Witness: Cold War Classics

Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) was a journalist and author who is primarily remembered for having testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about underground Communist networks throughout the US.

Born Jay Vivian Chambers, he loathed his first name and replaced it with his mother’s maiden surname, Whittaker, shortly after becoming an adult. Raised on Long Island, Chambers’s father earned professional success an illustrator while also abandoning his family for long stretches. Chambers’s mother was a former actor who compensated for her disappointing marriage with a fierce love of Chambers and his brother, Richard. Not depicted in Witness is the fact that both Chambers and his father were bisexual.

Chambers was drawn to the Communist Party as a student at Columbia University in the early 1920s. He credited Richard’s youthful suicide as pushing him fully into the Party’s arms: Chambers hoped that Communism could create the kind of world that would not have pushed Richard to take his own life. By 1932, Chambers had volunteered to work as a Party courier, passing information between American informants and Soviet military intelligence. He became disillusioned with the Party as Stalin purged all perceived threats to his power. Chambers made a complete break with Communism after the Soviet government signed a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany in 1939. His escape from the Party exposed him to the prospect of deadly retaliation, but he and his family survived by going into hiding.

Chambers eventually concluded that a public life would offer him more protection than one lived in hiding, and thus he accepted a position as a senior editor at Time magazine. After working at Time for nine years, Chambers became famous by testifying before HUAC that Alger Hiss, a former State Department official and then-president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, had been a Soviet agent alongside him. Specifically, Chambers stated that he had personally served for many years as a spy for the Soviet Union, that there was still an extensive network of Communists seeking to bring down the United States government, and that Hiss played an integral role in these espionage efforts. This hearing and Hiss’s subsequent criminal trials were national sensations, as well as sources of bitter partisan division.

Whittaker’s testimony made him a hero to the bourgeoning conservative movement. For figures like Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), Chambers was proof that the liberal establishment was insufficiently vigilant against the threat of Communist subversion within US borders. Hiss’s eventual conviction—albeit for perjury, not for espionage—inspired McCarthy to launch a much broader and more indiscriminate attack on suspected Communists. The destructive attacks McCarthy launched on countless people, many of whom were not actually Communist spies, is known to this day as “McCarthyism.” Chambers derided this moral panic and the chaos it caused as a setback to the anti-Communist effort. Despite such reservations, Chambers nevertheless sealed his conservative credentials by writing for the flagship magazine National Review from 1957 to 1959.

He was married to Esther Shemitz, with whom he had two children, and found his greatest happiness living and working on a farm in rural Maryland. He died of a heart attack in 1961.