A collision of American lives

Once upon a time in America there were two young men born near the turn of the 20th century. Both men had troubled family backgrounds. One grew up in “a house of horrors” that led to his brother’s suicide. The other’s father killed himself after failing to pay family debts. Both were brilliant. One attended Columbia. The other Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law. One went on to become a senior editor of Time magazine making the modern equivalent of $300,000 a year because of his unusual talent as a writer. The other rose rapidly through the ranks of the federal government and was at FDR’s side at the Yalta conference where the post-war order of Europe was discussed. He accumulated a series of famous sponsors, including Supreme Court justices such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, and Stanley Reed. Both men were secret communists and active agents of the Soviet Union.

The writer was named Whittaker Chambers. His collaborator in Soviet espionage was Alger Hiss, a leading light of the FDR’s New Deal. The collision of their lives in midcentury America made the reputation of a man who would become one of the most consequential and tragic politicians of the 20th century, Richard Nixon.

Chambers, after making a splash as a literary communist writing plays and working for the New Masses and the Daily Worker, was recruited to enter the communist underground in the United States where he interacted with American communists who had infiltrated the federal government. He mastered the techniques necessary to remain undetected and was able to obtain information for his spymasters regularly. Alger Hiss was one of his major sources within the U.S. government.

Chambers would become increasingly aware of the terrifying and murderous nature of Stalin’s totalitarian leadership of the Soviet Union. Reflecting on the disheartening revelations and explaining his decision to leave the communists, Chambers wrote of his state of mind, “I heard screams.”

Chambers escaped the communist underground and fed his family through freelance literary work, such as being the English translator of Bambi. His circumstances improved considerably when he was hired by Time and became one of the major contributors to the magazine. Ironically, capitalism saved the fugitive communist. During World War II, he tried to make American leaders aware of the extent of communist infiltration, but the Soviets were officially allies and New Deal officials looked askance at such warnings. He was ignored.

Toward the end of the 1940s, Chambers willingly appeared before the much-criticized House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to corroborate charges made by Elizabeth Bentley (another underground member) regarding communist infiltrators. Chambers did so at great personal cost. He would lose his job at Time (for having been a communist spy) and would earn the lasting enmity of American elites for exposing a New Deal star.

When Hiss denied the charges made by Chambers, it was a one-day media rout. Hiss (and the liberal establishment) was triumphantly indignant. The portly, rumpled Chambers appeared to be a disgrace. But the junior Congressman (and lawyer) Richard Nixon heard things in Hiss’s answers that raised his suspicions. In the end, Nixon’s dogged pursuit of the truth helped turn the tide in the case and a subsequent hearing to the point where many began to believe Chambers and Hiss had known each other well.

Hiss’s friends pushed him to go after Chambers for slander after he repeated his accusation on Meet the Press. Chambers played his trump card, which was to bring out his “life preserver” of documents he’d gathered in his last transactions with Hiss before leaving the underground. The proof he produced—famously called “The Pumpkin Papers,” which were hidden in a field—led to perjury charges against Hiss and a conviction 75 years ago in 1950.

Alger Hiss went to federal prison and then became a cause célèbre for the American left. Richard Nixon ascended to the U.S. Senate, became Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 and 1956, and later had both a triumphant and tragic presidency.

Whittaker Chambers, though he would live only about another decade and would die at the age of 60, would go on to write one of the finest memoirs ever produced. It was titled Witness. It explained the legal case but went much further by delving into faith. Chambers was convinced he was going over to the losing side by leaving the Soviets, but he ultimately could not avoid his fate. He explained how one day he (a determined materialist) looked at his baby daughter’s ears and was shaken by the unmistakable fact of design that was evident in them. In time, he saw how the supposedly scientific nature of communism masked a monstrosity. So Chambers the atheist and materialist was baptized and became a witness for man’s need for God and for faith in God as the foundation for freedom. He deserves to be remembered.