Witness: Cold War Classics

Witness (1952) is a memoir by journalist Whittaker Chambers. The title is a nod to the fact that Chambers had recently gained fame as a US government witness against Alger Hiss, a former US State Department official whom Chambers accused of being a Communist and a spy for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). After a series of court trials in the late 1940s, Hiss was convicted for perjury, not espionage, as the statute of limitations had expired on the espionage charge. Hiss’s pro-Communist affiliations were not established beyond reasonable doubt until a single cable (a type of dispatch) was declassified in 1996. At best, this shows him to have been an inconsequential Soviet sympathizer. It is still unclear how long he was involved with the Communist Party.

Chambers himself admitted to having spent years as a Soviet spy, which gives his memoir title a double meaning: As a member and agent of the Party, he “witnessed” the true face of Communism. For Chambers, Hiss was just one prominent example of the existential threat that Communism posed to Western democracies. Chambers was intent on using his first-hand knowledge of the movement to warn the world of a danger he believed it was only beginning to understand.

Witness was a major commercial success and a finalist for the National Book Award. It also became a seminal text for mid-century American conservativism, with Chambers later writing for its flagship periodical, National Review. For many conservatives, the Hiss case epitomized a liberal establishment that was blind to, or even in league with, the Communist threat. Chambers’s harrowing depiction of his years as a Soviet spy, along with his fervent denunciations of the radical socialist ideology he had once embraced, had a profound influence on the strident anti-Communism of the new American Right. The Hiss case became a pretext for Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) to champion a much broader effort to uncover Communist infiltration within the US government. While Chambers professed to oppose McCarthyism as reckless, he did not use Witness as a platform to condemn Senator McCarthy’s extremism.

Content Warning: The memoir and this guide contain references to substance use disorder, suicidal ideation, and death by suicide.

Summary

Witness begins with a dedicatory letter to Chambers’s children, in which he describes the titanic struggle between Communism and freedom and the likelihood that great suffering and sacrifice are yet to come.

Chambers eventually turns the clock back to his own childhood, which is difficult and unstable. His father, Jay, found success as a professional illustrator but gave and received little affection in his personal life. Jay also abandoned the family for significant periods of time. When he returned after his longest absence, he isolated himself within the family house, emerging mostly to exercise cruelty towards his wife and engage in savage conflicts with his own mother, whose dementia spurred her to violent outbursts. Chambers’s mother, a former actress, despises her husband and pours all of her energy into Chambers and his brother, Richard. She encourages them to dream of brighter futures whenever Jay is gone, and she urges both boys to attend college.

Chambers enrolls in Columbia University but eventually drops out to become a member of the Communist Party. His initial involvement in Communism is modest. His dedication to the Party experiences a substantial uptick, however, after Richard drops out of school, descends into alcoholism, and dies by suicide at the age of 24. Determined to change a terrible world that broke a gentle man like his brother, Chambers begins as a writer for The Daily Worker, an influential publication among American Communists. Among his journalistic achievements at this time was his reportage on a Communist uprising in the rural American Midwest, “Can You Hear Their Voices?” Originally published in The New Masses, his story was later adapted into a stage play that is still performed.

Chambers decides that he must do more, and so he joins the Communist underground as a courier. His new position sees him working as a go-between for sympathetic officials in the US government and Soviet military intelligence. While the Party has some well-placed allies among the American elite, it is tearing itself apart thanks to Stalin’s purges and the panicked internal suspicions they cause. Chafing under the control of his arrogant and incompetent handler, Boris Bykov, Chambers leaves the Communist Party in the late 1930s. He is disgusted with the vicious crimes of the Stalinist regime, as well as the anti-aggression pact signed by Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Even so, Chambers is fearful that the lethal machinery of Communist repression will make him and his family its next targets. He goes underground, helped in part by the sympathetic efforts of some of his Party comrades. He also learns that the officer responsible for handling him has disappeared, which infuses this period in his life with additional tension. He and his loved ones avoid a similar fate by living a quiet life: first in Florida, and then on a Maryland farm.

Chambers visits the home of his good friend, Alger Hiss, a fellow Communist and former high-ranking State Department official, and begs Hiss to leave the Party with him. Hiss and his wife dismiss Chambers’s concerns over Stalin’s excesses, and Chambers realizes that he will never convince them to leave Communism behind. Even so, Hiss sheds a tear at his friend’s departure, and Chambers likewise grieves the loss of their friendship.

After much reflection, Chambers decides it safer to live a public life: People will notice if he is suddenly gone. Moreover, if the US traces his disappearance back to Communists, it will likely create an international incident with the USSR. Shortly thereafter, Chambers takes up a job as a senior editor at Time magazine.

Chambers decides that former Communists have a moral obligation to inform on their former colleagues. As a result, Chambers tells his story to a State Department official in 1939 and warns of the many pro-Soviet spies in its midst. However, the US government does not act on Chambers’s warnings for nearly a decade, at which point the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) calls Chambers to testify. Chambers publicly and repeatedly names Hiss as a Communist. Chambers’s testimony, along with Hiss’s denials, split the nation, with social elites generally believing Hiss and Chambers receiving financial and legal help from Time and the support of many average citizens. Chambers emerges victorious after recovering documents that he had received from Hiss, along with microfilm that he famously hid in a pumpkin patch. These sources prove the truth of his claims, bely Hiss’s denials, and result in Hiss’s conviction for perjury.

Chambers retires to his farm, encouraged by his victory but still fearful of the prospects for freedom in the world.