Einar Gerhardsen

Einar Henry Gerhardsen was a Norwegian politician who served as the prime minister of Norway from 1945 to 1951, 1955 to 1963 and 1963 to 1965. With a total of 17 years in office, he is the longest serving Prime Minister in Norway since the introduction of parliamentarism. He was the leader of the Labour Party from 1945 to 1965.

Einar Gerhardsen was born in the municipality of Asker, in the county of Akershus. His parents were Gerhard Olsen (1867–1949) and Emma Hansen (1872–1949). His father was rodemester' roadworker in Public Roads Administration and was foreman of a trade union committee, fanekomiteen for Veivesenets arbeiderforening, and during Gerhardsen's childhood the trade union's leader, Carl Jørgensen, frequently visited their home, and sometimes they would sing The Internationale and Seieren følger våre faner ("Victory Follows Our Banners").

In 1932, he married Werna Julie Koren Christie (1912–1970), daughter of agent Johan Werner Koren Christie and Klara Rønning.[2] The couple had two sons, Truls and Rune and a daughter Torgunn. His brother was Rolf Gerhardsen and the pair also had a lifelong working relationship. From the age of seventeen, Gerhardsen attended meetings with the Labour Party's youth movement. In 1918, during the Finnish Civil War, Gerhardsen resigned his membership of the Church of Norway after the church sided with the "Whites" against the "Reds".

Originally a road worker, Gerhardsen became politically active in the socialist labour movement during the 1920s. He was convicted several times of taking part in subversive activities until he, along with the rest of the Labour Party, gradually moved from communism to democratic socialism. He participated in the Left Communist Youth League's military strike action of 1924. He was convicted for assisting in this crime and sentenced to 75 days in prison.

By the mid-1930s, Labour was a major force on the national political scene, becoming the party of government under Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold from 1935 until the Nazi invasion in 1940. Gerhardsen was elected to Oslo city council in 1932 and became deputy mayor in 1938. He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1939.

After the German occupation of Norway in 1940, Gerhardsen became acting Chairman of the Labour Party, as the chairman, Oscar Torp had gone into exile. Gerhardsen became Mayor of Oslo on 15 August 1940, but was forced to resign by the Germans on 26 August the same year. In September, the Nazi occupation government banned all parliamentary political parties, including the Labour Party.

During World War II, Gerhardsen took part in the organised resistance against the German occupation of Norway, and was arrested on 11 September 1941. Having already been under suspicion for a long time, Gerhardsen had been detained and subjected to interrogations on 31 previous occasions since the summer of 1940. Initially he was sent to Grini concentration camp in Norway. In February 1942, he was accused of leading resistance work from his imprisonment, and removed from the camp for interrogation. Initially interrogated at the police station at Møllergata 19, he was soon transferred to the Gestapo headquarters at Victoria Terrasse. At Victoria Terrasse, he was tortured to reveal information on the resistance, but did not give in. In April 1942, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. In September 1944, he was transferred back to Grini, where he spent the rest of the war.

After the war, Gerhardsen formed the interim government which sat from the end of the occupation in May 1945 until the general election held in October the same year. The election gave Labour an absolute majority in Parliament, the Storting, which it retained until 1961. Gerhardsen served as President of the Storting from 10 January 1954 to 22 January 1955.

During and after his periods in office, he was greatly respected by the people; even those not sharing his social democratic views. The administrations he led forged an eclectic economic policy in which government regulation of commerce, industry and banking. Abject poverty and unemployment were sharply reduced by his government's policies of industrialisation and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, together with the creation of a comprehensive social security system.

The Norwegian State Housing Bank Law of March 1946 introduced relatively cheap loans for co-operative housing societies and individual private builders. The Child Allowances Law of October 1946 introduced allowances for second and subsequent children under the age of sixteen years, while also providing allowances for single-parent families for the birth of their first child. Under a July 1947 law, unemployment insurance coverage was extended to agricultural workers and certain other groups. In 1947, a loan fund for students was introduced. That same year, housing allowances were introduced for families with two or more children below the age of sixteen years, “who live in dwellings financed through Housing Bank and in municipalities which pay one-third of the allowance.” The Comprehensive Schooling Law of July 1954 established nine-year comprehensive schooling on a trial basis, while the Sickness Insurance Law of March 1956 introduced compulsory insurance for all residents. A law in January 1960 introduced an invalidity pension scheme and a law of June 1961 extended accident coverage to military personnel and conscripts. In 1957, universal basic pensions were introduced. In 1957 an orphans’ pension scheme was established, and in 1958 university occupational injury insurance was introduced. In 1957, housing allowances were made available for single-parent families with children, and that same year, and income and property means test was introduced while the Housing Allowances Law was made compulsory for all municipalities. In 1964, a national widow’s benefit was introduced.

