My interview with David Chambers

I went to high school with the grandchildren of Whittaker Chambers. At the time, I only knew the Chambers boys to be brilliant students and pleasant young gentlemen who were great at chess and foreign languages. Twenty years later I read Witness and then the biography by Sam Tanenhaus. Whittaker Chambers quickly became one of my heroes, right up there with William Wallace, El Cid and John Paul Jones. Once when I was exuberantly discussing Whittaker Chambers with a close friend, she said to me: “Well, you know, you went to school with his grandchildren.” It was quite a revelation; I had never made the connection. I was delighted when a few years ago I ran into David Chambers on Facebook. David has meticulously compiled an extensive online archive about his grandfather which is a place for any lover of history to become happily lost. He is dedicated to setting the record straight;[1] as a lover of historical truth I heartily applaud his efforts.

I expressed to David in one of our exchanges that it concerned me how people were beginning to forget Whittaker Chambers and his courage in exposing Communist agents in the United States government. Every high school student (and every Hollywood producer) knows about McCarthyism; those who were blacklisted are considered to be political martyrs. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is popularly seen as a sort of Spanish Inquisition which sought to destroy innocent screenwriters. Yet the more I learn about the Alger Hiss case the more I am shocked that an important chapter of our history is not being taught. I thought I would take it up with David, since he is the expert on Whittaker Chambers; he agreed to answer some questions.

EMV: David, your grandfather’s name never came up in any of my high school or college American history classes. I had to learn about him on my own. How could the key figure of one of the most dramatic legal cases in American history, who exposed how deeply Communist agents had infiltrated the United States government, be swept aside?

DC: My grandmother (who outlived her husband by a quarter century), my father, and my aunt could not be happier to have the Hiss Case swept aside. For them, it is a grim subject. My grandmother died in 1986. From all indications, my father and aunt hope the world will continue to sweep aside the Hiss Case, each and every day.

My father has shared only a few stories about life during the Hiss Case. Neither my father nor aunt is likely to write about their experiences, so I will not speak for them. I do recommend Anne Kimmage’s memoir, An Un-American Childhood (1998), for insight into life for “red diaper babies”.

In the grand scheme of things — in 20th-century American history — the Hiss Case now serves largely as a prelude. The case started with a 1948 presidential campaign season that ended with Harry S. Truman’s surprising defeat of Thomas Dewey. During Hiss’s trials in 1949, international events overshadowed the case, particularly the Soviet atomic bomb and the fall of China to Mao.

Alger Hiss’s jail sentencing in January 1950 seemed to set off a chain reaction of events, nationally and internationally. Within days, Dr Karl Fuchs had surrendered himself to British authorities as a nuclear spy. Within two weeks, Senator Joseph McCarthy had made his first major speech about card-carrying communists in the federal government. Within a month, the Soviets had signed a mutual defence treaty with the Chinese. In May, the FBI arrested Harry Gold, a crucial link between Klaus Fuchs and American atomic spies. Based on Gold’s accounts, the FBI began arresting scores of people, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In less than two years, our country had gone from the initial shock of the Hiss Case in August 1948 — federal officials involved in Soviet espionage — to a nationwide scare over nuclear espionage in July 1950, pre-verified as it were by the Soviet’s own A-Bomb and underscored by the potential for nuclear confrontation in Korea, a war that had just erupted.

EMV: Why do you think we constantly hear about McCarthyism and its excesses but not about the Hiss case?

DC: McCarthyism involved a series of federal investigations into communist infiltration in our country. Those investigations did not occur only with McCarthy or even in the U.S. Congress. The FBI went all over the country to investigate and, occasionally, arrest people. I often wondered whether some of the outrage was over-the-top — until I started researching someone whom my grandfather knew.

In Witness, my grandfather describes a man named John Loomis Sherman, who worked with him at The Daily Worker newspaper in the late 1920s and then disappeared. My grandfather saw him about four years later, when the party ordered him to enter the underground — that was in 1932. Sherman became his first boss, then headed west to help set up spy networks in California and Japan. (One of the most famous spies ever, Richard Sorge, took over in Japan later in 1933.) My grandfather lost track of him again for another four years. They next met again in New York — some time after late 1936. Sherman had just escaped the Moscow purges; my grandfather covered for him while he then escaped from New York. Sherman resurfaced in Los Angeles, joined the open Communist Party, and returned to some semblance of normal life, married, with at least one child. So the trail ends in Witness.

