung to the politics of the far right, the other a “liberal” recruited from the idealistic wing of public service. If not these two, then two...