Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness”: A Story for the Ages

“Witness“ is a brief against the “dying civilization” that was the United States of the Jazz Age. The America of F. Scott Fitzgerald, flappers, and general frivolity was dying? The young Whittaker Chambers vaguely thought so at the time. The mature Chambers of “Witness“ was convinced of that.

Whittaker Chambers

“Man without mysticism is a monster.” This is one of many truth-telling lines in Whittaker Chambers’ truth-telling book, “Witness.” It’s also one of the most telling pieces of evidence in an autobiography that Chambers hoped would be a story for the ages, rather than simply a brief against Alger Hiss. Little could he have known that it might yet prove to be an important story for the very age in which we are living.

To be sure, Witness is also a brief against the Communist Party. Chambers had joined the party in the mid-1920s when he was in his mid-twenties. Convinced that America was then a “dying civilization,” he could see no meaningful alternative.

More specifically, Chambers’ autobiography is a brief against what he had gradually come to regard as essentially a “fascist,” even a “terrorist” organization. For the Whittaker Chambers of Witness, communism, fascism, and socialism were virtually indistinguishable. After all, if “socialism was “justified,” well then “terror was justified.” Having finally become convinced of all that, having observed the Soviet purges with “great revulsion,” having concluded that communism was “more evil” than Stalin,” Chambers would leave the party in 1938.

Last, but far from least, Witness is a brief against the “dying civilization” that was the United States of the Jazz Age. The America of F. Scott Fitzgerald, flappers, and general frivolity was dying? The young Chambers vaguely thought so at the time. The mature Chambers of Witness was convinced of that.

Having recently re-read what must still rank as one of the most compelling autobiographies in all of American literature, I can assure you that it deserves to be re-read—or read—as we contemplate what’s left of a civilization that Whittaker Chambers tells us had begun to die long ago, a civilization that as of the mid-twentieth century was also dying of “indifference and self-satisfaction.”

None other than H. L. Mencken would likely disagree—and not simply because the 1920s was his heyday, when he was the life of the party, prohibition notwithstanding.

Who knows for sure, but the full-time Baltimorean (Mencken) might well have had a part-time Baltimorean (Chambers) in mind when he wrote the following: “I dislike and distrust all communists and Calvinists and other such enemies of reason. But I dislike and distrust ex-communists and ex-Calvinists very much more.”

Whether he wrote those words before or after Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in August of 1948 is something that I do not know. But he surely was quite aware of Chambers’ testimony against Alger Hiss.

After all, that testimony—and Hiss’ response—had captured the entire country in the late summer of 1948. At that point Mencken was still the active journalist he had long been—and would continue to be until suffering a debilitating stroke in late November of that very same year.

Did Mencken believe that Hiss had been a member of the Communist Party, as Chambers had charged? Who knows? (At that point Chambers had yet to accuse Hiss of espionage.)

Do I believe that Hiss lied about his party membership, as well as his espionage activities? Yes. Let’s get that out of the way right away. There was little doubt about Hiss’ guilt in my mind when I first read this book years ago. For that matter, not even a smidgen of doubt remained after reading Alan Weinstein’s Perjury almost as long ago.

Weinstein had set out to prove once and for all that Hiss was innocent, but evidence obtained under the fledgling Freedom of Information Act convinced him otherwise. That evidence was—and remains—overwhelming.

In any case, to confirm Hiss’ obvious guilt is far from the main reason to return to Witness today. So what is the main reason? Let’s return briefly to Mr. Mencken, since the key word in his attack on the “ex’s” is, guess what, reason, which he claimed both “ex’s” were enemies of.

Reason meant everything to Mencken. Mysticism, however, meant nothing to him—other than complete foolishness. Was he one of the monsters? I think I can safely say “no.” In all likelihood, his sense of humor (an attribute which Chambers regarded as a “heavy cross” for any true communist) saved Mencken from such a fate. Nonetheless, Mencken was surely wrong to dismiss the Whittaker Chamberses of his time—or any time—as he did.

