Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, was an American writer-editor and former Communist spy who, in 1948, testified about Communist espionage, thereafter earning respect from the American Conservative movement. After early years as a Communist Party member and Soviet spy, he defected from the Soviet underground and joined Time magazine. Under subpoena in 1948, he testified about the Ware group in what became the Hiss case for perjury, all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.
Youth and education
Chambers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and spent his infancy in Brooklyn. His family moved to Lynbrook, Long Island, New York, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school. His parents were Jay Chambers and Laha Whittaker. Chambers described his childhood as troubled because of his parents' separation and their need to care for their mentally ill grandmother. His father was a half-closeted homosexual and treated Whittaker cruelly, while his mother was neurotic. Chambers's brother, Richard Godfrey Chambers, 22, committed suicide shortly after withdrawing from college. Chambers would cite his brother's fate as one of many reasons that he was drawn to communism at that time. As he wrote, communism "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 of Columbia University. 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, Guy Endore, and City College student poet Henry Zolinsky. In the intellectual environment of Columbia he gained friends and respect. His professors and fellow students found him a talented writer and believed he might become a major poet or novelist.
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 Alger Hiss. Disheartened over the controversy, Chambers left Columbia in 1925. From Columbia, Chambers also knew Isaiah Oggins, who went 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 ILGWU, and The World Tomorrow.
Communism and espionage
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.... He had at last found his church"; that is, he became a Marxist. In 1925, Chambers joined the Communist Party of the United States . Chambers wrote and edited for Communist publications, including The Daily Worker newspaper and The New Masses magazine.Combining his literary talents with his devotion to Communism, Chambers wrote four short stories in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt, including Can You Make Out Their Voices?, considered by critics as one of the best pieces of fiction from the American Communist movement. Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitled Can You Hear Their Voices?, staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator during this period; among his works was the English version of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods.
Harold Ware
Chambers was recruited to join the "Communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU apparatus headed by Alexander Ulanovsky. Later, his main controller in the underground was Josef Peters. Chambers claimed Peters introduced him to Harold Ware, and that he was head of a Communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included:| Name | Description |
| Lee Pressman | Assistant general counsel of Agricultural Adjustment Administration |
| John Abt | Chief of Litigation for AAA, assistant general counsel of the WPA 1935, chief counsel on Senator Robert La Follette Jr.'s La Follette Committee and special assistant to U.S. Attorney General |
| Marion Bachrach | Sister of John Abt; office manager to Representative John Bernard of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party |
| Alger Hiss | Attorney for AAA and Nye Committee; moved to Department of State in 1936, where he became an increasingly prominent figure |
| Donald Hiss | Brother of Alger Hiss; employed at Department of State |
| Nathan Witt | Employed at AAA; later moved to NLRB |
| Victor Perlo | Chief of Aviation Section of War Production Board; later, joined Office of Price Administration at Commerce and Division of Monetary Research at Treasury |
| Charles Kramer | Employed at Department of Labor's NLRB |
| George Silverman | Employed at RRB; later worked with Federal Coordinator of Transport, U.S. Tariff Commission and Labor Advisory Board of National Recovery Administration |
| Henry Collins | Employed at National Recovery Administration and later Agricultural Adjustment Administration |
| Nathaniel Weyl | Economist at AAA; later, defected from Communism himself and gave evidence against party members |
| John Herrmann | Author; assistant to Harold Ware; employed at Agricultural Adjustment Administration; courier and document photographer for Ware group; introduced Chambers to Hiss |
Apart from Marion Bachrach, these people were all members of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer among Communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents which were delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRU station chief.
Other covert sources
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:| Name | Description |
| Harry Dexter White | Director of Division of Monetary Research at Treasury |
| Harold Glasser | Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury |
| Noel Field | Employed at Department of State |
| Julian Wadleigh | Economist with Agriculture; later, Trade Agreements section of Department of State |
| Vincent Reno | Mathematician at U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground |
| Ward Pigman | Employed at National Bureau of Standards, then Labor and Public Welfare Committee |
Break with Communism
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, having 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 due to the Stalinist Purges.Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow, worried that he might be "purged." He also started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use these, 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, storing the "life preserver" at the home of his nephew and his parents. 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 political left to the right, author Daniel Oppenheimer noted that Chambers substituted his passion for communism for a passion for God. Chambers saw the world in black and white terms both before his defection and after. In his autobiography, he presented his devotion to communism as a reason for living, but after defecting saw his actions as being part of an "absolute evil."
Berle meeting
The August 1939 Hitler–Stalin non-aggression pact drove Chambers to take action against the Soviet Union. In September 1939, at the urging of anti-Communist, 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 it was their duty to inform. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution. During the meeting, which took place 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, however, 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' information tentative, unclear, and uncorroborated. He took the information to the White House, but the President dismissed it, to which Berle made little if any objection. Berle kept his notes, however.
