In 1948 TIME magazine editor Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) testified that in the 1930s he helped organize a Communist spy ring in the U.S. government. His accusations against State Department official Alger Hiss stunned the nation. Jay Vivian Chambers...

Whittaker Chambers was a confessed spy for the Soviet Union and the chief witness in the 1949 perjury trials of Alger Hiss. Chambers accused Hiss, who had been an important official with the U.S. State Department during the 1930s and 1940s, of being a...

Whittaker Chambers achieved public renown as the principal informant in what became the greatest espionage trial of the Cold War. In August 1948 Chambers informed the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) that he had been...

LEAFING through the introduction to the newly collected Holmes -Frankfurter correspondence, I found a passing reference to "the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss." Time was when such lawyerly weaseling left me speechless with anger. Now I just shrug. As Dostoyevsky, Whittaker Chambers's favorite...

(New York: Random House 1997). IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1997 edition of his book on the Hiss-Chambers case, Allen Weinstein notes that the story of the two men is so bizarre and fantastic it should be written by a novelist. Actually,...

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, steps out from behind the arras to play a nuanced round of connect-the-dots in his New Republic essay, “The End of the Journey: From Whittaker Chambers to George W. Bush” (July 2, $4.95). Mr. Tanenhaus,...

National Security: Leftist academics are determined to rehabilitate the reputation of Alger Hiss, the high-level U.S. diplomat and Soviet spy. Time may have passed, but this case was settled a long time ago.Was Soviet communism a malevolent global force committed to conquering the world, with...

In the following essay, Abbott contrasts Witness and Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, contending that “both these autobiographies fail from the standpoint of political theory.”

In the following essay, Tanenhaus surveys Chambers's literary and journalistic work.

In the following essay, Nieli contends that both Chambers and Eric Voegelin, a political writer and teacher, have similar ideas about Western modernity.