On the other hand, Chambers was surely right about the H. L. Menckens of the early twentieth century. Chambers regarded the twentieth century as “unique in the history of man for two reasons.” As Chambers saw it, his century—and Mencken’s—was the “first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind (had) not merely ceased to believe in God, but (had) deliberately rejected God.”

The second reason clinched matters for Chambers. His century—and Mencken’s—was also the century “in which this religious rejection had taken a specifically political form.” As a result, “the conflict between the two great camps of men—those who reject and those who worship God”—had become “irrepressible.”

Until 1937, Chambers regarded himself as a “typical modern man.” In his case, that meant living his life without God, save for “tremors of intuition.” Those “tremors” notwithstanding, as of the onset of 1938 Chambers expected that he would live the rest of his life as that “typical modern man.”

And yet 1938 turned out to be the year that Whittaker Chambers would leave the Communist Party and the communist underground. Precisely ten years later he could be found in New York City working as a Time magazine editor and living the “other typical life” of his time, namely a life of “career and success.” From that lofty vantage point, he fully anticipated that he would simply live his “second life to its close.” And yet he didn’t.

While there are many reasons that the Whittaker Chambers story is an important one, Chambers himself thought it was worth telling mainly because he had “rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of life in our time.” In his own words, that meant spurning both the “revolutionary ending and the success ending.”  Instead, he would choose a “third ending.” Instead, he would be a witness.

What’s more than doubly important here is that Chambers saw himself as a witness is a double sense. He would not just be a witness against communism, but he would also be a witness of and for his newly found faith in God. The communist courier had become a faithful Quaker.

In becoming this double witness Chambers would also make it clear that he was joining the “losing side.” How unreasonable! To the H. L. Menckens of his—or any—day, such a decision would have to be dismissed as highly unreasonable, especially since a young and seemingly reasonable Jay Vivian Chambers had reasoned his way to communism as the solution to the dual problems of war and economic privation. (He would later take Whittaker, which was his mother’s maiden name, as his legal name.)

Really now, what could be more unreasonable than signing on with the losing side when one is convinced that that side is, in fact, the losing side? And just what were the two sides? At the time of his departure from the CP, Chambers defined it to be a “contest” between “capitalism and communism,” each of which was essentially a materialistic philosophy. But there was this crucial difference: Capitalism was a philosophy that had abandoned religion, while communism was a philosophy that had become a religion. From Chambers’ impending post-communist vantage point, such a contest was really no contest.

Let’s now fast forward to the early stages of the Cold War. Chambers, the witness-turned-informer, had not budged from his belief that he was still on the losing side. As such, he was vilified by virtually everyone on the left (for his witnessing) and kept at a distance by some on the right (for his pessimism).

Most of those on the left accused Chambers of concocting lies about Alger Hiss, while some on the left, meaning those who either knew or suspected the truth of the matter, vilified him for being a stool pigeon.

And those on the right who were dismissive of Chambers? They surely believed that he was telling the truth, and they admired him for doing so. But what was this business about joining the “losing side?” That rankled. More than that, it continued to rankle long after Chambers’ death in 1961. For some it even rankled when President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom in 1984.

And then came the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was finally over. The “evil empire” was finally gone. The Reagan strategy/approach of “we win, they lose” had worked. Or had it really—and finally? In any case, Chambers was wrong. The “losing side” had turned out to be the winning side.

Or had it?

America had won, hadn’t it? The West had won. Capitalism had won. Game, set and match. End of story. Or was it?

Chambers himself may well have known better way back when. Near the end of Witness, the witness tells us that he “hit something else” when he deployed his “little sling and aimed at communism.” Chambers defined that something else as the “forces of that great socialist revolution,” which, “in the name of liberalism,” had been “inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.” That inching has continued over the course of the succeeding decades.

Though aware of this “great revolution” at the time, Chambers conceded that he had had “no adequate idea of its extent.” Nor had he grasped the “depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power.”

He might well have a much more adequate idea of its extent today. And if so, he might well be inclined to re-emphasize that, yes, he still was on the losing side.

