Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
The lesson of this book is that the establishment can and will lie to protect their own. The liberals had to have known that [Alger] Hiss was a Communist and yet they sat around and insisted he wasn’t. You have a modern Democratic Party that did not deal with serious threats to the Republic, with serious enemies of liberty. They treated the whole thing as a joke and attacked people who pointed out things that they knew to be true.
Let’s move on to the next two books. They surprise me actually because I think of you as primarily focused on economic issues, rather than Cold War kinds of issues and both of these books are very much Cold War period books. Let’s talk about Witness first because it’s the more famous of the two. Why Whittaker Chambers?
I read both of them in the same summer at my public library, in Weston Public Library.
How old were you?
Twelve, 13.
Where’s Weston?
Weston is 12 miles due west of Boston.
So you’re in the library…
Yes. So they were selling them off for a nickel or quarter a piece because the library was getting rid of all its silly right-wing books that nobody wanted. So I picked up all my anti-Communist stuff for a buck. I also got Masters of Deceit and the other J Edgar Hoover books and so on. I was an anti-Communist first, and a broader conservative/free marketeer later. I knew the other team for the bad guys, but I remember, as a teenager, not being completely opposed to certain government regulations. I hadn’t thought about it particularly, but then later I became more free market in my thinking. There was also the Vietnam War, which was a big thing. The Communists were pushing us, and the hard left was opposed to our opposing them, not as libertarians saying, ‘Excuse me but what are we doing in their war?’ but as, ‘They are the good guys, why are we fighting against the good guys?’
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Grover Norquist is founder and head of Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group, and author of Leave Us Alone. He is also a leading conservative strategist. Since 1993 he has convened and run the Wednesday Meeting, a weekly gathering of conservative activists, politicians, and group leaders.
