Whittaker Chambers

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Whittaker Chambers, 1948
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Whittaker Chambers, 1948

Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, Communist party-member-turned-defector, best known for his testimony about the alleged espionage and subversion of Alger Hiss.

Contents

[edit] Youth and Education

Whittaker Chambers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and spent much of his youth in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York His father, Jay Chambers, was an illustrator and part of the New York-based "Decorative Designers" group, largely students of Howard Pyle. Jay Chambers was bisexual, conflicted about his family life, and periodically disappeared from the household. Whittaker's mother is described as romantic and artistic. He had a grandmother who suffered from mental illness and a brother who committed suicide.[1]

After graduating from high school in 1919, he worked for two years in a bank before enrolling in Columbia University in 1921. University officials later found that much of his application for admission included references that did not exist.[citation needed] Classmates included Louis Zukofsky, Lionel Trilling (who later made him a main character in his novel Middle of the Journey) and Meyer Schapiro. His professors found him a talented writer and highly intelligent, and he was also described as being "brilliant, disturbed, idealistic, dysfunctional" and prone to destructive drinking binges.[2] Mark Van Doren was a mentor who helped introduce him to Communism. Chambers was expelled from Columbia in 1922 for a play the administration deemed blasphemous, which was later published (see Can You Hear Their Voices? in bibliography, below).

[edit] Communism and Defection

In 1924, Chambers read Nikolai 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 Chambers was attracted by Lenin's authoritarianism; that it was "precisely what attracts Chambers… He had at last found his church." In 1925, Chambers joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and wrote and edited for Communist periodicals, including The Daily Worker and The New Masses.

In 1931 he married Esther Shemitz, a young artist and fellow Communist whom he had encountered at a party-organized textile strike in 1926; the couple had a son and a daughter. In 1932 Chambers was recruited to join the Communist underground and began his career as a spy. It is claimed that in 1933 he was sent to Moscow for intelligence training, but Chambers always denied this, saying the incident was based on a prank postcard he sent to friend Meyer Schapiro. His main controller in the underground was Josef Peters (whom CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder later replaced with Rudy Baker). People involved or associated with Chambers included William Spiegel, Arvid Jacobson, Joshua Tamer, David Zimmerman, John Scott, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Viktor Vasilevish Sveshchnikov, David Weintraub, and Grace Lumpkin (a friend of Chambers' wife).

[edit] The Ware Group

Peters introduced Chambers to Harold Ware, head of the Ware group, a Communist underground cell in Washington that included Henry Collins, Lee Pressman and allegedly, Alger Hiss. These men 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 Illegal Rezident (a Soviet spymaster who resides in the US undercover, rather than as an embassy employee).

[edit] Members of the Karl group

"Karl" and "Carl" were cryptonyms used by Chambers in the mid-1930s as courier between the CPUSA secret apparatus and Soviet intelligence. It appears that after the mysterious death of the NKVD Illegal Rezident Valentin Markin in August 1934, within days the Karl group was transferred to the GRU Illegal Rezident Boris Bykov. Members allegedly included:

[edit] Defection

Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938, but his faith in Communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by Josef Stalin's Great Purge, which began about 1936. He was also fearful for his own life, having noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignatz Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of his friend and fellow spy Juliet 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.[3]

In his last years as a spy for the Soviets, Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow, worried that he might be "purged." He also started holding back 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" that would convince the Soviets that they could not afford to kill him.

In 1938, Chambers broke with Communism and took his family into hiding, storing a large manila envelope of the documents he had saved in a safe place. Initially he had no plans for giving 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.

The 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was reportedly the final straw for Chambers.[4] He saw this a betrayal of Communist values, and was also afraid that the information he had been supplying to the Soviets would be made available to Nazi Germany.

On September of 1939, Chambers flew to Washington and met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle. He named eighteen current and former government employees as spies or Communist sympathizers. Most of the names he mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already widely suspected of being Communists. Two names were more significant, however: the brothers Donald and Alger Hiss, who were respected midlevel officials in the State Department.

There was little immediate result to Chambers's confession. He chose not to produce his envelope of evidence at this time, and Berle thought his information was tentative, unclear and uncorroborated. Years later, Berle would explain that "you didn't go to the President with reports that were relatively so unsubstantial as that." Berle didn't even notify the FBI of Chambers's information until 1941. In February of that year the famed Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. The death was ruled 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 told the FBI about his interview with Chambers. The FBI took no immediate action, however. Although Chambers was interviewed by the FBI in May of 1942 and June of 1945, it wasn't until November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, that the FBI began to take him seriously.[5]

Meanwhile, After living in hiding for a year, Chambers joined the staff of TIME Magazine in 1940. Starting at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee, he would eventually rise to the position of a senior editor. While at TIME, Chambers became known as a staunch anti-Communist, sometimes enraging his writers with the changes he made to their stories.[6] Some colleagues, led by Richard Lauterbach and Theodore White, tried to have publisher Henry Luce remove him, but Luce was also a staunch anti-Communist.

