Witness

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The Alger Hiss case has always been a part of my background knowledge, but nothing more than that. I graduated from High School in 1977. I remember my history teacher sharing an anti-HUAC chant that he participated in during the 1950s. I knew that Whittaker Chambers was a seedy, homosexual, drunken psycho and that Nixon was involved in some kind of publicity seeking chicanery. I also knew that the question of whether Hiss was wrongfully convicted of perjury was a divisive issue and that – after I left high school – evidence emerged that Hiss was undoubtedly guilty.

After reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers, I wonder how I formed the impression that Chambers was an untrustworthy, seedy compulsive liar. Or rather I marvel at the power of disinformation to reach out across decades and to poison minds with smear and slander.

It is odd to me now that I knew things that were problematic. I think I knew that Chambers was a senior editor at Time magazine, but I never wondered how he managed to make the jump from underground Communist to leading journalist while being such a loathsome and incompetent human being. It seems that he must have had something going for him. Likewise, I knew that he was involved with National Review at its inception and that many of the writers of National Review held him in high esteem, and, yet, my sense that Chambers was a man I would not want to be in the same room with remained intact.

This book is therefore a revelation and a fascinating window into the Communist underground of the twenties and thirties.

The book has an odd structure for memoirs, but it is a structure that makes sense from the standpoint of telling a topical story to people who wanted the “sexy bits.” The book starts with a long first chapter where Chambers recounts both his break with the Communist underground and his activities in that underground, including his involvement with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. The book then moves back in time to Chambers' boyhood and brings him up to the point where he enters the Communist underground. Having caught up to the beginning of the first chapter, third part of the book follows Chambers years after leaving the Communist Party, his employment at Time magazine, and his subsequently becoming embroiled in the Hiss case (the “Case.”)

Chambers was born in 1901. His family life was miserable. His father was cold and a philanderer. His mother was frustrated by not belonging to the wealthy classes, which she had inhabited in her youth. Chambers favorite book was Les Miserables, and he was particularly enamored of the character of the Bishop of Digne, which he felt was a foreshadowing of his attraction to Communism and its love of the poor. When he graduated from school, he left home and spent three months doing physical labor in Washington DC and then used the money he had earned to travel to New Orleans. When the money ran out, he contacted his parents and got money to return home. He then went to Columbia University, where he became enmeshed in socialist politics. When he was 25 he joined the Communist Party and worked on the Daily Worker as a reporter and editor. In 1932, Chambers was moved to the Communist underground where worked under “party names,” including “Carl.” His job in the underground was to act as a courier for information that other underground Communists in government had to provide to Russia. (Chambers was actually working for the Soviet espionage service.)

Chambers hold virtually nothing back from his memoirs when it comes to self-accusation, except his homosexual affairs, which he disclosed to J. Edgar Hoover. However, I never felt that I got enough information to understand Chambers' motivations. Chambers claimed that he was motivated to join the Communist Party because of “the great world crisis” as to which only the Communist Party had a plan, but he never tells us what this crisis was or what plan the Communist party had. (Later he does mention a trip through Europe immediately after the end of World War I and his observation of the poverty and damage caused by war but it isn't clear what the greater crisis was – nationalism? War?) Likewise, throughout the book, Chambers clearly romanticizes the working class or the working man. He looks back fondly on his period in Washington DC where he worked with men of all kinds of races and nationalities and languages and tells a story about how he was helped in getting his first job by a conspiracy of proletarians. This seems to have been his one experience with physical labor, and, typical of leftwingers in love with the proletariat, he had the resources to end his adventure with a phone call, and then go to college.

The other interesting feature is the Columbia connection. Chambers met a class of people who were able to help him throughout his life. He got his job with Time after 6 years of being underground through a Columbia friend, and he was able to provide for himself and his family as a German-French translator. (Chambers was the translator of “Bambi”, of all things. With an internet search of newspaper databases you can see numerous references to Chambers being the translator of various books.)

Chambers' disengagement from Communism came in part from the Stalinist purges which caught up his friends and comrades. In addition, he claims that he came to doubt the materialistic philosophy of Communism. This passage is particularly effective:

“But I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear— those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.”

In 1939, motivated by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Chambers attempted to report to the United States government the truth of Communist penetration into government. His report was taken by Adolf Berle, who was an Assistant Secretary of State. Berle did nothing with the report:

“In August, 1948, Adolf A. Berle testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities not long after my original testimony about Alger Hiss and the Ware Group. The former Assistant Secretary of State could no longer clearly recall my conversation with him almost a decade before. His memory had grown dim on a number of points. He believed, for example, that I had described to him a Marxist study group whose members were not Communists. In any case, he had been unable to take seriously, in 1939, any “idea that the Hiss boys and Nat Witt were going to take over the Government.”