In foreign policy, Gerhardsen aligned Norway with the Western powers at the end of the 1940s after some initial hesitation within the governing party. He denounced Norwegian communists in the Kråkerøy speech in 1948, and had Norway become a founding member of NATO in 1949. Documents from 1958 reveal that the Gerhardsen's government knew that Israel was going to use heavy water supplied by Noratom for plutonium production, making it possible for Israel to produce nuclear weapons.

In November 1962, an accident in which 21 miners died occurred in the Kings Bay coal mine on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. In the aftermath, the Gerhardsen government was accused of not complying with laws enacted by parliament. In the summer of 1963 a vote of no confidence passed with the support of the Socialist People's Party and a centre-right minority coalition government was formed, under John Lyng. Although this new government lasted only three weeks, until the Socialist People's Party realigned itself with Labour, it formed the basis for an opposition victory under the leadership of Per Borten at the 1965 general election. Gerhardsen retired from national politics in 1969 but continued to influence public opinion through writing and speeches.

Gerhardsen's political legacy is still an important force in Norwegian politics, especially within his own party, although some of the social policies of his government have been revised. 

Gerhardsen spent the last years of his life in Oslo, where he died on 19 September 1987, at the age of 90. He was buried in the Vestre Gravlund,

Per Hækkerup

Per Hækkerup was a Danish Social Democratic politician, who served as Foreign Minister of Denmark from 1962 to 1966.

Hækkerup, the son of Hans Kristian Hækkerup, a politician, was active in politics from the end of the Second World War to his death in 1979. He was the chairman of the youth organization of the Danish Social Democrats from 1946 to 1952 and the secretary general of International Union of Socialist Youth from 1946 to 1951.

Hækkerup is most widely known for the agreement he reached with the Norwegian Minister Jens Evensen that gave Norway the oil-rich Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea. According to an urban legend, Hækkerup was drunk when he signed the agreement, but Danish historians today agree that the agreement was most fair and that Hækkerup was not drunk.

He was married to Grethe Hækkerup and is the father of Hans Hækkerup and Klaus Hækkerup.

Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers was an American author, journalist, and spy. 

Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April 1, 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His family moved to Lynbrook, Long Island, New York State, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school. He was the elder of the two sons of Jay Chambers, an artist and member of the Decorative Designers, and Laha née Whittaker, a social worker. Early on, the young Chambers chose to go by "Whittaker", his mother's maiden name, instead of his given name "Jay Vivian". He would later describe his childhood as troubled by the distant relation between his parents, which led to a temporary separation, and by the presence in their household of his mentally ill grandmother. After withdrawing from college, Chambers's younger brother Richard descended into alcoholism and committed suicide at age 22. Chambers would later describe his brother's death as one of the circumstances that attracted him to communism, a doctrine that "offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity, faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die."

After graduating from South Side High School in neighboring Rockville Centre in 1919, Chambers worked itinerantly in Washington and New Orleans, briefly attended Williams College, and then enrolled as a day student at Columbia College. At Columbia, his undergraduate peers included Meyer Schapiro, Frank S. Hogan, Herbert Solow, Louis Zukofsky, Arthur F. Burns, Clifton Fadiman, Elliott V. Bell, John Gassner, Lionel Trilling (who later fictionalized him as a main character in his novel The Middle of the Journey), Guy Endore, and City College student poet Henry Zolinsky. Chambers's early writing attracted attention and praise from his fellow students and from faculty members, including the poet and critic Mark Van Doren.

In his sophomore year, Chambers joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote a play called A Play for Puppets for Columbia's literary magazine The Morningside, which he edited. The work was deemed blasphemous by many students and administrators, and the controversy spread to New York City newspapers. Later, the play would be used against Chambers during his testimony against Hiss. Disheartened over the controversy, Chambers left Columbia in 1925. From Columbia, Chambers also knew Isaiah Oggins, who had gone into the Soviet underground a few years earlier; Chambers's wife, Esther Shemitz Chambers, knew Oggins's wife, Nerma Berman Oggins, from the Rand School of Social Science, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and The World Tomorrow.

In 1924, Chambers read Vladimir Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class", a malaise from which communism promised liberation. Chambers's biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin's authoritarianism was "precisely what attracts Chambers. Chambers became a Marxist and, in 1925, joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), then known as the Workers Party of America.

Chambers wrote and edited for the magazine New Masses and was an editor for the Daily Worker newspaper from 1927 to 1929.

Combining his literary talents with his devotion to communism, Chambers wrote four short stories for New Masses in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt, including Can You Make Out Their Voices?, which was considered by critics as one of the best pieces of fiction of American communism. Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitled Can You Hear Their Voices? (see Bibliography of Whittaker Chambers), staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator, his works including the English version of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods.