It was during this period after his defection that Chambers and his family became members of Pipe Creek Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, about twelve miles from his Maryland farm.

[edit] The Hiss Case

On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here 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 didn't yet make any accusations of espionage. In subsequent HUAC sessions, Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew Chambers, but on seeing him in person (and after it became clear that Chambers knew details about Hiss's life), said that he had been 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."

The country quickly became divided over the Hiss-Chambers issue. President Truman, not pleased with the allegation that a prominent official with his State Department was a Communist, dismissed the case as a "red herring."[7] In the atmosphere of increasing anti-communism that would be later be termed McCarthyism, many conservatives saw the Hiss case as emblematic of the Democrat's laxity towards Communist infiltration and influence in the State Department.

On October 8, 1948 Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers. At this point, Chambers finally retrieved his envelope of evidence and presented it to Hiss's lawyers and to HUAC. It contained four notes in Alger Hiss's handwriting, sixty-five typewritten copies of State Department documents and five strips of 35mm film with photographs of State and Navy 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. Prior to this time, Chambers had repeatedly stated or testified that Hiss had not engaged in espionage, and this fact would be used by Hiss's defenders to impugn Chambers's credibility.

Hiss could not be tried for espionage at this time, because the evidence indicated the offence had occurred over ten years ago, 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 hadn't seen Chambers after mid 1936.

Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June of 1949, ended with a hung jury. In addition to Chambers's testimony, a key piece of evidence was a typewriter that had belonged to the Hiss family, and which analysis indicated had been used to type the documents Chambers had produced. 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."[8] 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 of 1950 with Hiss found guilty on both counts. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

[edit] After the Hiss case

Chambers had resigned from TIME in December 1948. After the trial his close friend William F. Buckley, Jr. initiated the magazine National Review and Chambers briefly worked there as senior editor. He also wrote for Fortune and Life magazines.

In 1952 Chambers wrote his autobiography Witness, which was highly praised for the quality of its writing and was a bestseller for almost a year. The royalties helped to offset legal expenses Chambers had been accumulating since 1948. Witness was not only an account of Chambers's life, but also a pessimistic warning about the dangers of Communism and liberalism.

Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at the age of 60. He had suffered from angina since the age of 38, and had had several heart attacks previously.

His second book, Cold Friday, 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.

[edit] Recent evidence

At Chambers's first testimony before HUAC, he implicated Harry Dexter White as well as Alger Hiss as a covert member of the Communist party. White died shortly thereafter, so the case didn't receive the attention that the charges against Hiss did. Transcripts of coded Soviet messages decrypted through the Venona project, revealed in 1995, have added evidence regarding White's covert involvement with Communists and Soviet intelligence. Venona evidence regarding Alger Hiss is less conclusive, though it was sufficient for a bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to conclude "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department." [9] A review of Soviet intelligence files by former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev produced further corroboration of Chamber's Congressional testimony when a list of Soviet agents and intelligence sources from the period was found, apparently including Alger Hiss (Soviet code name "Leonard"), Harry White, and Harold Glasser. Chambers' real name and code designation was also listed in the memorandum--as well as a notation listing him as a Soviet "traitor".[10]

[edit] Legacy

In the years since the Hiss trials, the debate about Hiss's guilt and Chambers's truthfulness has continued. Both Hiss and Chambers still have their defenders and detractors, often divided along liberal/conservative political lines.[11]

Chambers's book Witness is on the reading lists of the Heritage Foundation, The Weekly Standard, and the Russell Kirk Center. He is regularly cited by conservative writers such as Heritage's president Edwin Feulner.

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."[12] In 2001, members of the George W. Bush Administration held a private ceremony to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Chambers' birth. Speakers included William F. Buckley Jr.

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Tanenhaus, Sam (1998). Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75145-9.
  2. ^ Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press, pp 28, 29. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
  3. ^ Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press, pg. 17. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
  4. ^ Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press, pg. 31. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
  5. ^ Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press, pg. 32. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
  6. ^ Sterling, Dorothy (Feb. 28, 1984). Whittaker Chambers: Odd Choice for the Medal of Freedom. Letters to the Editor. New York Times.
  7. ^ Linder, Douglas. The Alger Hiss Trials. "Famous Trials". University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law.
  8. ^ Linder, Douglas. The Alger Hiss Trials. "Famous Trials". University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law.
  9. ^ Appendix A; SECRECY; A Brief Account of the American Experience (PDF). Report Of The Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy pp. A-37. United States Government Printing Office (1997).
  10. ^ Vassiliev, Alexander (2005). Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks.
  11. ^ See, for example Fukuyama, Francis (2006). The American Way of Secrecy. Sunday Book Review. New York Times.
  12. ^ Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Whittaker Chambers (March 26, 1984).