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. While police ruled the death a suicide, 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 USSR as minor, when compared to that of Nazi Germany. Only in November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, did the FBI begin to take Chambers seriously.
''Time''
By the time of the Berle meeting, Chambers had come out of hiding after a year and joined the staff of Time. 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.During this time, a struggle arose 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 cooperation with Mao's Red Army in the struggle against Japanese imperialism, and Chambers and others like Willi Schlamm who adhered to a staunchly pro-Chiang, anti-communist perspective. Time founder Henry Luce, who grew up in China and was a personal friend of Chiang and his wife, 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 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 or September 1943 and became a member of Time's "Senior Group" in December 1943.
Chambers, close colleagues, and many staff members as of the 1930s helped elevate TIME–"interstitial intellectuals," as historian Robert Vanderlan has called them. 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" on the Yalta Conference. Subsequent cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson, Arnold J. Toynbee, Rebecca West and Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on Marian Anderson 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.
During this period, Chambers and his family became Quakers, attending Pipe Creek Friends Meetinghouse near his Maryland farm.
Hiss case
On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There he gave the names of individuals he said were part of the underground "Ware group" in the late 1930s, including Alger Hiss. He thus once again named Hiss as a member of the Communist Party, but did not yet make any accusations of espionage. In subsequent HUAC sessions, Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew anyone by the name of Chambers, but on seeing him in person, said that he had known Chambers under the name "George Crosley". Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist, however. Since Chambers still presented no evidence, the committee had initially been inclined to take the word of Hiss on the matter. However, committee member Richard Nixon received secret information from the FBI which had led him to pursue the issue. When it issued its report, HUAC described Hiss's testimony as "vague and evasive"."Red Herring"
The country quickly became divided over the Hiss–Chambers issue. President Harry S. Truman, not pleased with the allegation that the man who had presided over the United Nations Charter Conference was a Communist, dismissed the case as a "red herring".In the atmosphere of increasing anti-communism that would later be termed McCarthyism, many conservatives viewed the Hiss case as emblematic of what they saw as Democrats' laxity towards the danger of communist infiltration and influence in the State Department. Many liberals, in turn, saw the Hiss case as part of the desperation of the Republican party to regain the office of president, having been out of power for 16 years. Truman also issued Executive Order 9835, which initiated a program of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947.
"Pumpkin Papers"
Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers on October 8, 1948. Under pressure from Hiss's lawyers, Chambers finally retrieved his envelope of evidence and presented it to the HUAC after they subpoenaed them. It contained four notes in Alger Hiss's handwriting, sixty-five typewritten copies of State Department documents and five strips of microfilm, some of which contained photographs of State Department documents. The press came to call these the "Pumpkin Papers" referring to the fact that Chambers had briefly hidden the microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin. These documents indicated that Hiss knew Chambers long after mid-1936, when Hiss said he had last seen "Crosley," and also that Hiss had engaged in espionage with Chambers. Chambers explained his delay in producing this evidence as an effort to spare an old friend from more trouble than necessary. Until October 1948, Chambers had repeatedly stated that Hiss had not engaged in espionage, even when Chambers testified under oath. Chambers was forced to testify at the Hiss trials that he had committed perjury several times, which reduced his credibility in the eyes of his critics.The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files. Independent researcher Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, sued the U.S. Justice Department in 1975 when his request for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act was denied. On July 31, 1975, as a result of this lawsuit and follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and William Reuben, the Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film turned out to be totally blank due to overexposure, two others are faintly legible copies of nonclassified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of the State Department documents introduced by the prosecution at the two Hiss trials, relating to U.S./German relations in the late 1930s.
This story, however, as reported by the New York Times in the 1970s, contains only a partial truth. The blank roll had been mentioned by Chambers in his autobiography Witness. But in addition to innocuous farm reports, etc., the documents on the other pumpkin patch microfilms also included "confidential memos sent from overseas embassies to diplomatic staff in Washington, D.C."; worse, those memos had originally been transmitted in code, which, thanks to their having both coded originals and the translations forwarded by Hiss, the Soviets now could easily understand.
Perjury
Hiss could not be tried for espionage at that time, because the evidence indicated the offense had occurred more than ten years prior to that time, and the statute of limitations for espionage was five years. Instead, Hiss was indicted for two counts of perjury relating to testimony he had given before a federal grand jury the previous December. There he had denied giving any documents to Whittaker Chambers, and testified he had not seen Chambers after mid-1936.Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June 1949, ended with the jury deadlocked eight to four for conviction. In addition to Chambers's testimony, a government expert testified that other papers typed on a typewriter belonging to the Hiss family matched the secret papers produced by Chambers. An impressive array of character witnesses appeared on behalf of Hiss: two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, former Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis and future Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Chambers, on the other hand, was attacked by Hiss's attorneys as "an enemy of the Republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect for matrimony or motherhood". In the second trial, Hiss's defense produced a psychiatrist who characterized Chambers as a "psychopathic personality" and "a pathological liar".
