Whittaker Chambers
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Jay Vivian (Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, political operative and informant. He was an icon of the Red Scare of the 1950s, best known for his accusation and testimony against Alger Hiss.
A controversial figure in history, Chambers is credited with or blamed for — depending on the point of view — touching off McCarthyism. Some even trace the fall of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s back to Chambers.
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Youth and Education
Chambers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent much of his youth in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York. He was described in childhood as a loner whose parents frequently separated. After graduating from high school in 1919, he worked for two years in a bank before enrolling in Columbia University in 1921, where he discovered communism. At Columbia University, his instructors recalled him as a talented writer who rarely went to class. He was expelled in 1922; some accounts attribute it to a blasphemous play he wrote while others attribute it to his simply not going to class.
The American Communist Party
In 1925, Chambers joined the American Communist Party and wrote and edited for communist periodicals, including The Daily Worker and The New Masses. Chambers joined the Communist underground in the spring of 1932. In 1933, he was sent to Moscow for intelligence training and when he returned to the United States, his main controller was Josef Peters. Peters introduced Chambers to Harold Ware, head of the Ware group, a Communist underground cell in Washington that included Alger Hiss, Henry Collins and Lee Pressman. Hiss, meanwhile, took a job on the legal staff of the Agricultural Adjustment 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. He worked in this capacity from 1934 until he left the party in 1938. He broke with the Communist party after he grew alienated by the Soviet labor camps and mass murders under Josef Stalin, leaving in 1938.
Chambers saved a collection of documents he recieved from Hiss to protect himself and his family against retribution of the secret apparatus as occurred in the Juliet Poyntz case. They became known as the "pumpkin papers."
Post-Communist Life
After leaving the Communist party, Chambers' politics shifted right. In the late 1930s, Chambers joined the staff of Time Magazine, where he would eventually rise to the position of senior editor and earn a yearly salary of $30,000. While at Time, Chambers became known as a staunch anti-Communist, sometimes enraging his writers with the changes he made to their stories.
In late 1939, after the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, Chambers approached assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and spent three hours detailing what he knew about Communist activity within the United States. In the wake of World War II, Chambers' story was mostly ignored.
During this period of his life, Chambers also translated Bambi from its original German into English.
In fact, Chambers translated Felix Salten's children's book, Bambi, in 1927, while he was also editing the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper in New York City. As recounted on page 239 of Witness, Chambers did so because wages on the Daily Worker were "intermittent and so small." He was asked to do the translation by Clifton Fadiman of Simon and Schuster, and the translation became an instant success, thus making Chambers an established translator.
The Trial of the Century
After the war, Chambers' story caught the attention of a freshman Representative from California, Richard Nixon. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and presented a list of what he said were members of an underground communist network working within the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the names on that list was that of a State Department official who had participated in the creation of the United Nations: Alger Hiss. The official White House response was to dismiss the case as a "red herring." Internally, White House staffers set about discreditting Chambers.
Chambers had skeptics. Hiss was well educated and had a long list of achievements to his name, and he vehemently denied the charges. Comparatively, Chambers was a drifter. Hiss had credibility; Chambers' story seemed fantastic, with little hard evidence. Hiss used this to his advantage, maligning Chambers in the press. Hiss even made up stories about Chambers having homosexual experiences, and used them to smear Chambers in public.
Hiss initially denied knowing Chambers, then later said he recognized Chambers as a man he had known as George Crosley. After Chambers accused Hiss of being a communist on the radio program "Meet the Press," Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit. Then, in November 1948, Chambers led two HUAC investigators into a pumpkin patch in Maryland, where he brought out a hollowed-out pumpkin containing four rolls of microfilm. The contents of the microfilm became known as the "pumpkin papers." Nixon posed with a magnifying glass and these microfilms in a number of highly publicized photographs.
On May 31, 1949, amidst unprecedented hype, Alger Hiss's perjury trial began. After that trial ended in a hung jury, a second was held, which ended with a one count conviction of Hiss on January 21, 1950. By then, Chambers had made a total of 14 appearances. Because of his testimony, he resigned from his position at Time and, at one point during the trial, Chambers attempted suicide unsuccessfully.
Congressman Richard Nixon, credited with dicovering Chambers, was so skeptical of his background, he asked FBI Directot Hoover to do a thorough background check. Nixon feared Chambers was a homosexual and had been confined to a mental hospital. The FBI found gaps in Chambers life story that both they and he could not account for.
Post-trial Life
While the Hiss trial propelled Nixon's political career, Chambers derived little benefit from it. His job at Time gone, Chambers went to work on his farm, writing his autobiography, Witness, which was published in 1952.
Critics of Chambers, then and now, maintain that his life was a paradox and he experienced so many changes of lifestyle and philosophy that his testimony was unreliable and self serving.
Before his death, Chambers served briefly as senior editor of William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review.
Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961. A final book, titled Cold Friday, was published posthumously in 1964. It predicted, correctly, that the fall of communism would start in the satellite states surrounding the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.
In 1984, Chambers was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.
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 the GRU.
See also
Sources
- Truman Presidential Library (http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/hiss.htm)
- Whittaker Chambers: A Centenary Reflection (http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2001_07-09/sempa_chambers/sempa_chambers.html)
- Lynbrook History: Whittaker Chambers (http://members.aol.com/lynhistory/lhps/chambers.htm)
- The New Criterion: Whittaker Chambers: The Judgment of History (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/feb97/hilton.htm)
- The Alger Hiss Case: The Real Trial of the Century (http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/DB/Issues/95/10.31/view.hiss.html)