In the wake of the death of Alger Hiss, more than thirty years after the death of the man principally responsible for the exposure of his double life which he stubbornly denied under mounting evidence that he was lying, a long, detailed, and fascinating biography of Whittaker Chambers has been published.1 It should put to rest, at least among persons capable of attending to reason, any lingering doubts about his truthfulness, good faith, or suspicion that he was a mere tool of Republican enemies bent on discrediting the New Deal.

Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of Whittaker Chambers has garnered admiration and approval from such different quarters as Arthur Schlesinger, Alistair Cooke, and John Kenneth Galbraith on the liberal side, and William Buckley on the conservative side. I have come across only one sour dissenting note by Sidney Blumenthal, predictably enough in The New Yorker, the editors of which for many years now seem to have been carrying a torch for Alger Hiss.2

Tanenhaus has not written a hagiography. He is non-partisan and unbiased in his approach. He perceives Chambers not as a man oscillating between the extreme of commitment to revolution and commitment to reaction and counter-revolution, but as a sympathetic man, in his later years especially, who valiantly labored to attain a balanced view of the world and its politics. In other words, the biographer takes a nuanced approach to a man who has been long crudely caricatured and stereotyped. 

Far from being in relentless pursuit of the destruction of the character of Alger Hiss, it transpires through this massively researched and detailed narrative that in fact Chambers for a long time tried to save Hiss from the consequences of his own folly by coming forward and frankly acknowledging it. Tanenhaus presents his subject as a serious and moral man, and a writer endowed with exceptional literary talents, equally evident when he was defending the freedom of the United States or misguidedly attempting to destroy it in the service of an inimical dictatorship and tyranny. Chambers emerges from the patient pages of Tanenhaus’s book as a highly gifted and even unique Emersonian individualist or maverick, as pitiable as he was admirable because he was trapped in the modern world, too much in a hurry to recognize that he was anything other than an organization man who had absconded from the service of Stalin in order to carry out the orders of Henry Luce and Time magazine. He could not, by any stretch of the imagination, possibly be his own man! It is little wonder, in retrospect, that just as the case against Hiss turned a corner and the facts spoke for themselves, Chambers should have attempted to kill himself, so ashamed was he of the role of informer which circumstance compelled him to play. 

The sequence of events that led to the opening up of the Russian spy operation that had penetrated high levels of the United States government prior to World War II must be kept in mind. Chambers had exposed the disloyalty of Alger Hiss and various officials in government in 1939 during an interview with Adolf Berle, Liberal Party leader in New York, an assistant secretary of state in the Roosevelt administration, and a man who had direct access to the president. This daring disclosure of a sinister secret conspiracy was provoked by several things. The first had occurred in 1937–38, when, after serving Russian military intelligence underground for half a dozen years, Chambers became alarmed at the Moscow show trials, which destroyed the makers of the Russian revolution wholesale and condemned or executed or caused to defect many of those in the military or diplomatic services of the Soviets whom Chambers knew. With good reason to fear for his life because of his dangerous knowledge, Chambers had gone into hiding with his wife and two small children after breaking off suddenly from the espionage network and tried to convince some of the associates who had worked with him to do likewise. The second and even more urgent and serious provocation came in 1939 when, on August 23, in a surprise that stunned the world, a pact between Stalin’s Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, hitherto the most deadly enemies, was concluded in Moscow and Berlin, secret protocols of which provided for dismemberment and occupation of Poland, the little states adjoining Russia, and large segments of eastern and central Europe. The pact also opened the door to a general European war in which England and France, ill-prepared and hopelessly outgunned, especially in air power and in tanks, seemed to face huge odds against an overwhelmingly powerful and vaingloriously militaristic totalitarian Germany.

Imaginative and even sophisticated people like Secretary Berle, not to mention private persons like Chambers, could be excused for fearing the involvement of the United States in the hostilities threatening to engulf much of the world. It was this that moved Chambers to warn the government of the dangers of treason, subversion, and espionage with which it was threatened. He realized vividly the risks to which his action exposed him. Berle, too, was alarmed sufficiently to pass on his information to the commander-in-chief. But FDR, with supreme skepticism and the invincible self-confidence which he shared with the America that elected him again and again, brushed the warning aside as of no consequence and perhaps only another of the deep-laid plots of his domestic enemies to discredit his New Deal as communist-inspired. The result was that Chambers was convinced that he had wasted his breath and risked mortal danger to himself in vain. He waited impatiently to be contacted by the FBI or other security services of the government in order to confirm and to explore the danger he had revealed, but it was as if he had never spoken at all. He felt understandably frustrated; he also felt that he had fulfilled his duty and owed nothing more to a government complacent or stupid enough to treat him as a non-person.

