Whittaker Chambers

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Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961), an American writer-editor and former Communist spy who testified against Communist espionage in 1948, later receiving accolades from the American Conservative Party.

He defected from the Soviet underground (1925) and became a Soviet spy (1932-1938), and became a member of the Communist Party (1939-1948) and became a member of Time magazine (1938-1948).

He testified against the Ware group in what became the Hiss case for perjury (1949-1951) under surveillance in 1948, according to his 1952 memoir Witness.

He served as a senior editor at National Review (1957–1959) for a brief period of time.

President Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.

Personal life and death

Chambers married Esther Shemitz (1900-1986) in 1930 or 1931. Shemitz, who had attended the Art Students League and integrated herself into New York City's academic circles, met Chambers at the 1926 textile strike at Passaic, New Jersey, New Jersey. They then embarked on a courtship that was retaliation against her mentor Grace Hutchins. Shemitz referred to her as "a pacifist rather than a revolutionary." She worked for The World Tomorrow, a pacifist newspaper, in the 1920s.

Ellen and John, the couple's two children, were born in 1930s. Some Communist leaders wanted professional revolutionists to go childless, but the couple declined, which he cited as part of his growing disillusion with communism. Ellen, his daughter, died in 2017.

Allen Weinstein's Perpetuty revealed in 1978 that the FBI has a copy of a letter in which Chambers referred to homosexual relations in the 1930s. Chambers abandoned the beliefs in 1938 when he escaped the underground, which he attributed to his newfound Christianity. From many angles, the letter has been divisive.

Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at his 300-acre (1.2 km2) farm in Westminster, Maryland. He had angina since the age of 38 and had suffered from several heart attacks.

Source

Career

Chambers was a reporter and editor for The New Masses newspaper from 1927 to 1929.

Chambers wrote four short stories for New Masses in 1931 about prodigal and resistance, including Can You Make Out Their Voices?, which was deemed by critics as one of the finest pieces of fiction of American communism. Can You Hear Their Voices, a play by Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play. Whittaker Chambers' bibliography has been viewed throughout America and other countries. Chambers also served as a translator, including the English translation of Felix Salten's 1923 book Bambi, A Life in the Woods.

Chambers was recruited to join the "communist underground" and began his career as a spy for a GRU intelligence unit led by Alexander Ulanovsky, also known as Ulrich. Josef Peters, his main handler, was replaced by CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder with Rudy Baker later this year. Peters introduced Harold Ware to Harold Ware, but he later denied Peters was ever deployed to war, and he also testified to the HUAC that he, Chambers, never knew Ware (which later denied it). Ware, according to chambers, was the head of a communist underground cell in Washington that included the following:

These individuals were all members of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration, except Marion Bachrach. Chambers served in Washington as both an organist in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents, which were sent to Boris Bykov, the GRU station chief.

Chambers, who codenamed "Karl" or "Carl," served as a courier between various clandestine organisations and Soviet intelligence during the mid-1930s. In addition to the Ware group that was listed above, there were other sources who said Chambers had dealt with the following:

Chambers continued his spying from 1932 to 1938 or 1938, even as his confidence in communism faded. Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, which began in 1936, became increasingly disturbed. He was also worried about his own safety after learning that Ignace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, was assassinated in Switzerland, and then disappeared into the United States, and Chambers' friend and fellow spy Juliet Stuart Poyntz was missing. Poyntz vanished in 1937, just after she had been to Moscow and returned disillusioned with the communist cause due to the Stalinist Purges.

Chambers refused several orders that he fly to Moscow because he was concerned that he would be "purged." He also started concealing some of the documents he obtained from his sources. He planned to use them, as well as a number of rolls of microfilm photos of documents, to discourage the Soviets from killing him and his family.

Chambers broke with communism in 1938 and took his family into hiding. Nathan Levine, Chambers' counsel, stored the "life preserver" at the home of his wife's sister. He had no intentions to inform the US government of his espionage operations. His intelligence contacts were his acquaintances, and he had no intention to reveal them.

Chambers substituted his passion for communism with a passion for God and saw the world in black-and-white terms both before and after his defection. Chambers' autobiography referred to communism as a reason for living, but after his defection, he saw his activities as being part of a "completely evil" society.

