Communist Chambers wrote and edited for the magazine
New Masses and was an editor for the
Daily Worker newspaper from 1927 to 1929.
Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitled
Can You Hear Their Voices? (see
Bibliography of Whittaker Chambers), staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator, his works including the English version of
Felix Salten's 1923 novel
Bambi, a Life in the Woods.
Soviet underground Ware group Chambers was recruited to join the "communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for a
GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate)
spy ring headed by
Alexander Ulanovsky, also known as Ulrich. Later, his main handler was
Josef Peters, who was replaced by CPUSA General Secretary
Earl Browder with
Rudy Baker. Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him to
Harold Ware (although he later denied Peters had ever been introduced to Ware, and also testified to HUAC that he, Chambers, never knew Ware). Chambers claimed that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included the following: Apart from Marion Bachrach, these individuals were all members of
Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer in communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents, which were delivered to
Boris Bykov, the
GRU station chief.
Other covert sources Using the codename "Karl" or "Carl", Chambers served during the mid-1930s as a courier between various covert sources and Soviet intelligence. In addition to the Ware group mentioned above, other sources that Chambers alleged to have dealt with included the following:
Defection (), whose disappearance spurred Chambers to defect Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938 even while his faith in communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by
Joseph Stalin's
Great Purge, which began in 1936. He was also fearful for his own life since he had noted the murder in Switzerland of
Ignace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of Chambers's friend and fellow spy
Juliet Stuart Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the communist cause because of the Stalinist Purges. Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow since he worried that he might be "purged". He also started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use them, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" to prevent the Soviets from killing him and his family.
Berle meeting (): Member of the FDR administration who took Chambers's 1939 report. Initially enthusiastic, he later downplayed the report. The August 1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact drove Chambers to take action against the Soviet Union. In September 1939, at the urging of the anticommunist Russian-born journalist
Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of State
Adolf A. Berle. Levine had introduced Chambers to
Walter Krivitsky, who was already informing American and British authorities about Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Krivitsky told Chambers that it was their duty to inform. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution. During the meeting at Berle's home,
Woodley Mansion, in Washington, Chambers named several current and former government employees as spies or communist sympathizers. Many names mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already under suspicion. Some names were more significant and surprising: Alger Hiss, his brother Donald Hiss, and Laurence Duggan, who were all respected, mid-level officials in the State Department, and
Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to
Franklin Roosevelt. Another person named Vincent Reno had worked on a top-secret bombsight project at the
Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Berle notified the
Federal Bureau of Investigation of Chambers's information in March 1940. In February 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. Police ruled the death 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. The FBI interviewed Chambers in May 1942 and June 1945 but took no immediate action in line with the political orientation of the United States, which viewed the potential threat from the Soviet Union as minor compared to that of
Nazi Germany. Only in November 1945, when
Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, would the FBI begin to take Chambers seriously.
Time and
Clare Boothe Luce () valued Chambers's writing at
Time magazine During the Berle meeting, Chambers had come out of hiding after a year and joined the staff of
Time (April 1939). He landed a cover story within a month on
James Joyce's latest book,
Finnegans Wake. He started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with
James Agee and then
Calvin Fixx. When Fixx suffered a heart attack in October 1942,
Wilder Hobson succeeded him as Chambers's assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment. Other writers working for Chambers in that section included novelist
Nigel Dennis, future
New York Times Book Review editor
Harvey Breit, and poets
Howard Moss and
Weldon Kees. A struggle had arisen between those, like
Theodore H. White and
Richard Lauterbach, who raised criticism of what they saw as the elitism, corruption and ineptitude of
Chiang Kai-shek's regime in China and advocated greater co-operation with Mao's Red Army in the struggle against Japanese imperialism, and Chambers and others like
Willi Schlamm who adhered to a perspective that was staunchly pro-Chiang, anticommunist, and both later joined the founding editorial board of
William F. Buckley, Jr.'s
National Review.