Almost ten tumultuous years had to pass, a devastating global war to be fought, and Stalinist absorption of almost half of Germany and virtually all of eastern Europe before America would awaken to its own peril and become alert to the fact that it was threatened by aggression from without and betrayal, disloyalty, and subversion from within. Chambers in the interim had achieved a successful career in journalism, rising to be in charge of foreign news at Time magazine (in which strategic post he had done his utmost to counter Soviet disinformation and propaganda); he had also acquired additional land for his farm in Maryland, which had a symbolic and almost mystical significance in his mind, giving him not merely a material but a spiritual stake in the survival of a free American republic. But he could hardly forget his painful rebuff in 1939. He was no longer of a mind to volunteer his services to an unheedful country. He had to be summoned by a congressional committee before he would give his testimony. In its obituary of Alger Hiss, the New York Times reported that Chambers had appeared as a voluntary witness. That is not so, unless appearance in answer to a subpoena to answer questions under threat of punishment for failure to do so is defined as voluntary compliance. There is no doubt that earlier Chambers had been eager to share the full extent of what he had learned with constituted authority. But the refusal to listen and to take him seriously by those with the greatest responsibility for national security had made him cautious and reluctant. He did not wish to injure friends who might have acted belatedly on his advice to them to break away from the Soviet underground. The information that he had shared freely with Adolf Berle in 1939 had to be wrung from him drop by painful drop in 1948. 

Such is the slippery ground on which the famous case against Alger Hiss originated. It is often thought that Chambers was the sole witness against Hiss. That is far from the truth. Credible doubts about the loyalty of Hiss had surfaced long before Chambers came forward in 1948. It had separated him from his post and security clearance in the Department of State, so that by the summer of 1948 he was seeking the presidency of the Carnegie Foundation, a private but very prestigious organization dedicated to the preservation of international peace. It would be a fitting capstone to a career that had reached its high point in the role he had played in the formation of the United Nations. But when Chambers repeated openly part of what he had said in confidence in 1939 to Adolf Berle, Hiss immediately stepped forward not only to give him the lie but also, and, more astonishingly, to say that he had never known his accuser. The personable ex-government official suggested that his adversary was an Iago who, with motiveless malignity, was bent on the destruction of an honorable, long-tried, and long-tested public servant. Democratic partisans, right up to the secretary of state, the president himself, and a Supreme Court justice closely identified with the New Deal, rallied to his defense. Few besides a freshman representative in Congress from California, and those who had some knowledge of the Communist movement with its dogma that the real enemy of progress was right here at home in the shape of greedy capitalists whose executive committee was the government of the United States, were prepared to take the charges seriously.

Hiss, however, had been cagey enough to deny he had known a person named Whittaker Chambers and claimed he did not recognize his picture in the papers. A confrontation arranged by the committee revived his memory, but he insisted he had known Chambers slightly under the name George Crosley. The obituary of Hiss mistakenly asserted that this was a pseudonym used by Chambers. But though Chambers admitted to the use of false names, he denied ever having used this particular one, and Hiss, being challenged, could produce no one other than his wife, Priscilla, who recalled George Crosley. He appears to have been a figment of Hiss’s fertile imagination. 

Hiss proved very adept at lawyerly evasions, but he could not wholly evade becoming entangled in the web of deceit he wove or to offset the straightforward, detailed, and verifiable account given by Chambers. It eventually resulted in an ill-fated suit for slander filed by Hiss against Chambers—a suit that compelled Chambers to produce documentary evidence of Hiss’s disloyalty. The statute of limitations prevented Hiss from being tried on a charge of espionage, but he was indicted by the Department of Justice for perjury and, after two jury trials, finally convicted to spend forty-four months in prison.  

