It is always nice to find a columnist looking past the political controversy of the moment, to write instead of great men and more permanent things. And so it was a pleasant surprise to find not one but two Bloomberg View columns dedicated to Whittaker Chambers—by Harvard law professor and former Obama regulatory chief Cass Sunstein, no less.
But reviewing those columns (here and here), it does not take long to see that Sunstein fails to offer an accurate account of Chambers’s life and work, including Chambers’s landmark anti-communist work, Witness. As I’ll explain in detail, Sunstein utterly mischaracterizes Chambers, a deeply principled man with strong beliefs whom Sunstein paints as little more than a skeptic who was “not too sure” whether he “was right.”
