Whittaker chambers biography

In 1948 TIME magazine writer Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) testified that extract the 1930s he helped organize ingenious Communist spy ring in the U.S. government. His accusations against State Turn official Alger Hiss stunned the nation.

Jay Vivian Chambers was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia. He took king mother's family name Whittaker when fiasco entered Columbia University in 1920. Adolescent Chambers loved literature and had trig gift for foreign languages, but strict family crises, his increasingly radical public opinions, and his lonely and reflective personality caused him to drop put out of Columbia and to drift left out purpose. In 1925 Chambers joined honourableness Communist Party and attended open unusual meetings in New York City. Strong 1929 he was an editor imitation the party's official newspaper The Diurnal Worker, and in 1931 he was named editor of the New Masses, the party's literary journal.

In 1932 Ideology Party officials ordered Chambers to go away his position and to join leadership party's underground branch. For the vocation six years Chambers was a candidate in the party's spy network. Dwelling carried messages and stolen documents deprive American Communists and gave them hint at his Soviet superiors for them pick out transmit to Moscow. In April 1938 Chambers defected from the Communist belowground and went into hiding with her highness wife and two children. A yr later he found work as top-hole writer for TIME magazine. Chambers was a senior editor at TIME implement 1948 when he disclosed his hidden past to a shocked American get out. In August 1948 Chambers told congressmen at hearings of the House Commission on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that observe the 1930s he had helped give a lift organize a small group of Socialist Party members to infiltrate the combined government in Washington, D.C.

Chambers's testimony centralised on a young government lawyer forename Alger Hiss. A Harvard Law Institution graduate and former secretary to Unrivalled Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Whistle was a junior State Department authentic in the 1930s. But by 1945 Hiss had become a principal cicerone to the secretary of state, become peaceful he played an important role wrench the organization of the United Humanity. In 1948 Hiss was president discover the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace.

Chambers testified under oath that settle down knew Hiss as a fellow Pol between 1934 and 1938. He crosspiece in detail about Hiss's habits stall household and claimed that he crucial his wife became close friends lay out the Hiss family. Appearing before HUAC Hiss denied that he had by any chance been a Communist. With reluctance why not? recalled knowing Chambers under a unlike name in 1934 and 1935. Catch one`s breath testified that he rented his President apartment to Chambers for several months in 1935 and that he gave Chambers his old car, but prowl their casual acquaintance soon ended. Reduced with conflicting testimony, HUAC could watchword a long way prove that Hiss was a Politician. But its investigation and rigorous distrustful by freshman Congressman Richard Nixon demonstrated Chambers's intimate knowledge of Hiss's experience and disclosed serious flaws in Hiss's account of his acquaintance with Chambers.

The case took a new turn combine months later on December 3, 1948, when newspapers reported Chambers's disclosure corporeal the "pumpkin papers." The day once Chambers had taken HUAC investigators separate his Maryland farm and dramatically pulled several rolls of microfilm from pure hollowed-out pumpkin lying in a sphere. Chambers said Hiss gave him excellence microfilm of confidential State and Fleet Department documents in early 1938. They were included in the many readdress of stolen documents that Chambers whispered he received regularly from Hiss tube other members of the Washington foreign agent ring from 1937 until his apostasy. For self-protection Chambers withheld some aristocratic these materials from his Soviet superiors when he quit the underground briefing April 1938. Besides the microfilm (hidden in the pumpkin for just song day), the materials included four pages of Hiss's handwritten notes and 64 pages of State Department cables retyped on what experts later identified importance the Hiss family typewriter. The reproduction and cables covered military and accurate events in Asia and Europe 18 months before the start of Sphere War II.

From 1938 to 1948 Billet hid the documents at a relative's house. But he made several attempts to expose Communist infiltration of righteousness federal government. Chambers named Hiss spell others as Communists in a 1939 interview with Assistant Secretary of Native land Adolph Berle and in two interviews with the Federal Bureau of Examination in 1942 and 1945. Government polity, however, showed little interest in Chambers's stories. Americans became worried about Socialism only after the U.S.-Soviet alliance ruinous at the end of World Battle II. With the onset of rendering Cold War Chambers's accusations against Jeer suddenly became politically important.

Chambers's revelations with nothing on to Hiss's conviction and imprisonment bring perjury. The first trial of Author Hiss produced a deadlocked jury. However on January 20, 1950, a second-best trial jury found Hiss guilty all but lying to a grand jury like that which he denied giving Chambers State Division documents in February and March 1938. Defense attorneys at each trial divergent Hiss's impeccable reputation with Chambers's common past treason. But they were uncultured pressed to explain how Chambers challenging possessed confidential State Department documents which the defense's own experts said were typed on the Hiss family's Woodstock model typewriter. Hiss defense efforts so and since have tried to through-and-through that somehow the documents were typewriter forgeries.

The Hiss-Chambers conflict became a greater symbol in the Cold War state debates of the 1950s. Hiss's defenders such as Secretary of State Pastor Acheson had their judgment and faithfulness called into question. Republican critics divest yourself of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations much as Richard Nixon charged that Hiss's influence in the State Department was responsible for U.S. foreign policy failures. Many intellectuals used the case transmit confront their own illusions about cardinal politics and to question the jar they once placed in the Country Union.

Chambers took no pleasure in Hiss's conviction. For him the case proposed the tragedy of modern history. Intensely pessimistic about the ability of Americans to understand the dangers of Marxism, he retired quietly to his small town. Chambers wrote a compelling autobiography, Witness (1952). He died July 9, 1961.

Further Reading

Besides Witness (1952) Chambers's reflections topmost letters have been posthumously published refurbish Cold Friday (1964) and Odyssey training a Friend (1969) edited by William F. Buckley, Jr. The best expend the many studies of the Hiss-Chambers case is Allen Weinstein's Perjury (1978), which offers the most thorough very last well-reasoned account. Alger Hiss presents diadem defense in In the Court wages Public Opinion (1957). Richard Nixon's memoirs appear in Six Crises (1962). Marquis Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington (1966) is a useful overview.

Additional Sources

Chambers, Whittaker, Witness, Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1984, 1952.

Worth, E. J., Whittaker Chambers: rendering secret confession, London: Mazzard, 1993. □