Having cast his lot with the losers, Chambers was not about to surrender. Nor was he about to encourage others to surrender. Witness itself is continuing evidence of his willingness to stay in the fight, while encouraging others to do the same.

Some of that evidence amounts to the encouragement he received from nameless others. Scattered through this memoir are occasional vignettes of strangers approaching him and encouraging him. Or not entirely. While Chambers was lunching alone in an Automat during a break from grand jury testimony, a man of “late middle age” approached him to thank him for what he was trying to do. Chambers replied to the effect that he hoped that he might be of some help to the American people. “Nothing can save the American people,” was the retort from the stranger.

Silently, Chambers might well have had similar thoughts. In any event, what he does express in these pages is a sense that is commonly felt today, namely that there is what he called a “jagged fissure” between the “plain people” and the “best people” by which he meant the experts and those in power.

Did Chambers truly have hope? He must have. Otherwise why bother writing this monster of an autobiography that still weighs in at more than 700 pages.

Beyond that, there surely was reason to place one’s hope in the American countryside and in the American family. After all, he had hope in his wife and two young children and their Maryland farm.

He even had had some reason to have hopes for Time magazine and its publisher, Henry Luce, even if it was located in New York City. Son of missionaries to China, Luce had called Chambers to his office in the midst of the Hiss hullabaloo to tell him that he had been reading about a “young man born blind.” Chambers responded by apologizing for not yet have read the magazine’s latest issue.

“No, no,” Luce replied, “I mean the young man born blind. It’s in the eighth or ninth chapter of St. John. They brought Our Lord a young man who had been blind from birth and asked Him one of those catch questions” ‘Whose is the sin, this man’s or his parents,’ that he was born blind?”

Not finished, Luce proceeded to describe Christ’s restoration of the young man’s sight. Then he quoted from memory Christ’s words in the gospel account: “Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

Slowly, Chambers came to realize what Luce was really saying to him. He was telling Chambers that he, Chambers, was the young man born blind, that all he had to offer God was his blindness, and that through his recovered sight, His works might be made manifest.

Could a similar story be told about an editor of a mainstream publication today? It’s more than unlikely; it’s unimaginable.

At that moment Chambers could excuse Luce for locating Time in New York City. But the city itself, any large city, was another matter entirely. For Chambers, communism was a “faith of the cities,” and he feared that the fate of the twentieth century would be “determined by the cities.” Surely, New York City was no place for placing one’s hope.

Nor did Chambers have any reason to place any hope in the Democratic party of his day. Following the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he decided to tell his story to the Roosevelt administration. He met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle, who either did nothing with the information or could get nowhere with it. And then in the midst of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings Berle would tell Congress that Chambers had only told him about a communist “study group.”

Later President Truman declared Chambers’ 1948 testimony to be nothing more than a “red herring,” while his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, publicly made a show of refusing to “turn my back on Alger Hiss.”

Republicans were little better, save for a freshman congressman from California by the name of Richard Nixon. A fellow Quaker and a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Nixon believed Chambers early on and remained a believer, save for a brief snafu over the mistaken mis-dating by Eastman Kodak of the microfilm Chambers had stashed in the notorious “pumpkin papers.” Besides, Chambers thought that Nixon was the only HUAC member who asked “shrewd questions.”

Politics, however, was never the answer for Whittaker Chambers. Nor was conservatism, for that matter. Preferring to call himself a “man of the right,” Chambers insisted that there were only “revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries.” More than that, counter-revolutionaries and conservatives had “little in common.”

The missing link between the two was religious faith, which this witness had come to regard as a “human necessity.” For Whittaker Chambers, man’s “unending effort to know God” was driven by the “noblest” of man’s intuitions, namely a sense of one’s “mortal incompleteness.” It was also the only way to forever assure one’s standing as a counter-revolutionary—and to forever avoid becoming a monster who would build, support, defend, excuse, or ignore such monstrosities as the Soviet state.

While Whittaker Chambers is not on hand today, his words and thoughts remain on hand to offer hope that his losing side will not always be a losing side—or that his losing side will not one day become a monster all its own.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay; the photograph of Whittaker Chambers (1948) is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.