Witness (book)

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Witness is a 1952 autobiography by American writer and journalist, Whittaker Chambers. The book, which became a best seller, detailed Chambers' life as secret member of the US Communist Party and Soviet spy and his eventual break with Communism.^[1]

Chambers wrote the book as a warning against the evils of the leftist ideology and covered in great detail his testimony in the espionage case against US State Department official Alger Hiss. Chambers accused Hiss of being a secret member of the Communist Party and of engaging in espionage against the US.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called Witness one of the greatest American autobiographies. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan, who credited the book with having turned him from a New Deal Democrat into a conservative Republican, posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his stand against Communist totalitarianism.

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