From Tanenhaus’s investigation-in-depth of the famous case, few characters emerge as unscathed as Whittaker Chambers himself and the prosecutor Thomas F. Murphy, who argued the case against Hiss. Among those who share in the discredit are many of the heavyweight pundits and bellwethers of the intellectual and the journalistic community, such as Walter Lippmann, James Reston, Joseph Alsop, Marquis Childs, and A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker. Tanenhaus’s conclusions are similar to those reached by the historian Allen Weinstein, who began his study Perjury with a bias in favor of Hiss but concluded that Chambers was the more trustworthy.3 Perhaps the greatest discredit of all fell upon the professor of psychiatry Dr. Carl Binger, who regarded Chambers, without examination, as a psychotic personality, but who was turned into a laughingstock by the clever cross-examination of Murphy, who was treated with disdain by Hiss on the witness stand but who turns out, in Tanenhaus’s account, to be a sophisticated reader of French fiction and an enthusiast for the work of Marcel Proust. 

The defense of Alger Hiss seemed to stop at nothing in its determination to besmirch the character of Whittaker Chambers. The lowest point was reached in its homophobic appeal to the prejudice of the jury. It found evidence of Chambers’s deviant sexuality in some obscure verses he had published in a magazine that had achieved notoriety by pirating chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses, at that time judged as obscene and forbidden postal entry to the United States. Weinstein’s Perjury revealed that the prosecution feared a full-fledged attack upon Chambers as a sometime homosexual. In anticipation of it, Chambers gave an unsigned statement about his occasional homosexual experiences before his marriage to Esther Shemitz, to whom he had been scrupulously faithful, and which had nothing to do with the derelictions of which Hiss stood accused. Ultimately, this proved unnecessary since the Hiss defense did not raise the issue, except perhaps indirectly in the psychiatric testimony designed to arouse doubts about the soundness of Chambers’s mind.

The one thing lacking in Tanenhaus’s otherwise admirable biography is its failure to do justice to Chambers’s poetic ambition and the influence of Walt Whitman upon him. In Whitman’s verse Chambers heard the ebb and flow of the tides of his native Long Island: “It was as if, by plugging up my ears, I were listening to my own blood pound.” When it comes to literature, Tanenhaus is inclined to credit the power over Chambers of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables with its international emphasis upon the plight of “the wretched of the earth.” That influence no doubt existed, especially upon the earlier part of Chambers’s life. But his recovery from his revolutionary obsession and his rediscovery of the ties which brought him back to his patriotic feelings for his native land and his determination to fend off its enemies, foreign and domestic, undoubtedly owed something to the great singer of America, whose conviction it was that the greatest reward awaiting a true American poet is that his country would one day embrace him with the same love with which he had embraced it. 

The odds against Chambers’s truth prevailing against the simulacrum Alger Hiss seemed for a time insuperable. That it did prevail eventually is owing not so much to support by fellow journalists and intellectuals (who, in Tanenhaus’s account, consigned him, in his final years, to an exile and isolation exceeding that of the convicted Alger Hiss), but to the common people who recognized him basically as one of their own, as well as to a minority of his intellectual and professional peers. The politicians who made successful careers on the strength of Chambers’s real suffering (even martyrdom) get short shrift from his sympathetic biographer. This includes not only the opportunistic demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Chambers, after a brief flirtation, recognized as an embarrassment to the anti-communist cause, but also Richard Nixon, to whom, despite his failings at a crucial point in the case, Chambers himself remained grateful for providing him with the opportunity to make his original breakthrough to public understanding.  

Praiseworthy as is Tanenhaus’s justification of Chambers against his numerous detractors, the faults he himself finds with his subject’s judgments have a quality of wisdom in hindsight. The biographer’s own liberal equipoise is at odds with the intense poetic enthusiasm of Chambers. He emerges from this stringent examination as a “true believer,” as likely to go off the rails in one direction as he is in an opposite direction at another time. But without such extremes of commitment, he would never have become involved with the anti-American Soviet spy operation in the first place, or been able to muster the courage and personal self-sacrifice needed to expose this operation to the world. His story remains relevant because it involved a soul-wrenching conversion and a reordering of personal faith which presented his country with one more chance to escape the constricting bonds of authoritarian socialism and to preserve the liberty of its institutions, imperfect, lethargic, slow-moving, and maddeningly inefficient as these sometimes appear to be.

Milton Hindus was a member of the founding faculty of Brandeis University, taught there for thirty-three years, and retired as the Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities.

  1. Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York, 1997). ↩︎
  2. Sidney Blumenthal, “The Cold War and the Closet: The True Legacy of Whittaker Chambers,” The New Yorker, March 17, 1997, 112–117. ↩︎
  3. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York, 1978). ↩︎