Time founder
Henry Luce, who grew up in China and was a personal friend of Chiang and his wife,
Soong Mei-ling, came down squarely on the side of Chambers to the point that White complained that his stories were being censored and even suppressed in their entirety, and he left
Time shortly after the war as a result. In 1940,
William Saroyan lists Fixx among "contributing editors" at
Time in Saroyan's play, ''Love's Old Sweet Song''. By early 1948, Chambers had become one of the best known writer-editors at
Time. First had come his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on the
Yalta Conference in which Hiss partook. Subsequent cover-story essays profiled
Marian Anderson,
Arnold J. Toynbee,
Rebecca West and
Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on
Marian Anderson ("Religion: In Egypt Land", December 30, 1946) 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. In a 1945 letter to
Time colleague
Charles Wertenbaker,
Time-Life deputy editorial director
John Shaw Billings said of Chambers, "Whit puts on the best show in words of any writer we've ever had ... a superb technician, particularly skilled in the mosaic art of putting a
Time section together." Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss case broke later that year.
Hiss case (1948) denied Chambers's allegations but was convicted of perjury On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he gave the names of individuals he said were part of the underground "
Ware group" in the late 1930s, including
Alger Hiss. He once again named Hiss as a member of the Communist Party but did not yet make any accusations of espionage. In subsequent sessions, Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew anyone by the name of Chambers, but on seeing him in person and after it became clear that Chambers knew details about Hiss's life, Hiss said that he had known Chambers under the name "George Crosley". Hiss denied that he had ever been a communist. Since Chambers still presented no evidence, the committee had initially been inclined to take the word of Hiss on the matter. However, a committee member,
Richard Nixon, received secret information from the FBI that had led him to pursue the issue. When it issued its report, HUAC described Hiss's testimony as "vague and evasive".
"Red Herring" (center) with
Joseph Stalin (left) and
Winston Churchill (right) in 1945. Truman called Chambers's allegations a "red herring". The country quickly became divided over Hiss and Chambers. President
Harry S. Truman, initially responded dismissively, labeling the case a "
red herring". In the atmosphere of increasing
anticommunism, the Alger Hiss case contributed to paranoia among Republicans and movement conservatives, who would increasingly speculate as to much more widespread Communist infiltration (later culminating in
McCarthyism). Truman also issued
Executive Order 9835, which initiated a program of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947.
"Pumpkin Papers" Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers on October 8, 1948. That story, however, as reported by
The New York Times in the 1970s, contains only a partial truth. The blank roll had been mentioned by Chambers in his autobiography,
Witness. However, in addition to innocuous farm reports, the documents on the other pumpkin patch microfilms also included "confidential memos sent from overseas embassies to diplomatic staff in Washington, D.C." Worse, those memos had originally been transmitted in code, which, thanks to their presumable possession of both coded originals and the translations (claimed by Chambers, to be forwarded by Hiss), the Soviets now could easily understand.
Perjury ) in New York City (here, 2009) Hiss was indicted for two counts of
perjury relating to testimony he had given before a federal
grand jury the previous December. He had denied giving any documents to Chambers and testified that he had not seen Chambers after mid-1936. Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June 1949, ended with the jury deadlocked 8–4 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 Supreme Court justices,
Felix Frankfurter and
Stanley Reed, the former Democratic presidential nominee
John W. Davis, and the 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". The second trial ended in January 1950 with Hiss being found guilty on both counts of perjury. He was sentenced to
five years in prison. It was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of communism.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it "a powerful book".
Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.
National Review , left:
L. Brent Bozell Jr. Buckley in 1954 first asked Chambers to endorse their book on
Joseph McCarthy. In 1955,
William F. Buckley Jr. started the magazine
National Review, and Chambers worked there as senior editor, publishing articles there for a little over a year and a half (October 1957 – June 1959). The most widely cited article to date is a scathing review, "Big Sister is Watching You", of
Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged. In 1959, Chambers resigned from
National Review, although he continued correspondence with Buckley despite having suffered a series of heart attacks. In one letter, he noted, "I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative." In that same year, Chambers and his wife embarked on a visit to Europe, the highlight of which was a meeting with
Arthur Koestler and
Margarete Buber-Neumann at Koestler's home in Austria. ==Personal life and death==