Chambers were forced to take action against the Soviet Union after they were triggered by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle met in September 1939 at the behest of anticommunist Russian-born journalist Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine. Walter Krivitsky, who was already informing American and British authorities of Soviet agents who held positions in both administrations, was referred to Chambers by Levine. Krivitsky told Chambers that it was their job to inform. Chambers finally agreed to reveal what he knew about the condition of his immunity from prosecution. Several current and former government workers were designated as spies or communist sympathizers at a meeting in Washington, Berle's Woodley Mansion. Several of the names mentioned had little to do with or were already under suspicion. However, some of Alger Hiss' names, including Donald Trump, and Laurence Duggan, who were all respected, mid-level officials in the State Department, as well as Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to Franklin Roosevelt, were more notable and surprising: Vincent Reno, another individual, had been working on a top-secret bombsight mission at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

Berle found that Chambers' information was tentative, vague, and uncorroborated. President Franklin Roosevelt confirmed it to the White House, but Berle denied it, but Berle denied it without a single objection. Berle retained his notes, but they were later used as evidence during Hiss' persuasion trials.

In March 1940, Berle notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation into Chambers' details. Krivitsky was discovered dead in his hotel room in February 1941. Krivitsky was pronounced suicide by the police, but it was widely believed that Soviet intelligence had killed him. Berle has told the FBI that he was worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers as well. Chambers were interviewed in May 1942 and June 1945, but the FBI took no immediate action in accordance with the US's political lension, which saw the potential threat from the Soviet Union as minor compared to Nazi Germany. Only in November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated a portion of Chambers' tale, will the FBI begin to investigate Chambers properly.

Chambers had come out of hiding after a year and joined the service of Time (April 1939). Within a month of finishing Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's new book, Finnegans Wake, he landed a cover story. With James Agee and then Calvin Fixx, he started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film. Wilder Hobson replaced Fixx as the Chambers' assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment after the 1942 heart attack. Nigel Dennis, the future New York Times Book Review editor, and poets Howard Moss and Weldon Kees were among the writers contributing to Chambers.

A battle had erupted between those, like Theodore H. White and Richard Lauterbach, who raised concerns of Chiang Kai-shek's regime's elitism, mistrust, and ineptitude, as well as others who encouraged greater collaboration with Mao's Red Army in the fight against Japanese imperialism, as well as others like Willi Schlamm, who adhered to a firmly pro-Chiang, anti-communist viewpoints Henry Luce, who grew up in China and was a personal friend of Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, fell squarely on the side of Chambers, suggesting that his accounts were censored and even banned in their entirety, and that he left Time shortly after the war as a result.

"contributing editors" in 1940, William Saroyan's play, Love's Old Sweet Song, appears at Time in Saroyan's play, "contributing editors." Luce appointed him senior editor in summer 1942 (Weinstein) or September 1943 (Tanenhaus) and became a member of Time's "Senior Group" who influenced editorial policy in December 1943.

Chambers, close colleagues, and several staff members in the 1930s all contributed to Time, which has been dubbed "interstitial intellectuals" by historian Robert Vanderlan. They were described as follows by his coworker John Hersey: "They were named as follows: '

Chambers had been one of the most prominent writer-editors at Time in early 1948. His scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" was published on March 5, 1945, where Hiss was present at the Yalta Conference, where hiss was first on the roof. Marian Anderson, Arnold J. Toynbee, Rebecca West, and Reinhold Niebuhr were interviewed in subpoenas to subsequent cover-story papers. Marian Anderson's (Religion: In Egypt Land, December 30, 1946) was so popular that the magazine broke its ban on non-attribution in reaction to reader letters:

"Whit puts on the best show in terms of any writer we've ever encountered," Time deputy editorial director Charles Wertenbaker wrote about the Time capsules. Chambers was in the midst of his career when the Hiss case was filed later this year.

Meanwhile, Chambers and his family became Quakers, who spent time outside Pipe Creek Friends Meetinghouse near his Maryland farm.

Chambers was summoned on August 3, 1948, to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he gave the names of people he said were members of the underground "Ware group" in the late 1930s, including Alger Hiss. He named Hiss as a Communist Party member once more, but no claims of spying had been made at the time. Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew anyone by the name of Chambers, but after it became clear that Chambers knew the names of Hiss, hiss said he did not know Chambers under the name "George Crosley." However, his parents denied ever being a communist. Since Chambers had no evidence, the committee had initially been encouraged to take the word of Hiss. However, Richard Nixon, a committee member, was given classified information by the FBI that led him to investigate the subject. "Vague and evasive" was the HUAC's description of Hiss' testimony when it first revealed its report.

Hes and Chambers sparked national divides in the country. President Harry S. Truman, who was dissatisfied with the allegation that the man who presided over the UN Charter Conference was a communist, dismissed the lawsuit as a "red herring." Many conservatives saw the Hiss case as an example of what they saw as Democrats' laxity toward communist infiltration and control in the State Department in the midst of increasing anticommunism, which would later be referred to as McCarthyism. Many liberals, in turn, saw the Hiss case as part of the Republican Party's effort to regain president's office after it had been out of office for 16 years. Executive Order 9835, which introduced a program of loyalty assessments for federal employees in 1947, was also issued by Truman.

