Journalist, writer, and Soviet agent, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied at Columbia University, gained a modest reputation as a writer, and later translated several works, notably Bambi, into English. He was an active US Communist (19259, 19318), writing for the Daily Worker and editing the New Masses. Along the way he became an actual agent of Soviet intelligence, and passed classified government information to Moscow. Disillusioned by Stalin's purges, he became a virulent anti-Communist and edited Time magazine's foreign affairs section. In 1948, he testified that many executive branch officials were Communist sympathizers, and said that Alger Hiss had given him classified materials; this brought about a libel suit by Hiss, who was found guilty. The HissChambers trial remains a symbol of the whole era that extended from the idealism of communism in the 1930s to the disillusionment of the late 1940s.
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.
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.
After graduating from high school in 1919, he worked for two years in a bank before enrolling in Columbia University in 1921. 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).
Communism and Defection
In 1924, Chambers read Nikolai Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. Chambers's biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Chambers was attracted by Lenin's authoritarianism; 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; 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. 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).
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. 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).
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. Members allegedly included:
Noel Field, employed at the Department of State Harold Glasser, Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury Alger Hiss, Department of State Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Economic Adviser and Chief of Analysis and Plans, Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Material and Services, War Department Julian Wadleigh, United States Department of State Harry Dexter White, Director of the Division of Monetary Research Secretary of the Treasury Viktor Vasilevish Sveshchnikov -- John Herrmann (who introduced Chambers to Hiss).Defection
Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938, but his faith in Communism was waning.
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."
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.
The 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was reportedly the final straw for Chambers.
On September of 1939, Chambers flew to Washington and met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle. 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. Berle didn't even notify the FBI of Chambers's information until 1941. Worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers too, Berle told the FBI about his interview with Chambers. 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.
Meanwhile, After living in hiding for a year, Chambers joined the staff of TIME Magazine in 1940. While at TIME, Chambers became known as a staunch anti-Communist, sometimes enraging his writers with the changes he made to their stories.
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.
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. When it issued its report, HUAC described Hiss's testimony as "vague and evasive." 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. 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. 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 of 1950 with Hiss found guilty on both counts.
After the Hiss case
Chambers had resigned from TIME in December 1948. initiated the magazine National Review and Chambers briefly worked there as senior editor.
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.
His second book, Cold Friday, was published posthumously in 1964 with the help of Duncan Norton Taylor.
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. 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. 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.
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.
Chambers's book Witness is on the reading lists of the Heritage Foundation, The Weekly Standard, and the Russell Kirk Center.
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." Hiss, Alger (1957). Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. Alger Hiss, The True Story. Hiss, Tony (1977). Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War. Footnote on an Historic Case: In Re Alger Hiss, No. Two foolish men: The true story of the friendship between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Hiss, Alger (1989). Whittaker Chambers: The Discrepancy in the Evidence of the Typewriter. Whittaker Chambers: The Secret Confession. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Hiss, Tony (1999). Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. The Alger Hiss Espionage Case.
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