Decades later when I picked up the trail, I found that Sherman’s troubles had not stopped there. In February and March of 1950, he received subpoenas to appear before a grand jury in Los Angeles and before the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Washington. Sherman told HUAC how the FBI had hounded him at his place of work — a small university in Los Angeles — losing him his job. With restraint evident in his testimony, he said, “In the current year, largely due to the activities of the FBI, I have been unable to obtain a teaching position.” He understates further, “The FBI has known of my whereabouts and I think practically every detail of my life for years, for many years.” He was 54 years old at the time. I could find nothing more about him, even when posting to expert scholarly groups. I imagine the rest of his life went no easier. Now, those hearings were not part of the Hiss Case per se. But they do indicate just how fast and furious the U.S. Government conducted its investigations — even before anyone had heard of Harry Gold or the Rosenbergs.

EMV: I remember reading that your grandfather thought that Communism would win in the end, and that those who fought against it were on the losing side. Did he ever change his mind?

DC: The much-quoted lines about “winning” and “losing” sides come from Witness, describing his state of mind when defecting in 1938. He wrote:[2]

“I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th Century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed, or that has happened to me since, has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast.”

No, he did not ever change his mind.

EMV: Do you think he was right? Was he a prophet?

DC: Whittaker Chambers was no prophet, and he would be the first person to say so.

Conservative writers often crow that in this particular instance their oracular Whittaker Chambers was decidedly wrong about the West’s “losing” — particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union. However, I believe that the common conservative interpretation of what Whittaker Chambers wrote and meant here is incorrect — largely because they fail to take into account his Marxian training and overall outlook. I am developing my interpretation into a long response for publication at a later time.

EMV: Whittaker Chambers was often perceived as a sort of woeful Jeremiah, but Buckley has described his ebullient sense of humour. Humour, to me, betokens hopefulness rather than doom. Do you have any insights or anecdotes which can deepen our appreciation of your grandfather’s amazing wit and insightfulness?

DC: My mother met Whittaker Chambers only in the last year of his life. He died a month and a day after my father and she married. She told me many times that she found it hard to believe that he was the same man who appeared in the Hiss Case and who wrote Witness. He was very light-hearted and told funny stories and jokes much of the time around her. My father was often the same way when I was growing up, and I hope that has passed down to my generation, too. Given the weight of most of his writings, I have often felt my grandfather used daily humour to dispel a gloomy outlook.

Many of Whittaker Chambers’ writings for Time magazine are humorous. I like his 1939 review of Ninotchka with Greta Garbo — a favourite of his, too, since my grandmother was Ukrainian and so in some ways his own Ninotchka.

Perhaps the funniest piece he wrote for Time was a review of Arthur Schlesinger’s book, The Age of Jackson. As a polyglot, he had an excellent ear for English, too. This is how he opened the review, entitled “The Old Deal”. (I myself always read this aloud in Walter Brennan’s voice):[3]

“Once upon a time, when the Yewnited States was just a little shaver among the nations, but already very spoiled along the literate Eastern fringes, there lived younder in Tennessee a lovable old man with a tongue like a rat-tailed file and a face so hard they called him Old Hickory. He was a great hero. In the War of 1812, he licked the British in the Battle of Noo Orleens (some time after peace had been made). Everybody loved him because he had come up the hard way from nothing to a plantation and owning slaves, but he never forgot the COMMON MAN. Sitting on his plantation porch of an evening, he would say: “I still love the COMMON MAN,” and, with a jet of tobacco juice slanchwise between the Ionic columns, would drown a doodlebug at five yards. So they called him the SAGE of The Hermitage (his plantation).”

EMV: I enjoy your reviews of the various books and articles that endeavour to take on the role your grandfather played in history. The more liberal books tend to demonise him in favour of Hiss. I am thinking particularly of Susan Jacoby’s recent work Alger Hiss and the Battle for History.[4]

On the other hand, Whittaker Chambers is lionised as being the patron saint of modern conservatism by Buckley conservatives, although your grandfather resigned from the staff of The National Review. Which view, from your perspective, has greater currency in contemporary America? Those who love him or those who hate him? Or those who are indifferent?

DC: None of the views you mention have greater currency to contemporary America: neither Left, nor Right, nor indifferent — in my opinion.

I have read most books on the Hiss Case. In the process, I have amassed a library of more than 500 books on that and closely related subjects. Almost every book is so partisan, whether Left or Right — again, in my opinion — as to contribute nearly nothing to understanding the case. Furthermore, most of them regurgitate what others in their camp have said before them.

Susan Jacoby’s book Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (2009) approaches the Hiss Case from the Left. Jacoby was so sloppy with her facts that even the Hiss camp decried the book. I like her writing style — when I started reading the book, I felt as if I was listening to a deep discussion among family and friends. It seemed open and inviting, and I was eager to read on. However, she muffed numerous facts, which coloured her account. Her sole contribution seems to have been to concede on behalf of the Left that Hiss was indeed guilty.