On October 8, 1948, his son brought a $75,000 libel lawsuit against Chambers. Chambers eventually recovered his envelope of evidence and presented it to the HUAC after it had subpoenaed them under pressure from Hiss' attorneys. It contained four notes in Hiss' handwriting, 65 typewritten copies of State Department reports, and five strips of microfilm, some of which contained photographs of State Department records. Since Chambers had temporarily obscured the microfilm inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, the press began to call these the "Pumpkin Papers." Hiss knew Chambers well before mid-1936, when Hiss said he had last seen "Crosley" and that his brothers had been involved in spying with Chambers, according to the reports. Chambers explained that he delayed producing the evidence in the hopes of saving an old friend from more trouble than was necessary. Chambers had consistently stated that His Sons were not involved in spying until October 1948, even though Chambers testified under oath. Chambers was coerced to testify at the Hiss trials that he had committed perjury several times, lowering his credibility in the eyes of his opponents.

The five rolls of 35mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" were expected to be firmly embedded in HUAC files until late 1974. When Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, pleaded for admission to them under the Freedom of Information Act in 1975, the Justice Department denied him. The Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss on July 31, 1975, as a result of Peter Irons' and follow-on cases brought by Alger Hiss and William Reuben. One roll of film came out completely black due to overexposure, two others are barely legible copies of nonclassified Navy Department papers related to such topics as life rafts and fire extinguishers, while the remaining two are photographs of the State Department records relating to US-German relations in the late 1930s.

That tale, on the other hand, as told by The New York Times in the 1970s, contains only partial truth. In his autobiography, Witness, Chambers mentions the empty roll. However, the documents on the other pumpkin patch microfilms also included "confidential memos sent from overseas embassies to diplomatic workers in Washington, D.C., which, according to the Soviets' presumed ownership of both coded originals and translated into Mandarin, which could now be understood in code, which can be sent by Hiss.

In taped recordings of President Nixon on July 1, 1971, he confessed that he did not check the Pumpkin Papers before they were used, and that the Justice Department was out to exonerate Hiss, and that a federal grand jury would indict Nixon's ally Chambers for perjury. Hes' innocence was still being investigated by the FBI into 1953.

His uncle was charged with two counts of perjury relating to witness he had received before a federal grand jury the previous December. He denied handing over any papers to Chambers and testified that he had not seen Chambers since mid-1936.

Hiss was convicted twice of perpetriety. The first trial, which was held in June 1949, was decided 8–4 for conviction. In addition to Chambers' testimony, a government expert testified that other papers typed on a typewriter belonging to the Hiss family matched the classified papers published by Chambers. Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, the former Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis, and future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson appeared on behalf of Hiss: an impressive number of character witnesses, as well as current Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Chambers, on the other hand, was described as "an enemy of the Republic, a defamer of Christ, a disbeliever of God, with no regard for matrimony or motherhood." Hiss' defense introduced Chambers as a "psychopathic personality" and "a pathological liar" in the second trial.

Hiss was found guilty on both counts of perjury and conviction in January 1950. He was sentenced to five years in jail.

In December 1948, Chambers had resigned from Time. He wrote a few articles for Fortune, Life, and Look magazines after the Hiss case.

William Spiegel of Baltimore referred to "Carl Schroeder" as Chambers in 1951, during the HUAC hearings, while Spiegel was describing his relationship with David Zimmerman, a spion in Chambers' network.

Witness, Chambers' book Witness, was released in 1952 to widespread acclaim. It was a blend of autobiography and a warning of communism's dangers. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it "a great book." Ronald Reagan credited the book with his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a centrist Republican. Witness was a bestseller for more than a year and aided in paying for Chambers' legal debts, but bills lingered ("as Odysseus was run by a ghost").

George Will, a commentator, published this article in 2017.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded the National Review in 1955, and Chambers served as senior editor, releasing articles in the magazine for a little over a year and a half (October 1957-June 1959). Of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged's most cited paper to date, "Big Sister is Watching You," is Ayn Rand's most cited article to date.

Chambers and his wife embarked on a trip to Europe in 1959, the highlight of which was a meeting with Arthur Koestler and Margarete Buber-Neumann at Koestler's home in Austria. He recommenced studies at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster, Maryland, that fall.

Source

Awards

• 1952 – Honorary Doctorate of Law from Mount Mary College (Milwaukee)
• 1953 – National Book Award finalist for nonfiction (Witness)
• 1984 – Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumously) (for contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism")