Chambers Blows Lid Off Communist Spying

Thus began what became known as the Hiss-Chambers case—a legal, political, and ideological battle that divided the country and, to some extent, still divides the country. Most Democrats and ideological liberals sided with Hiss—President Truman dismissed the allegations as a “red herring,” while Dean Acheson famously stated, “I won’t turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Most Republicans and conservatives sided with Chambers—one of the HUAC’s members, a young congressman named Richard Nixon, became nationally famous because of this case; Nixon was one of the few members of the committee who believed Chambers was telling the truth.

Chambers subsequently revealed that Hiss not only was a member of a communist cell, but also engaged in espionage activities for the Soviet Union. When he broke with communism, Chambers took with him classified State Department documents that Hiss had delivered to him when they were both in the underground. Chambers hid those documents and others in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm in Westminster, Md. Those documents, Chambers’ testimony, and other damning evidence were presented to a federal grand jury that indicted Hiss for perjury—Hiss had testified before the grand jury that he was never a member of a communist cell and did not engage in espionage.

The first Hiss trial ended in a hung jury (8-4 for conviction). The second trial resulted in Hiss’ conviction on two counts of perjury. He was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

After the second trial, Chambers retreated to his Maryland farm to write Witness, one of the most important books of the 20th century. In Witness, Chambers wrote movingly about his journey from the depths of communism to a religious awakening and a realization of the worth of Western Civilization. It is a memoir of human frailty, courage, and redemption. It is a stark portrayal of the Cold War as more than a political and ideological conflict. The struggle between communism and Western Civilization, he wrote, is a conflict of faiths and visions between those who believe in God and those who believe in man without God. He memorably described the communist vision as:

the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals.

In the book’s foreword in the form of a letter to his children, Chambers called himself a witness, and explained that a man “is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. A witness, he continued, “in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.”

Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961. He had been writing another book that was later published posthumously with the title Cold Friday, the name of one of the sections of his Maryland farm. In that book, Chambers remarkably foresaw the possibility of national uprisings in Eastern Europe resulting in the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Alger Hiss died on Nov. 15, 1996, proclaiming his innocence to the very end.

The evidence since the Hiss-Chambers case, especially the release of the so-called Venona Papers (army signals intelligence intercepts of Soviet cables between Moscow and the U.S. during and after World War II) vindicates the jury’s verdict. In 1978, Allen Weinstein published Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, which reviewed old and new evidence, and definitively concluded that Hiss was guilty and Chambers told the truth.

More recently, Sam Tanenhaus, in is magnificent biography of Chambers, reached the same conclusion.

When Chambers died, Arthur Koestler, the author of Darkness at Noon, famously remarked, “The witness is gone. The testimony will stand.”