[edit] Writings by Chambers

[edit] Books and plays

  • Chambers, Whittaker (1932). Can You Hear Their Voices?. International Pamphlets.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1964). Cold Friday. Random House. ISBN 0-394-41969-3.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1952). Witness. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 0-89526-571-0.

[edit] Online

[edit] Collections

  • Chambers, Whittaker (1987). Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F.Buckley Jr. 1954-1961. Regnery Publishing, Inc.. ISBN 0-89526-567-2.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1997). Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers/Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960. Regnery Publishing, Inc.. ISBN 0-89526-425-0.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1989). Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959. Regnery Publishing, Inc.. ISBN 0-89526-765-9.

[edit] Books on the Hiss-Chambers Case

  • De Toledano, Ralph and Lasky, Victor (1950). Seeds of Treason - The True Story of the Hiss-Chambers Tragedy. Funk and Wagnalls. ISBN 1-139-72266-3.
  • Cooke, Alistair (1950). A Generation on Trial: USA v. Alger Hiss. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23373-X.
  • Morris, Richard Brandon (1952). Fair trial: Fourteen who stood accused from Anne Hutchinson to Alger Hiss. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-428-62638-7.
  • Jowitt, William Allen (1953). The Strange Case of Alger Hiss. Hodder and Stoughton.
  • Kempton, Murray (1955 (2003 reprint)). Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties. NYRB Classics. ISBN 1-59017-087-3.
  • Hiss, Alger (1957). In the Court of Public Opinion. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-090293-0.
  • Cook, Fred J. (1958). The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 1-131-85352-0.
  • Andrews, Bert & Andrews, Peter (1962). A Tragedy Of History: A Journalist's Confidential Role In The Hiss-Chambers Case. Robert B. Luce.
  • Zeligs, Meyer A. (1967). Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. New York Viking Press. ISBN 1-199-49987-0.
  • Seth, Ronald (1968). The Sleeping Truth: The Hiss-Chambers Affair Reappraised. Frewin. ISBN 0-09-086890-0.
  • Smith, John Chabot (1976). Alger Hiss, The True Story. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 0-03-013776-4.
  • Hiss, Tony (1977). Laughing last: Alger Hiss. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-24899-X.
  • Weinstein, Allen (1978). Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House. ISBN 0-679-77338-X.
  • Levitt, Morton and Levitt, Michael (1979). Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss. Random House. ISBN 0-517-37134-0.
  • Theoharis, Athan (Editor) (1982). Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War. Temple University Press. ISBN 0-87722-241-X.
  • Reuben, William A (1983). Footnote on an Historic Case: In Re Alger Hiss, No. 78 Civ. 3433. Nation Institute. ISBN 0-458-93689-9.
  • Moore, William Howard (1987). Two foolish men: The true story of the friendship between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Moorop Press.
  • Hiss, Alger (1989). Recollections of a Life. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 1-55970-024-6.
  • Gwynn, Beatrice (1993). Whittaker Chambers: The Discrepancy in the Evidence of the Typewriter. Mazzard Publishers. ISBN 0-9518738-1-4.
  • Worth, Esme J. (1993). Whittaker Chambers: The Secret Confession. Mazzard Publishers. ISBN 0-9518738-0-6.
  • Oeste, Bob (1996). Last Pumpkin Paper (novel). Random House. ISBN 0-679-44837-3.
  • Tanenhaus, Sam (1998). Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75145-9.
  • Hiss, Tony (1999). The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir. Alfred E. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40127-X.
  • Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
  • Swan, Patrick (Editor) (2003). Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. ISI Books. ISBN 1-882926-91-9.
  • White, G. Edward (2005). Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-518255-3.
  • Ruddy, T. Michael (2004). The Alger Hiss Espionage Case. Wadsworth Publishing. ISBN 0-15-508560-3.

[edit] Chambers and Soviet Espionage

[edit] External links

[edit] Video on Chambers

  • RAM Whittaker Chambers on "close friends"
  • RAM Alger Hiss Story - Chambers on the "tragedy of history"
  • RAM Alger Hiss defends himself

[edit] Photos

  • 1931 Whittaker Chambers
  • 1939 Whittaker Chambers
  • 1948 Whittaker Chambers before HUAC
  • 1950 Whittaker Chambers reading of Hiss guilty verdict
  • 1961 Whittaker Chambers near the time of his death
  • 1948 A young Richard Nixon posing with the "Pumpkin Papers" microfilm

[edit] See also

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