ABSTRACT
Witness—Whittaker Chambers’ account of the Hiss case and its historical setting—is the fount of modern Movement Conservatism. (Ronald Reagan credited it with converting him from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican.) Ideologues on today’s right are still playing changes on the persona—”a solitary man in a gregarious land”—Chambers perfected in his great American autobiography cum anti-communist moral tract. But torture-mongers and Tea Partiers will find it hard to assimilate certain implications in Chambers’ thought. Meanwhile, leftists who instinctively avoid Chambers—ally of Nixon and the man who shaped Reagan’s brain—are missing out on a 20th-century mind whose testimony seems especially pertinent now.
