Whittaker Chambers | Biography

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 Communist spy. Though Hiss denied it, Chambers produced microfilm of military secrets he claimed Hiss had given him. The allegations marked the beginning of anti-Communist investigations by congressional committees.

Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1924, he joined the Communist Party and soon became involved with writing for various party publications. He was an editor for the Communist Daily Worker newspaper until 1929 and then took on a new role as a courier for the Russian spy system in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s. As early as the 1920s he used the name Whittaker, his mother's maiden name, but by the 1930s he was using many aliases.

During the 1930s Chambers claimed to have become acquainted with Alger Hiss, who delivered military secrets to Chambers for transmission to Chambers' handlers. Hiss, a Harvard Law School graduate who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, worked in the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice from 1933 to 1936. Hiss then transferred to the State Department in 1936 and quietly rose in prominence during World War II as a key adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1945, Hiss had accompanied the president at the Yalta Conference, where the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union decided the shape of the post-war world. The following year, Hiss played a central role in the establishment of the United Nations. In 1946, he became president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Chambers left the Communist Party in 1938, disillusioned with its philosophy and its methods. He worked on the editorial staffs of Time and Life magazines, both owned by the staunch anti-Communist Henry Luce. While working for Luce, Chambers helped shape the anti-Communism ideology that pervaded U. S. media in the years after World War II. In 1948, Chambers felt personally compelled to tell investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had been a Soviet spy.

House investigators were initially skeptical about his disclosures. He then produced a 1938 microfilm of secret State Department documents from a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. This hiding place led the press to dub them "the pumpkin papers." Chambers claimed these papers had been typed on Hiss's typewriter. California Representative Richard M. Nixon led the investigation of Hiss. Called before HUAC, Hiss denied all the accusations.

A grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury for lying to Congress that he did not know Chambers and that he had not given the documents to him. His first trial in 1948 ended in a hung jury, but he was convicted in 1950. Chambers testified at both trials and never changed his story. Hiss's defense, which he maintained for the rest of his life, was that Chambers was a psychopathic personality and a chronic liar. After the trials Chambers retired to his Maryland farm. He wrote an account of his Communist sojourn, Witness (1952), and in the late 1950s he helped edit the National Review magazine. He died on his farm near Westminster, Maryland on July 9, 1961.