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Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, Communist party member and spy for the Soviet Union who defected and became an outspoken opponent of communism. He is best known for his testimony about the perjury and alleged espionage and subversion of Alger Hiss.

Contents 1 Youth and education 2 Communism and espionage 2.1 The Ware Group 2.2 The Karl group 3 Defection 3.1 Editor at Time Magazine 4 The Hiss case 5 After the Hiss case 5.1 Recent evidence 5.2 Legacy 6 See also 6.1 Associated people 6.2 Biographers 6.3 Related topics 7 Notes and references 7.1 Writings by Chambers 7.2 External links

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. He grew up in a household which he himself described as troubled by parental separation and the long-term presence of a mentally ill grandmother.^[1]

After graduating from high school in 1919, he worked at a variety of jobs before enrolling in Columbia University in 1921. 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 and fellow students found him a talented writer and believed he might become a major poet or novelist.^[2] In the intellectual environment of Columbia he finally gained friends and respect. Historian Kathryn Olmsted has described him as being, at this time in his life, "brilliant, disturbed, idealistic, dysfunctional."^[3] Early in his sophomore year, Chambers wrote a play entitled "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. Disheartened over the furor, Chambers decided to leave the college.

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." 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. Chambers combined his literary talents with his devotion to Communism, writing four short stories in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt. One of these was Can You Make Out Their Voices?, which has been described by critics as one of the best pieces of fiction to come out of the American Communist movement.^[4] This story was later published as the play Can You Hear Their Voices? (see Writings by Chambers, below), and staged across America and in many other countries. His other works during this time include the English translation of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods.

In 1931, Chambers married Esther Shemitz (1900-1986 ^[5]), a young artist and fellow Communist whom he had encountered at a party-organized textile strike in 1926; the couple would eventually have a son and a daughter.

In 1932, Chambers was recruited to join the Communist underground and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU apparatus headed by Alexander Ulanovsky, aka Ulrich. Afterward, his main controller in the underground was Josef Peters (whom CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder later replaced with Rudy Baker). Peters introduced Chambers to Harold Ware, head of the Ware group, a Communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included:

• Henry Collins, employed at the National Recovery Administration and later the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).
• Lee Pressman, assistant general counsel of the AAA.
• Alger Hiss, attorney for the AAA and the Nye Committee; he moved to the Department of State in 1936, where he became an increasingly prominent figure.
• John Abt, chief of Litigation for the AAA from 1933 to 1935, assistant general counsel of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, chief counsel on Senator Robert La Follette, Jr.'s LaFollette Committee from 1936 to 1937 and special assistant to the United States Attorney General, 1937 and 1938.
• Charles Kramer, employed at the Department of Labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
• Nathan Witt, employed at the AAA; later moved to the NLRB.
• George Silverman, employed at the Railroad Retirement Board; later worked with the Federal Coordinator of Transport, the United States Tariff Commission and the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration.
• Marion Bachrach, sister of John Abt; office manager to Representative John Bernard of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.
• John Herrmann, author; assistant to Harold Ware; employed at the AAA; currier and document photographer for the Ware group; introduced Chambers to Hiss.
• Nathaniel Weyl, author; would later defect from Communism himself and give evidence against party members.
• Donald Hiss, brother to Alger Hiss; employed at the Department of State.
• Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, later joined the Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce and the Division of Monetary Research at the Department of Treasury.

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 Illegal Rezident (a Soviet spymaster who resides in the US undercover, rather than as an embassy employee).

"Karl" and "Carl" were codenames used by Chambers in the mid-1930s as courier between the CPUSA secret apparatus and Soviet intelligence. Thus "the Karl group" was used to refer to all the covert sources he dealt with. In addition to the Ware groupe mentioned above, members of the Karl group allegedly included:

• Noel Field, employed at the Department of State.
• Harold Glasser, Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury.
• Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Price Administration; National Labor Relations Board; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education; Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Senate Civil Liberties Subcommittee, an economist with the Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee.
• Ward Pigman, employed at the National Bureau of Standards; Labor and Public Welfare Committee.
• Vincent Reno, a mathematician at the U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground.
• George Silverman, an economist and mathematician with the Railroad Retirement Board; later with the Federal Coordinator of Transport, the United States Tariff Commission and the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration.
• Julian Wadleigh, economist with the Department of Agriculture and later the Trade Agreements section of the United States Department of State.
• Harry Dexter White, Director of the Division of Monetary Research at the Secretary of the Treasury.
• Viktor Vasilevish Sveshchnikov, ballistics expert at the War Department.

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.^[6]

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 the "life preserver" at the home of his nephew and his parents. 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. He saw this as 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.^[7]

In September of 1939, at the urging of anti-Communist, Russian-born journalist, Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle at Berle's home. Chambers was afraid that he would be found out by Soviet agents who had penetrated the government if he were to meet at the State Department. Levine had told Chambers that Walter Krivitsky had begun informing to American and British authorities concerning Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.^[8] At the meeting, Chambers named eighteen current and former government employees as spies or Communist sympathizers. Many of the names he mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already widely suspected of being Communists. Other names were more significant and surprising, however: Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss and Laurence Duggan, all respected midlevel officials in the State Department; Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to Franklin Roosevelt. Another member of the ring was said to be working on a top secret bombsight project at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

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. Berle took the information to the White House, but the President dismissed it, apparently with little objection from Berle.^[9] Berle notified the FBI of Chambers's information in March of 1940. In February of that 1941 the 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 again told the FBI about his interview with Chambers, but the FBI took no immediate action. 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.^[10]

Meanwhile, after living in hiding for a year, Chambers had joined the staff of TIME Magazine in 1939. Starting at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee, he eventually rose to the rank 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.^[11] 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 and respected Chambers' skill as a writer and editor.

