“A Third Ending”

A Chinese national and her husband were arrested this week on Long Island for allegedly spying for the Chinese government. Linda Sun was charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (1938), visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering. Her husband, Christopher Hu, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and misuse of identification. He allegedly orchestrated the transfer of millions of dollars in kickbacks for himself and his wife.

Sun worked as a top-level aide to New York governors Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo until being fired from her job as liaison to the Asian community in March 2023 for misconduct. The indictment accuses her of forging Hochul’s signature and editing Cuomo’s statements to allow Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members to enter the United States illegally and meet with government officials to advance CCP interests.

Much of mainstream media’s analysis has pointed to CCP infiltration into state and federal governments. This raises alarm in the public for obvious reasons, particularly given the volatile political situation and concerns about election tampering from both the progressive Left and conservative Right. In fact, the attorney for the government has argued that “Sun wielded her position of influence among executives to covertly promote [People’s Republic of China] and [Chinese Community Party] agendas, directly threatening our country’s national security.”

If the CCP has infiltrated governmental agencies to such a degree–and there’s little reason to believe otherwise (just think of Nancy Pelosi’s chauffeur)–it wouldn’t be the first time in modern history that a foreign, hostile government has done so. While I don’t believe Russia and Putin are responsible for everything sinister that happens in the world, there was a time when Russian penetration into departments and positions of influence in the government was considerable (cf., Venona Project).

The following excerpt by Whittaker Chambers is taken from his beautifully written memoir, Witness, which I am currently reading, and provides an account of the Alger Hiss case (1948-1950). Hiss, a former State Department attorney, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union during the 1930s when Chambers worked for the Soviet underground in America. The statute of limitations had run out by the time of the trial and retrial, however, and Hiss ultimately served time in federal prison for perjury, all the while maintaining his innocence.

Witness tells the story of Chambers’ conversion from a committed communist convinced that “the revolution is made by any and all means” to a Christian who understood that “the basic virtue of life is humility.” Chambers rejected both godless communism on one hand and a managerial life of gray flannel suits on the other in favor of what he called a “third ending.” The following account is his description of that ending. It may surprise you.

I have sought, too, to report, more painfully, how out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century, which is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form, so that the characteristic experience of the mind in this age is a political experience. At every point, religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men–those who reject and those who worship God–becomes irrepressible. Those camps are not only outside, but also within nations.

The most conspicuously menacing form of that rejection is Communism. But there are other forms of the same rejection, which in any case, Communism did not originate, but merely adopted and adapted.

Until 1937, I had been, in this respect, a typical modern man, living without God except for tremors of intuition. In 1938 there seemed no possibility that I would not continue to live out my life as such a man. Habit and self-interest both presumed it. I had been for thirteen years a Communist; and in Communism could be read, more directly with each passing year, the future of mankind, as, with each passing year, the free world shrank in power and faith, including faith in itself, and sank deeper into intellectual and moral chaos. Yet, in 1938, I gave a different ending to that life.

Again, in 1948, exactly ten years later, I was leading a life prosperous beyond most men’s dreams and peaceful beyond my hopes. On its surface, this was the other typical life of my time–the life of career and success. Again, there seemed no possibility that I would not lead that second life to its close. I did not do so.

In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral. They give men the heart to suffer the ordeal of a life that perpetually rends them between its beauty and its terror. If my story is worth telling, it is because I rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of life in our time–the revolutionary ending and the success ending. I chose a third ending.

For content sources, see MSN.com, NBCnews.com, US DOJ. Image credits: feature by Fred Palumbo, World Telegram photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c14739, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1265950. Excerpt from Whittaker Chambers, Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation (Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC, 1952, 1969, 1984 ed), 386.