Chambers was recruited to join the "communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) spy ring headed by Alexander Ulanovsky, also known as Ulrich. Later, his main handler was Josef Peters, who was replaced by CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder with Rudy Baker. Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him to Harold Ware (although he later denied Peters had ever been introduced to Ware, and also testified to HUAC that he, Chambers, never knew Ware). Chambers claimed that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included the following:

Using the codename "Karl" or "Carl", Chambers served during the mid-1930s as a courier between various covert sources and Soviet intelligence. In addition to the Ware group mentioned above, other sources that Chambers alleged to have dealt with included the following:

Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938 even while his faith in communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, which began in 1936. He was also fearful for his own life since he had noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of Chambers's friend and fellow spy Juliet Stuart Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the communist cause because of the Stalinist Purges.

Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow since he worried that he might be "purged". He also started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use them, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" to prevent the Soviets from killing him and his family.

In 1938, Chambers broke with communism and took his family into hiding. He stored the "life preserver" at the home of his wife's sister, whose son Nathan Levine was Chambers's lawyer. Initially, he had no plans to give information on his espionage activities to the U.S. government. His espionage contacts were his friends, and he had no desire to inform on them.

In his examination of Chambers's conversion from the left to the right, author Daniel Oppenheimer noted that Chambers substituted his passion for communism with a passion for God and saw the world in black-and-white terms both before and after his defection. In his autobiography, Chambers presented his devotion to communism as a reason for living, but after his defection, he saw his actions as being part of an "absolute evil".

The August 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact drove Chambers to take action against the Soviet Union. In September 1939, at the urging of the anticommunist Russian-born journalist Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle. Levine had introduced Chambers to Walter Krivitsky, who was already informing American and British authorities about Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Krivitsky told Chambers that it was their duty to inform. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.

During the meeting at Berle's home, Woodley Mansion, in Washington, Chambers named several current and former government employees as spies or communist sympathizers. Many names mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already under suspicion. Some names were more significant and surprising: Alger Hiss, his brother Donald Hiss, and Laurence Duggan, who were all respected, mid-level officials in the State Department, and Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to Franklin Roosevelt. Another person named Vincent Reno had worked on a top-secret bombsight project at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

Berle found Chambers's information tentative, unclear, and uncorroborated. He took the information to the White House, but President Franklin Roosevelt dismissed it. Berle made little if any objection, but he kept his notes, which were later used as evidence during Hiss's perjury trials.

Berle notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Chambers's information in March 1940. In February 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. Police ruled the death a suicide, but it was widely speculated that Krivitsky had been killed by Soviet intelligence. Worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers too, Berle again told the FBI about his interview with Chambers. The FBI interviewed Chambers in May 1942 and June 1945 but took no immediate action in line with the political orientation of the United States, which viewed the potential threat from the Soviet Union as minor compared to that of Nazi Germany. Only in November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, the FBI began to take Chambers seriously.

During the Berle meeting, Chambers had come out of hiding after a year and joined the staff of Time (April 1939). He landed a cover story within a month on James Joyce's latest book, Finnegans Wake. He started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee and then Calvin Fixx. When Fixx suffered a heart attack in October 1942, Wilder Hobson succeeded him as Chambers's assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment. Other writers working for Chambers in that section included novelist Nigel Dennis, future New York Times Book Review editor Harvey Breit, and poets Howard Moss and Weldon Kees.

A struggle had arisen between those, like Theodore H. White and Richard Lauterbach, who raised criticism of what they saw as the elitism, corruption and ineptitude of Chiang Kai-shek's regime in China and advocated greater co-operation with Mao's Red Army in the struggle against Japanese imperialism, and Chambers and others like Willi Schlamm who adhered to a perspective that was staunchly pro-Chiang, anticommunist, and both later joined the founding editorial board of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review. Time founder Henry Luce, who grew up in China and was a personal friend of Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, came down squarely on the side of Chambers to the point that White complained that his stories were being censored and even suppressed in their entirety, and he left Time shortly after the war as a result.

In 1940, William Saroyan lists Fixx among "contributing editors" at Time in Saroyan's play, Love's Old Sweet Song. Luce promoted him senior editor in either summer 1942 (Weinstein[32]) or September 1943 (Tanenhaus) and became a member of Time's "Senior Group", which determined editorial policy, in December 1943.

Chambers, close colleagues, and many staff members in the 1930s helped elevate Time and have been called "interstitial intellectuals" by the historian Robert Vanderlan. His colleague John Hersey described them as follows:

Time was in an interesting phase; an editor named Tom Matthews had gathered a brilliant group of writers, including James Agee, Robert Fitzgerald, Whittaker Chambers, Robert Cantwell, Louis Kronenberger, and Calvin Fixx. ... They were dazzling. Time's style was still very hokey—"backward ran sentences till reeled the mind"—but I could tell, even as a neophyte, who had written each of the pieces in the magazine, because each of these writers had such a distinctive voice.