Chambers' constant theme is that he was a reluctant witness. I found his many efforts to limit Hiss's exposure to the consequences of his actions totally inexplicable. At every occasion, Chambers soft-peddled the accusations against Hiss. Chambers committed perjury in denying that espionage had occurred before one grand jury. He did not bring up the espionage information to the HUAC committee. He would not have produced the documentary evidence he secreted at the time of his break if Hiss's attorney in the libel action brought by Hiss against Chambers had not goaded him into it. Even then, Chambers withheld microfilm (which he did turn over to the HUAC committee.)

Chambers constantly expresses his concern about being an “informer.” His memoirs go on ad nauseam about his mental torture at being an informer, but simultaneously he goes on about the importance of being a witness and the need to expose Communism. Chambers explains that he is concerned about mercy and so proportions his goal of exposing Communism to his desire to protect Hiss and his former comrades from the worst results of their conduct.

I admit that I don't get it. Chambers was being called a liar and a fraud by a person who had shown himself to be a disloyal psychopath (the willingness of Hiss to shamelessly fabricate lies on the spot that contradicted prior lies is impressive in its being totally unmoored from normal human abilities.) An editorial from 1953 that I read makes the point that perhaps we who have not been in the Communist underground and separated ourselves from a totalizing faith like Communism may not be in a position to understand:

“Because of Chambers' own compulsive desire to confess, all because we do have so much information concerning him, his motivations, his mysticism and his other-worldly attitudes, we must take him on his own terms. They are not our terms. But we must, I feel, believe that mingled with his desire to make a clean breast of his offenses and to injure the Soviet cause in America was a sort of odd saintliness; a wish not to visit upon a former friend and associate the full odium of his crimes, not, as he says, to destroy Hiss.” (Cincinnati Inquirer 7/1/53 Forrest Davis Editorial.)

Davis makes a fair point about knowing so much about Chambers and knowing nothing about Hiss. We have biographical details about Hiss, but nothing that explains his betrayal and pathological deceitfulness. After all, it wasn't like Hiss could ever write a memoir explaining his motivations.

As a practicing attorney, I was amazed at how much of a liar Hiss clearly was. His testimony was classically evasive and he was a horrible witness in his egotism and condescension. He seemed to be operating on the premise that since all of his friends despised the HUAC, all he had to do was show the HUAC the same derision directly that he heard from his friends in cocktail parties and all would be fine. However, to someone who is not in his Amen corner, he was anything but an innocent person. An innocent person would have answered simply and directly and not have needed the evasions. An innocent person can be allowed one or two mistakes, but Hiss went from not knowing Chambers to identifying him as George Crosley, from saying that he sold Crosley a car to saying he gave him the “use of” the car when it was obvious that documents contradicted him, from claiming that Crosley was a mere boarder to saying that Crosley was running a “deep con” on him.

We now know that there were Communist spies in the American government, but why is that surprising? Wouldn't we expect that the Soviets would place agents in our government? I would hope that we had spies in their government.

What is surprising is the unwillingness of the American government of the 1930s and 1940s to do anything about them when they were exposed. Chambers reported Hiss in 1939. The FBI had been reporting Hiss for ten years prior to 1948. Yet, President Truman described the Hiss case as a “red-herring” and Hiss was able to trot out the Secretary of State and Supreme Court Justices to vouch for his integrity. A reasonable person could look at the facts and see a cover-up. Moreover, there was a class bias in this cover-up: the right sorts of people with the right connections were being coddled and protected because of their connections. It was the outsiders – the Californian Nixon – who were blowing the whistle.

In reading this book I was struck by how much this seemed like modern politics. This review is written a few weeks after a Muslim Democrat shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando. The Department of Justice initially refused to release the audio of the shooter proclaiming his allegiance to Islamic terrorism (ISIS at this point) and then released with the pledge omitted and the word “Allah” changed to “God.” In the 1940s, the government line was that Communists were really not a problem; today it is that Islamic terrorism is not a problem. In both cases, the average person has to wonder, “what the heck is going on?” After which, the wondering gives rise to conspiratorial implications, which are then described as “paranoid” and “psychotic.”


Likewise, with the Hiss case, we see the politics of personal destruction, as Chambers is vilified as insane and a drunk and a deadbeat. Chambers was “psychologized” to explain his behavior and the slander was never retracted. Even today we see the same thing as Trump or his reporters are “psychologized,” while Hillary Clinton, who has to be a fascinating case study in neurosis based on the nastiness and cruelty that is reported about her, is left alone.

Hiss v Chambers may not be the first example of this kind of politics, but it seems to have set the mold for the next 80 years.