WAS AND MUST (via Tom Morin):

Ralph de Toledano, 90; Ardent Conservative (Joe Holley, February 7, 2007, Washington Post)

Ralph de Toledano, 90, a prolific author and journalist and a passionate partisan for the cause of conservatism, died Feb. 3 of cancer at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. He was a longtime resident of the District.

Mr. de Toledano was a former editor for Newsweek and National Review. His political views migrated steadily rightward through the decades, a political path trodden by a number of leftist intellectuals from the 1930s and 1940s. Ardent anti-Communism was the impetus, Mr. de Toledano said in books, articles and interviews.

He once described himself as "a non-conformist conservative with general (though often critical) Republican sympathies." Toward the end of his life, he labeled himself a libertarian, his son Paul Toledano said.

Mr. de Toledano's disillusionment with the left became irrevocable when Newsweek assigned him to cover the 1950 trial of Alger Hiss, a State Department official accused of perjury in a case involving charges that he was a Soviet spy. Mr. de Toledano came to believe in the veracity of Whittaker Chambers, a former managing editor at Time and Hiss's chief accuser.

"Whittaker Chambers became like a surrogate grandfather," his son said.

The Imperatives of the Heart: A friend remembers Whittaker Chambers (Ralph de Toledano, August 1, 1986, National Review)

I leave it to others of more acute wisdom to assess his impact on our contemporaneity. It is my simple belief that Whittaker Chambers was the catalyst that changed the chemistry of this nation. But for him, the Hiss case would have been one more dreary process of law, a police assault on treason. Through him it became a contest of faith, a confrontation of God and Man. At issue was not the declaration of Communism, not the twitchings of Marx or the cunning of Lenin, but an affirmation of what our civilization was and must once more be.

Few understood the Old Testament evocations of what he wrote in Witness. "Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible." But the word when uttered takes flight and lodges in hearts that are otherwise occupied. He looked to a God of Mercy, but when the sword was brandished, it was to a God of Justice that he bent.

So much there is to remember of his tuition and intuition. I brought him to the poems of St. John of the Cross and the mystical iteration of Aunche es de noche. He led me to Rilke's Marienleben and its injunction that we must make our God das Harte aus dem Harten -- the hard from the hard. In the days before the first trial, he made my house a refuge after hours spent recalling what he would have preferred to forget, the detailed recital of what the courts require, extracted from him by FBI agents who by then were calling him Uncle Whit. In those evening hours, he would release the tension, parodying himself and the seriousness of both defense and prosecution -- or simply letting his mind unfold. Once he came in, warm and a-chortle over a movie he had gone to as an escape from the probing -- Shane, about a small boy and a tough cowboy.

The past is a bucket of self-deception in which the good grows better and the bad worse. But the recall of my first encounter with Whittaker Chambers is etched in metal.

Letter to My Children (Whittaker Chambers, from the Foreward to Witness, 1952)

Beloved Children,

I am sitting in the kitchen of the little house at Medfield, our second farm which is cut off by the ridge and a quarter-mile across the fields from our home place, where you are. I am writing a book. In it I am speaking to you. But I am also speaking to the world. To both I owe an accounting. It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live. It is about what the world calls the Hiss-Chambers Case, or even more simply, the Hiss Case. It is about a spy case. All the props of an espionage case are there-foreign agents, household traitors, stolen documents, microfilm, furtive meetings, secret hideaways, phony names, an informer, investigations, trials, official justice.

But if the Hiss Case were only this, it would not be worth my writing about or your reading about. It would be another fat folder in the sad files of the police, another crime drama in which the props would be mistaken for the play (as many people have consistently mistaken them). It would not be what alone gave it meaning, what the mass of men and women instinctively sensed it to be, often without quite knowing why. It would not be what, at the very beginning, I was moved to call it: "a tragedy of history."

For it was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts.

At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time-Communism and Freedom-came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of Our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.

But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the Course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy-not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope. For it is about the struggle of the human soul -of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time.

My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father-dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes. Sometimes you will wonder which is harder to bear: friendly forgiveness or forthright hate. In time, therefore, when the sum of your experience of life gives you authority, you will ask yourselves the question: What was my father?

I will give you an answer: I was a witness. I do not mean a witness for the Government or against Alger Hiss and the others. Nor do I mean the short, squat, solitary figure, trudging through the impersonal halls of public buildings to testify before Congressional committees, grand juries, loyalty boards, courts of law. A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. A witness, in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences..

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2007 1:02 PM