This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

The book Witness by author Whitaker Chambers, was one of the biggest U.S. bestsellers of

the 20th century, yet it is almost unknown among Americans today.

Here to tell the story of the book and its author is Greg Forster on behalf of the Acton Institute.

Forster is a Whitaker Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction in political philosophy from Yale University.

Let's take a listen. Chambers grew up in an unhappy home, a home full of emotional neediness, manipulation,

petty jealousies. He had a younger brother named Richard who was really popular at school

and he was able to take solace in his friends, but Chambers himself was awkward and socially inept, and he was tormented as much at school as he was able to take solace and his friends, but Chambers himself was awkward and socially

inept, and he was tormented as much at school as he was at home. His only escape was into the woods.

He spent long days walking alone in the woods near his home, in the world of nature. He said,

nature gives peace to anyone who comes to see and to hear

and not to change. As a teenager, he ran away from home. He got a job laying railways in the streets

in Washington, D.C. On that job, he experienced the hopelessness and the cruel mistreatment of the impoverished workers.

On his very first day on the job, as one of the streetcars slowed down in order to move through the work site,

a laughing passenger leaned his head out of the window and casually and deliberately spat tobacco juice all over him.

But among those workers, Chambers also experienced the unique compassion and mutual assistance

that the poor give to one another in their affliction.

After he was forced to return home, Chambers went to Columbia University, looking around

at the chaos and the injustice of the world, watching the developments in and after World

War I and also his own experience, he became convinced that society was sick, so sick that only surgery could save it. And he became

convinced that communism was history surgeon. He would later write, nobody becomes a communist because

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