Whittaker Chambers

Growing up in Long Island, Whittaker Chambers attended Columbia University. His mentor was English professor Mark Van Doren. Classmates included Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Clifton Fadiman, and Louis Zukofsky. Before the university president could expel him, Chambers left for a year after publishing a blasphemous play in The Morningside literary magazine which he was editing (now Columbia Review). He returned to college studies after a trip to Europe in 1923, shocked by the post-WWI misery he saw.

Chambers joined the American Workers Party (aka the Communist Party of the USA) in 1925 while studying at Columbia University. After writing for The Daily Worker newspaper and becoming an editor (1931) of The New Masses magazine, the GRU recruited him into the Soviet underground (1932).

By the mid-1930s, Chambers had taken over one Federal espionage apparatus in Washington, DC, and begun a second. The Spanish Civil War and Great Purge helped lead Chambers to defect (1938). He hid with his family for many months. He shared his story with FDR Brain Trust member Adolph Berle, who disregarded the matter.

By 1939, Chambers resurfaced with a job at TIME magazine. There, he rose to become senior editor and special projects editor. He wrote numerous cover stories and essay. By 1947-1948, he was rising to the top of his career. The FBI occasionally interviewed him during the 1940s, but by then Chambers no longer wished to seek government intervention.

Following the Hollywood trials (1947), the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed Chambers in August 1948 to verify testimony of former Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley. Chambers did more, naming the names of nearly a dozen former Federal officials as part of his apparatus. From that moment onwards, Hiss-Chambers Case (or the Hiss Case) would remain frontline news for nearly 18 months.

The most prominent of those named, Harry Dexter White, denied Chambers' allegation, then died of a heart attack. Most pled the Fifth. That left Alger Hiss the sole person to deny Chambers' allegations.

Hiss testified before HUAC convincingly that he had never known Chambers, but, when brought together on August 25, 1948, Hiss backed down. Two days later, Chambers accused Hiss on the Meet the Press radio show. Hiss took a month but then sued Chambers in civil court. Meanwhile, both Hiss and Chambers found themselves testifying before a Grand Jury in New York, HUAC in Washington, and preparing for civil trial in Baltimore.

In November 1948, Chambers produced scores of typed and handwritten documents involving both Hiss and White for the Baltimore trial (properly known as the "Baltimore Documents"). Hiss surrendered the documents to the Justice Department, hoping to have Chambers indicted. Until that time, Chambers had testified that no one in his apparatus had engaged in espionage, but when he produced the Baltimore Documents, he changed his testimony.

Faced with admitted perjury by Chambers and possible perjury by Hiss, Justice stalled through November 1948. In December, realizing that Chambers might be holding more evidence, HUAC member Rep. Richard M. Nixon had Chambers subpoenaed for all evidence. To assure that no one would steal remaining microfilm from his Maryland farm before HUAC investigators arrived, Chambers hid the microfilm in a pumpkin on his farm overnight. Nixon paraded the misnamed "Pumpkin Papers" to the press, pressuring Justice to back off Chambers and look more closely at Hiss. On December 15, 1948, after investigating both men closely, Justice announced it was indicting Hiss on two counts of perjury.

A first Hiss trial in 1949 ended in a hung jury, but the second ended in a conviction against Hiss. The government made its cased based on testimony from Chambers, the handwritten and typed documents (including Hiss' own handwriting) and, later, the Woodstock typewriter owned by the Hiss Family which had produced a great number of the Baltimore Documents. In January 1950, his received his jail sentence.

Two weeks later, Senator Joseph McCarthy made his famous Wheeling speech. Within weeks, Klaus Fuchs would confess to atomic espionage in England, and the FBI would arrest Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others on similar charges. A second "Red Scare" of "McCarthyism" swept the nation during much of the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration.

Upon his conviction, Alger Hiss maintained that he could not understand how Whittaker Chambers had ever managed to enter his home and type documents on his Woodstock typewriter. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death in 1996. He became a cause celebre by liberals, who created an anti-anti-communist stance to counter anti-communism. The VENONA papers, which first came to public light in the mid-1990s, did much to finish discrediting his story.

Chambers did not live to see any of this. Isolated for the remainder of his life, he first wrote an autobiography, Witness (1952), serialized by The Saturday Evening Post and Readers Digest and a best-selling book (the proceeds of which went to cover his legal debts). He found himself a social pariah, unwelcome back at TIME or any other publication -- except William F. Buckley's new National Review magazine, which he joined for two years as a founding editor and contributor. Leaving the National Review, Chambers made a trip to Europe with his wife where he met Arthur Koestler (1959), then returned to America to resume college-level studies. He lived long enough to see both his two children married, then died of a seventh heart-attack at his Maryland home in July 1961 after suffering from angina pectoris for more than 20 years.

In 1964, Chambers' wife published a posthumous book of essay, Cold Friday. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1987, Secretary of Interior Donald Hodel placed the Whittaker Chambers Farm on the National Historic Register. Colleagues Buckley (1969) and Ralph de Toledano (1997) both published books of Chambers' letters to them.

Website: http://www.whittakerchambers.org/