It’s as if “two plus two make five,” as George Orwell explained in 1984, the author likely seizing on a chapter of the same name in Eugene Lyons’s 1937 memoir Assignment in Utopia. In the novel, which came out in 1949, less than six months after Bentley and Chambers testified [truthfully], Orwell explores the impact of such thought control, analyzing how “the very existence of external reality” could be “tacitly denied” by ideology. He concludes, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”

The mind could adapt, though. Orwell: “And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable— what then?”79

What then? Here’s what then: Whittaker Chambers is relegated to purgatory; there was no Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union; McCarthy is the Great Satan; John Bricker is remembered as “an amiable and photogenic figure of no remarkable qualities.” [Soviet agent] Lauchlin Currie et al.—and I mean all—keep their cover in posterity’s mainstream without even a teeny, tiny, scarlet footnote. And a Mao portrait by Warhol over the mantelpiece is just the thing.

No wonder it is Elizabeth Bentley who was garishly marked as a “neurotic spinster” from the hot July day of her 1948 testimony forward, tattooed in memory with faintly lurid question marks. Look carefully, though, where the slander against Bentley originated: The very first malign expectoration against her shot from the mouth of NKVD agent Gregory Silvermaster himself (KGB cover name “Pal”). It was Silvermaster who brazenly dismissed Bentley’s charges before the House Committee on Un-American Activities before serially invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination (including about his own basement). On August 4, 1948, the Soviet superspy said, “I can only conclude that she is a neurotic liar.”

It was just a short hop from neurotic “liar” to neurotic “spinster”82 and back again, the constant being “neurotic.” It was no coincidence, either, that Soviet agent and Ware group cell leader Lee Pressman additionally savaged the testimony of American patriot Whittaker Chambers as “the stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican exhibitionist.”83

Then, thanks to the amplification of the echo chamber—from the Communist rag The Daily Worker to “respectable press” such as The Milwaukee Journal, The New York Post, and The Washington Post to the president—the Party line that it was all in their heads soon was all in our heads. Pace Orwell, if the mind was controllable, what then? Even when physical evidence—typewriters, rugs, microfilm—increasingly bore out Chambers’s word, Communist Party lies vaporized into a dense haze of suspicion that obscured what should have been a diamond-clear line of sight to judgment: Hiss, Silvermaster, and the rest, guilty. Chambers, Bentley, heroes of conscience. But with a Communist-seared “liar” brand still smoking on Bentley’s and Chambers’s hides, the only guilty verdicts that endured were their own, the false verdicts that were upheld in the kangaroo court of elite opinion, the people with rattles and noisemakers, penthouses and publishing imprints, judge and jury with no more claim on fact and reason than the men who sent fourteen women and five men to their deaths for witch- craft in seventeenth-century Salem, and with the same zealotry.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t it the anti-Communists who were the big, bad witch hunters?

Certainly, that’s the message Americans have had drummed into their heads, Mao’s-Little-Red-Book-style. The more literary text of choice in this case is, of course, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Instead of violent Red Guard troops forcing us to live by it, our reeducators were high school teachers who merely assigned us to read it and absorb its lessons. (I had to read the thing in the eighth grade.) For two or three generations, anyway, Arthur Miller’s dramatic re-rendering of congressional efforts to disclose extensive and clandestine Kremlin-directed assaults on our constitutional republic as the irrational and imaginary fetish of “repressed” and “Puritanical” “zealots” in Pilgrim hats was a classroom staple—Silvermaster’s “neurotics” and “exhibitionists” elevated to the realm of theah-tuh. As a 2005 (post-Venona) collection of twentieth-century American drama puts it, “Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 and it presents a clear parallel between the American anti-Communist paranoia of the period and the 1692 witch trials of Salem, exposing both to be maliciously motivated with ritualistic public denunciations of largely innocent people.”84

Largely innocent? I’d like to plop the 650 damning pages of Spies right down in front of the editor that wrote that tripe. What is most breathtaking here, though, is the obdurate endurance of the glaring lie. In fact, a greater intellectual hoax than the Saleming of the Red hunters is beyond imagination. (Islam-is-peace is as great, but no greater.) Unchanged by the hard evidence, the deception continues, as impossible to claw back from the culture at large as a cloud.

This is telling. The great witnesses (Bentley, Chambers, J. B. Matthews, Louis Budenz . . . ), the great investigators (Dies, McCarran, McCarthy . . . ), took their stand to save America from Communist subversion. Whether they realized it—and, for the most part, how could they?—they also took their stand to save the essential base of reality itself: the importance of fact-based narrative; the primacy of “neutral truth”; morality’s need for absolutes. All would dissipate rapidly in society at large following anti-Communism’s demise in American culture. It was the ultimate defeat for the anti-Communist opposition, with their facts and conclusions, their witnesses and their affidavits, their investiga- tions and their implications. This defeat cleared the field for the rise of brand-new waves of subversion: fungible facts, moral relativism, deconstructionism, and other explosive assaults on the rocks of civilizational equilibrium.

This was revolutionary struggle, raw and desperate. Unlike the discreetly private conspiracy to take Gareth Jones down back in the spring of 1933 in order to hide Soviet perfidy inside the Soviet Union—the very first Big Lie of the Terror Famine, as Conquest tells us—this was an all-out assault on the wit- nesses and investigators of Soviet perfidy inside the United States. When this battle was joined in our own backyard, the struggle against exposure took on climactic intensity. Whittaker Chambers explains why, and eloquently, in Witness:

The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolu- tion, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades . . . [This] is a statement of fact that need startle no one who voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power.