Battle of Bretton Woods

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil, 348 pages

In July of 1944, even as American and British troops fought side-by-side through the hedgerows of Normandy, representatives of the two governments squared off against each other in a resort hotel overlooking the small town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.  They were gathered there, along with over 700 delegates from 42 other nations, to begin to construct a postwar international economic system.   Attention was centered on Lord John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist in the world and the head of the British delegation.  As a result of the war the United Kingdom was "mortgaged to America", a situation their delegation was eager to mitigate or escape.  The US delegation, meanwhile, saw the British Empire as a potential postwar rival, and would pursue an economic strategy designed to promote its dismemberment and assure postwar American dominance.  The architect of this American strategy was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, who organized and manipulated the conference, and who was also, unbeknownst to both his American and British peers, a Soviet agent.

Although the story of what happened at Bretton Woods - how it both succeeded and failed - is doubtlessly an important one, it mostly takes the form of interminable committee meetings and memoranda exchanges in which the most abstruse minutiae of international finance are discussed.  Somehow, Steil finds enough interest in the characters and enough humor in the proceedings to keep the reader awake despite these handicaps.

Witness

Witness by Whittaker Chambers, 799 pages

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, then an editor at Time magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He informed the committee of his long years in the Communist Party, first as a member of the "open" American Communist Party, later as a member of the Soviet Communist underground, assisting in the subversion of the US government, until his break with the Party in the mid-'30s.  Among the names Chambers named was that of Alger Hiss, then a highly placed official in the State Department.  The confrontation between Hiss and Chambers, as Hiss unsuccessfully sued Chambers for libel and then was himself convicted of perjury, polarized the nation.  Some saw Chambers' testimony as evidence of a vast Communist conspiracy, others as dangerous lies that had to be exposed, and still others believed that, even if what he said was true, it still had to be discredited lest it encourage the wrong kind of thinking.

Seventy years later, Witness, Chambers' autobiography written shortly after the conclusion of the Hiss case, can be read as a historical document chronicling a time when much of America's elites, faced with a choice between defending American institutions and providing cover for an aggressive dictatorship bent on subverting them, chose to side with Stalin.  More significantly, it can also be read as the story of the ultimately spiritual struggle of one man, sunk deep in darkness but saved by the light, who found the grace to witness to the truth in that world-historical moment.