By early 1948, Chambers had become one of the best known writer-editors at Time. First had come his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on the Yalta Conference in which Hiss partook. Subsequent cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson, Arnold J. Toynbee, Rebecca West and Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on Marian Anderson ("Religion: In Egypt Land", December 30, 1946) proved so popular that the magazine broke its rule of non-attribution in response to readers' letters:

Most Time cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear. Certain cover stories, that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill, are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers.

In a 1945 letter to Time colleague Charles Wertenbaker, Time-Life deputy editorial director John Shaw Billings said of Chambers, "Whit puts on the best show in words of any writer we've ever had ... a superb technician, particularly skilled in the mosaic art of putting a Time section together." Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss case broke later that year.

In 1952, Chambers's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. It was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of communism. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it "a powerful book". Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican. Witness was a bestseller for more than a year and helped to pay off Chambers's legal debts, but bills lingered ("as Odysseus was beset by a ghost").

In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. started the magazine National Review, and Chambers worked there as senior editor, publishing articles there for a little over a year and a half (October 1957 – June 1959). The most widely cited article to date is a scathing review, "Big Sister is Watching You", of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

In 1959, Chambers resigned from National Review, although he continued correspondence with Buckley despite having suffered a series of heart attacks. In one letter, he noted, "I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative."

In that same year, Chambers and his wife embarked on a visit to Europe, the highlight of which was a meeting with Arthur Koestler and Margarete Buber-Neumann at Koestler's home in Austria.That fall, he recommenced studies at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster, Maryland.

Chambers married the artist Esther Shemitz and the couple had two children, Ellen and John, during the 1930s. While some Communist leadership expected professional revolutionists to go childless, the couple refused, a choice Chambers cited as part of his gradual disillusionment with communism.

Chambers's conversion to Christianity was expressed by his baptism and confirmation in the Episcopal Church, but more permanently in his and his family's request for membership in the Pipe Creek Friends Meetinghouse of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) near their farm in Maryland on August 17, 1943. They remained a part of this meeting until long after his death. In 1952, Chambers wrote a memoir, Witness, that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. Historian H. Larry Ingle argues that Witness is a "twentieth-century addition to the classic Quaker journals", and that "it is impossible to understand him without taking his religious convictions into consideration".

Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at his farm in Westminster, Maryland.

Why Do I Smoke a Pipe?

Why do I smoke a pipe?

Let us begin from the beginning. I grew up in a very conservative Southern Baptist home, my dad was a Southern Baptist Pastor and in the late 1980s early 1990s there was an emphasis on the dangers of cartoons and popular tv shows in children television and their development. So, my mom being the Southern Baptist pastor’s wife she took everything she heard, read, and decided to have me watch old movies that she did not think would be harmful. I grew up watching old AMC and Turner Classic Movie’s and in most of the movies that were aired at that time had men in suits and business attire smoking pipes. Leslie Howard, Cary Grant, Edgar G. Robinson, and Bing Crosby just being a few that left an indelible impression on me. The classic look of a man in his suit and tie smoking a pipe looked sophisticated. When I got older, I decided that I was going to smoke a pipe. I was 18 years old working in Memphis for a travel agency that was around the corner from the great Tobacco Corner owned and operated by a gentleman by the name of Elliot Abel. Elliot was extremely helpful in finding me my first pipe a Savinelli 626 Tortuga, that I still own to this day. Every pay period for the next 9 years was spent buying a new pipe and trying new tobaccos. By the time that the Tobacco Corner closed in 2019 I had accumulated over 140 pipes. In 2008 I started a blog that was just for my own enjoyment collecting photos and biographies of famous pipe smokers. From 2008 until today in 2025 I have accumulated over 1830 biographies of famous pipe smokers from around the world from authors, doctors, actors, educators, and politicians. As a new pipe smoker in 2004 I started with aromatic tobaccos but after a few years of smoking aromatic I slowly moved to English blends and Virginia blends. I still smoke an aromatic tobacco occasionally, when I am feeling nostalgic.  I enjoy smoking a pipe because it causes me to slow down and contemplate everything that I am doing. The process of smoking a pipe causes me to slow down in my life as well, the process of packing the pipe with tobacco, the lighting, the tamping, and the slowness that is needed to keep the pipe lit. Smoking a cigarette is quick and quickly discarded, a cigar is a longer smoke but is also discarded, where my pipe is a longer smoke but stays with me. The comradery of smoking a pipe with other pipe smokers is always a pleasure for me. My pipes are eclectic, I do not smoke just on brand alone I have English, Danish, Italian, French, and American pipe brands. I also do not smoke one particular pipe shape.  I smoke what I like and feel comfortable to me. I smoke a pipe because it takes me back to a simpler time in our society when things were slower and not so rushed.