By early 1948, Chambers had became one of the best known writer-editors at TIME. First came his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on the Yalta Conference (where, ironically, Hiss was a major participant). His cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson, Arnold Toynbee, Rebecca West, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on Marion Anderson (December 30, 1947) 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." ^[12] Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss Case broke later that year.

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.

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 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."^[13] 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.

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 35 mm 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 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 hadn't seen Chambers after mid 1936.

Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June of 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."^[13] In the second trial, Hiss's defense produced a psychiatrist who characterized Chambers as a "psychopathic personality" and "a pathological liar."^[14] The second trial ended in January of 1950 with Hiss found guilty on both counts. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Chambers had resigned from TIME in December 1948. After the trial, 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's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was combination of autobiography, an account of his role in the Hiss case and a pessimistic warning about the dangers of Communism and liberalism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it one of the greatest of all American autobiographies, and Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.^[13] Witness was a bestseller for more than a year and helped pay off Chambers' legal debts.

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.

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."^[15]

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, Harry White, and Harold Glasser. Chambers's real name and code designation was also listed in the memorandum--as well as a notation listing him as a Soviet "traitor".^[16]

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."^[17] In 1988, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel granted national landmark status to the Pipe Creek Farm.^[18] 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. ^[19]

Debate over the Hiss case remains lively in the press to the present date. Both Hiss and Chambers still have their defenders and detractors, often divided along liberal/conservative political lines. In 2006, Francis Fukuyama wrote in The New York Times: "Moynihan pointed out that the Venona intercepts... showed without a doubt that... Whittaker Chambers’s charges that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent were correct."^[20] In March 2007, debate arose within The Wall Street Journal over the Scooter Libby perjury case. The Journal commented: "Perjury charges are also attractive to prosecutors because it can be easier to nail a suspect for lying than for an underlying crime, as seen in the case of Alger Hiss."^[21] A Chambers grandchild replied: "The statute of limitations always protected Mr. Hiss, so his only legal risk in testifying was perjury."^[22] (Others heatedly joined the exchange.^[23])

• Alger Hiss
• Richard Nixon
• Harry S. Truman
• Boris Bykov
• Elizabeth Bentley
• Joseph McCarthy

• Allen Weinstein
• Sam Tanenhaus
• William F. Buckley, Jr.
• Ralph de Toledano

• McCarthyism
• American conservatism
• History of Soviet espionage in the United States
• List of alleged secret agents
• Venona

Main references

Notes

Books on the Hiss-Chambers case

Chambers and Soviet espionage

Fiction or Partial Fiction

Books and Plays

Online

Collections

Important Magazine Articles

• August 3, 1948 Testimony of Whittaker Chambers before HUAC.
• August 17, 1948 Testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss before HUAC.
• Time Magazine's review of Witness. TIME (June 9, 1952).
• Douglas, Ann. Review of Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers: A Biography.
• Schlesinger, Arthur (1997). Review of Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. New York Times.
• Langer, Elinor (1999). Review of Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. The Nation.
• Obituary of Whittaker Chambers. TIME (July 21, 1961).
• Scott, Janny (November 16, 1996). Obituary of Alger Hiss. New York Times.
• Linder, Douglas. The Alger Hiss Trials: An Account. "Famous Trials". University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law.
• Sempa, Francis P. (2001). Whittaker Chambers: A Centenary Reflection. American Diplomacy.
• Edwards, Lee (2001). Whittaker Chambers: Man of Courage and Faith. The Heritage Foundation.
• Buckley, William F. (2005). Witness and Friends; Remembering Whittaker Chambers. National Review Online.
• Cryer, Dan (2005). "We're a long way from the end of this"; An Interview with Tony Hiss. Salon.com.
• Kramer, Hilton (1997). Whittaker Chambers: the judgment of history. The New Criterion.
• Isserman, Maurice. Disloyalty As a Principle: Why Communists Spied.
• Navasky, Victor (1997). Allen Weinstein's Docudrama. A review of Weinstein's "Perjury". The Nation.
• Schrecker, Ellen (1999). The Spies Who Loved Us?. A discussion of Weinstein and "The Haunted Wood". The Nation.
• Fox, John F., Jr. (2005). In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence. FBI. Retrieved on 2006-11-17.
• Benson, Robert L.. The Venona Story. National Security Agency. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
• Martin, David (2007). FDR Winked at Soviet Espionage.

Video on Chambers

• American Writers: Whittaker Chambers. C-SPAN American Writers Series. C-SPAN (2002).

• YouTube.com Red Spy Films. Chambers Farm, Secret Doc. 1948/12/06 (1948) time: 00:00:51
• RAM Whittaker Chambers on "close friends"
• RAM Alger Hiss Story - Chambers on the "tragedy of history"
• RAM Alger Hiss defends himself

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