Happy Birthday Whittaker Chambers

Jeremayakovka has a terrific post up on the 106th Birthday of Whittaker Chambers, the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

For Chambers, whose Communist resume included writing for and editing the journal New Masses, had in 1939 been brought onto the editorial board of Time magazine. Chambers empathically lamented the Yalta Conference in his prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof," which appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. "Ghosts" broke the mould in editorial commentary. In haunting and magisterial tones it posited the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs gathering to note, with wry brooding from beyond their unmarked graves, the achievement through Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.