The second trial ended in January 1950 with Hiss found guilty on both counts of perjury. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
Chambers had resigned from Time in December 1948. After the Hiss Case, he wrote a few articles for Fortune, Life, and Look magazines.
In 1951 during HUAC hearings, William Spiegel of Baltimore identified a photo of "Carl Schroeder" as Whittaker Chambers while he was describing his involvement with David Zimmerman, a spy in Chambers' network.
''Witness''
In 1952, Chambers's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of Communism. Arthur 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 pay off Chambers's legal debts, though bills lingered.According to commentator George Will in 2017:
Witness became a canonical text of conservatism. Unfortunately, it injected conservatism with a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism. It is the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing Buckley's legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture. Chambers wallowed in cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment about "the plain men and women"—"my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness"—enduring the "musk of snobbism" emanating from the "socially formidable circles" of the "nicest people" produced by "certain collegiate eyries."
''National Review''
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. The most widely cited article to date is a scathing review, "Big Sister is Watching You", of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.In 1959, after resigning from National Review, 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 in Westminster, Maryland.
Personal life and death
In 1930 or 1931, Chambers married the artist Esther Shemitz. Shemitz, who had studied at the Art Students League and integrated herself into New York City's intellectual circles, met Chambers at the 1926 textile strike at Passaic, New Jersey. They then underwent a stormy courtship that faced resistance from their comrades, with Chambers having climbed through her window at five o'clock in the morning to propose. Shemitz identified as "a pacifist rather than a revolutionary." In the 1920s, she worked for The World Tomorrow, a pacifist magazine.The couple had two children, Ellen and John during the 1930s.. Daughter Ellen died in 2017. Her children are Stephen, Pamela, and John Into: Kyle Into is one of her grandchildren.
In 1978, Allen Weinstein's Perjury revealed that the FBI has a copy of a letter in which Chambers described homosexual liaisons during the 1930s. The letter copy states that Chambers gave up these practices in 1938 when he left the underground, attributed to newfound Christianity. The letter has remained controversial from many perspectives.
Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at his farm in Westminster, Maryland. He had suffered from angina since the age of 38 and had previously suffered several heart attacks.
Cold Friday, his second memoir, was published posthumously in 1964 with the help of Duncan Norton-Taylor. The book predicted that the fall of Communism would start in the satellite states surrounding the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. A collection of his correspondence with William F. Buckley, Jr., Odyssey of a Friend, was published in 1968; a collection of his journalism—including several of his Time and National Review writings, was published in 1989 as Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers
Awards
- 1952 – Honorary Doctorate of Law from Mount Mary College
- 1953 – National Book Award finalist for nonfiction
- 1984 – Presidential Medal of Freedom
Legacy
Chambers's book Witness is on the reading lists of The Heritage Foundation, The Weekly Standard, The Leadership Institute, and the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. He is regularly cited by conservative writers such as Heritage's president Edwin Feulner and George H. Nash.
In 2007, John Chambers stated that a library with his father's papers should open in 2008 on the Chambers farm in Maryland. He indicated that the facility will be available to all scholars and that a separate library, rather than one within an established university, is needed to guarantee open access.
In 2011, author Elena Maria Vidal interviewed David Chambers about his grandfather's legacy. Versions of the interview were published in the National Observer and The American Conservative.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism". In 1988, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel granted national landmark status to the Pipe Creek Farm. In 2001, members of the George W. Bush Administration held a private ceremony to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Chambers's birth. Speakers included William F. Buckley, Jr.Shortlived "Whittaker Chambers Award"
In January 2017, the National Review Institute inaugurated a "Whittaker Chambers Award" for its 2017 Ideas Summit.Recipients:
- Daniel Hannan: On March 16, 2017, the first recipient was Daniel Hannan MEP, dubbed "the man who brought you Brexit" by The Guardian.
- Mark Janus: In February 2019, NRI announced its second biennial winner of the award, Mark Janus. Supporters say Janus champions free speech; detractors say he seeks to erode public unions by enabling free rides.
All of us agree: the efforts of the two awardees run counter to the instincts and experience of Whittaker Chambers. All of us agree: their efforts have not matched his."Chambers' son said that the two awardees "are way, way off the target of the man whose name goes along with the award." One grandchild said, "I almost thought, well, 'Gosh, did the National Review guys read his book?'" Regarding the award to Daniel Hannan, another grandchild said, "My grandfather would have been horrified" by a Brexiteer who sought to divide the West, as if were a favor to the "very Stalin-like" Vladimir Putin." Regarding the anti-union Mark Janus, the family noted that Chambers' wife, Esther Shemitz had been a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and that other family members were active in unions, including Chambers himself in the Newspaper Guild.
In response, National Review conceded, "We don't own the Chambers name". While it refused the family's request to withdraw the two awards, it did agree to discontinue it. It also agreed to publish the Chambers' statement on its website the weekend after the award.
After National Review did not publish on time as promised, the family published themselves.