The latest book, Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary by Richard Reinsch (2010), is weaker still. It takes a decidedly Right approach. The author promises to systematise Chambers’ thought. He then proceeds not only to dismiss all Leftist influences but to focus solely on what he calls “conversion passages” in Witness and Chambers’ other late writings. This book was far more narrow-minded than Jacoby’s and contributed exactly nothing new to an understanding of Whittaker Chambers.

My father helped Allen Weinstein when he was writing Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1977). The only other book I know of, to which my father contributed as a source, is Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997). To this day, my father remains so upset at the way Tanenhaus portrayed his approach to the book and then wrote it that he (my father) has sworn never to work with anyone else again. That wound up hurting the only writer to publish something really interesting about my grandfather: Andrew Meier for his book The Lost Spy (2007), which traces an American couple who not only mirrored my grandparents but whom they in fact knew.

I myself am working on a book on the Hiss Case. It takes a very different approach to anything else I have ever read about the case. It tackles issues as no other book does, either. It is as non-partisan and impartial as any family member can make it. It also demonstrates why the story of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss remain highly relevant today — for any readers who wish to avoid the mistakes of the past.

My efforts received initial direction from the late Dr Tony Judt of New York University. We corresponded intermittently in the past few years. In fact, he last wrote me just days before his death this past August. I hold his book Postwar in the highest esteem (and reviewed while he was still living his last book, Ill Fares the Land, with my grandfather much in mind). Given his specialty in 20th-century French intellectuals (most of them communists) and his overview of 20th-century Western history, I feel that I have solid ground to build on. Of course, his early death from ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive motor neurone disease] is a terrible loss to all, but I am hoping to work with some of his colleagues and former students as I continue.

Of course, Tony’s blessing is almost a curse for a writer or historian: he was so absolutely excellent as both. Postwar runs fewer than 100 pages longer than Witness (896 to 799) — and packs in more insight with better writing while covering many more lives and events of the 20th century. I do not really mean “curse”, of course: rather, Postwar sets the bar against which I will measure my own work gratefully.

EMV: Where exactly did your grandfather stand in terms of American politics? Can the Right legitimately claim him?

DC: Based on what my grandfather published (his 1952 memoirs Witness and later articles for Life, Look, and National Review magazines) and posthumous publishings by my grandmother (Cold Friday, 1964), by William F. Buckley, Jr. (Odyssey of a Friend, 1969), and by Ralph de Toledano (Notes from the Underground, 1998), one could easily fall prey to Right efforts to canonise Whittaker Chambers among patron saints in a modern pantheon of conservative intellectual thought.

However, in my opinion, that is a shallow reading and one that I am addressing in my book. Suffice here to say that, as a lifelong Marxian intellectual activist, forced into the limelight under the worst circumstances from 1948 onwards, Whittaker Chambers was willing to work with the Right to combat communism, if only for the sake of political expediency. Beggars cannot be choosers — and by that time, people referred to Whittaker Chambers more often as a moral outcast or leper. So, no, in fact I do not believe the Right can legitimately claim Whittaker Chambers as one of their own. (The same goes for Lionel Trilling — in reference to Dr Michael Kimmage’s interesting work The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009).

EMV: People forget the role that Richard Nixon, then a congressman, played in getting your grandfather’s testimony before the HUAC, and his ongoing defence of Chambers’ witness of Communist infiltration in the United States government. Nixon is another person who is demonised while the good he did for his country is eradicated from public memory. What would have happened to your grandfather’s testimony without Nixon?

DC: That is a loaded way to ask that question. Yes, President (then Representative) Nixon played a pivotal role in sussing out the conflicting stories of Hiss and Chambers. Once upon a time, Nixon was a good showman. He first gained national attention when parading the Pumpkin Papers before the press in December 1948 — without any certainty that any of the microfilm contained one shred of damaging evidence. He was very gutsy. His demonisation started during the Hiss Case — but of course that only mirrored his own demonising efforts. I am referring here to the Republican-dominated HUAC’s efforts in demonising FDR’s New Deal legacy and to defeat President Truman in November 1948. Today, Nixon still suffers from Watergate, which wiped away most credit he ever earned.

Nixon’s reputation is not unlike my grandfather’s. Many people will never forgive Whittaker Chambers for betraying his country as a spy. Others will never forgive him for betraying colleagues like Hiss, even if they were also spies.

The difference between the two men lies in their motives. Part of why I am writing about my grandfather is to explain again just what makes a person join a movement like communism and act against his own country.