Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers (born April 1, 1901, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died July 9, 1961, near Westminster, Md.) was an American journalist, Communist Party member, Soviet agent, and a principal figure in the Alger Hiss case, one of the most publicized espionage incidents of the Cold War.

Chambers grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and attended Columbia University in New York City, where he studied alongside Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Solow, Louis Zukofsky, Clifton Fadiman, and Lionel Trilling and edited the university’s literary journal The Morningside (later The Columbia Review). Because he disliked his given name, in the 1920s he assumed his mother’s maiden name, Whittaker, as his given name. He joined the Communist Party in the mid-1920s and wrote for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (1927–29). He also wrote several articles for the Marxist publication The New Masses, of which he later became an editor (1931–32).

More From Britannica

Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

Chambers was asked to join the Soviet underground in 1932, serving first in New York. In the mid-1930s he moved to Baltimore after being assigned control of communists serving in and around Washington, D.C., in the U.S. federal government. As the Great Purge (purge trials, three widely publicized show trials and a series of closed, unpublicized trials held in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, in which many prominent Old Bolsheviks were found guilty of treason and executed or imprisoned) mounted, Chambers deserted the Communist Party in April 1938. With the announcement of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in August 1939, Chambers’s friends, including the journalist Herbert Solow and Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, urged and helped him to approach the administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to warn about communist infiltration in the U.S. federal government. A meeting with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle—a member of Roosevelt’s group of advisers known as the Brain Trust—in September 1939 produced only Berle’s meeting notes, which were filed away until they became evidence a decade later in the Hiss case.

In April 1939 Chambers joined Time magazine, where he held various writing and editorial positions before serving as special editor reporting to founder Henry R. Luce. Chambers helped articulate Luce’s policy toward communism in his cover story on Stalin (February 1945), followed by a sensational “fairy tale” essay—“The Ghosts on the Roof” (March 1945; reprinted in January 1948)—about the Yalta Conference.

In August 1948 Chambers appeared under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When questioned, he identified Alger Hiss as one of seven government officials who had formed part of a communist spy ring in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1930s. Speaking without congressional protection on the political radio talk show Meet the Press later that month, Chambers responded positively to the question of whether or not Hiss had been a communist. In September 1948 Hiss filed a $75,000 slander suit against Chambers in Baltimore. During pretrial proceedings, lawyers for Hiss requested evidence from Chambers to support his allegations. Chambers subsequently submitted the “Baltimore Documents” (also known as the “Baltimore Papers”)—consisting of approximately 60 typewritten pages and several handwritten notes by Hiss and Harry Dexter White, the former chief international economist for the U.S. Department of the Treasury—which Chambers claimed to have stored inside a “life preserver” that he had prepared a decade earlier when he was defecting from the Soviet underground. Hiss in turn had the documents submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice in hope of securing an indictment against Chambers. Upon learning that Chambers still had evidence, HUAC member Richard M. Nixon subpoenaed all remaining evidence from Chambers at the beginning of December. Chambers had stored the remaining evidence (35-mm microfilm) in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm to avoid discovery. The press subsequently dubbed these artifacts the “Pumpkin Papers.”

On Dec. 15, 1948, a grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury—one for claiming that he had never given any documents to Chambers, and the other for claiming that he had not met with Chambers after January 1937. A first trial ended in a hung jury (1949), and a second ended with his conviction. Key evidence in the second trial—in addition to Chambers’s testimony—were the Baltimore Documents, several of which contained Hiss’s handwriting and others of which had been typed on a Woodstock typewriter belonging to Hiss. Upon his conviction, Hiss stated, “Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.”

In 1952 Chambers published a best-selling autobiography, Witness, which was also serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and condensed in Reader’s Digest. Aside from working briefly in the late 1950s as an editor for the National Review at the behest of founder William F. Buckley, Jr., Chambers hardly appeared in print again. Selections from his diaries and letters, edited by Fortune magazine managing editor Duncan Norton-Taylor, appeared as Cold Friday (1964). Pres. Ronald Reagan awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. In 1988 the Whittaker Chambers Farm was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.