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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

Their two stories matched almost word for word. Isn't that interesting? Of course that prothonotary warbler story became public property. I don't know if the spring water one has been told. I think that it probably is in Chambers‘book. I don't remember.

At any rate, I took his two chapters home. They were the first two chapters of Witness. They're superb. Chambers is one hell of a writer. Harry Luce once said that Whittaker Chambers was the best writer he ever had working for him in the whole history of Time and Life.

Well, I didn't know what to do. You know, I am a liberal. Publishing Whittaker Chambers seemed shocking to me at first. I showed those two chapters to several friends of mine whose opinion I respected who felt the same way in politics that I did--Bob Sherwood, Moss Hart, Laura Hobson, and even a fellow I knew named Chodorov, who was way over on the left. I wanted to see their reaction. Everyone of them said, “How this bastard can write! You've got to publish the book. Let people judge for themselves.”

So we signed up the book, and of course it was a huge best-seller. It stood me in good stead later on in a purely accidental way. When I first became a regular on “What's My Line?" this miserable grocer up in Syracuse, Mr. Johnson, who owned a big chain of stores, and was using as his Bible Red Channels, the paper that was trying to blacklist every liberal in the public arts, protested to “What's My Line?" and to CBS that he didn't think that I was the right person to be on





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