Volume 44, Number 19 · December 4, 1997
The Drama of Whittaker Chambers
By Theodore H. Draper
Whittaker Chambers
by Sam Tanenhaus
Random House, 638 pp., $35.00
Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (updated edition)
by Allen Weinstein
Random House, 622 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Unlike Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers left no mystery about his political beliefs. He was not a systematic thinker, but he was a man of ideas. Without his ideas, he was merely an informer who soon would have been forgotten. Chambers's ideas lay at the root of his actions, and both books under review, Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Chambers and Allen Weinstein's Perjury, now in a new edition, are notably weak in this respect, although they provide much information about Chambers.[1]
Review, 4121 words
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