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Whittaker Chambers

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Whittaker Chambers, 1948

Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, Communist party member and spy for the Soviet Union who defected and became an outspoken opponent of communism. He is best known for his testimony about the perjury and espionage of Alger Hiss.

Youth and education

Chambers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and spent much of his youth in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York. His parents were Laha Whittaker and James Chambers,[1] an illustrator and part of the New York-based "Decorative Designers" group, largely students of Howard Pyle. He grew up in a household which he himself described as troubled by parental separation and the long-term presence of a mentally ill grandmother.[2]

After graduating from high school in 1919, he worked at a variety of jobs before enrolling in Columbia University in 1921. Classmates included Louis Zukofsky, Lionel Trilling (who later made him a main character in his novel Middle of the Journey) and Meyer Schapiro. In the intellectual environment of Columbia he gained friends and respect. His professors and fellow students found him a talented writer and believed he might become a major poet or novelist.[3] Historian Kathryn Olmsted has described him as being, at this time in his life, "brilliant, disturbed, idealistic, dysfunctional."[4] Early in his sophomore year, Chambers wrote a play entitled "A Play for Puppets" for Columbia's literary magazine The Morningside, which he edited. The work was deemed blasphemous by many students and administrators, and the controversy spread to New York City newspapers. Disheartened over the furor, Chambers decided to leave the college.

Communism and espionage

In 1924, Chambers read Vladimir Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class"; a malaise from which Communism promised liberation. Chambers's biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin's authoritarianism was "precisely what attracts Chambers… He had at last found his church." In 1925, Chambers joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and wrote and edited for Communist periodicals, including The Daily Worker and The New Masses. Chambers combined his literary talents with his devotion to Communism, writing four short stories in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt. One of these was Can You Make Out Their Voices?, which has been described by critics as one of the best pieces of fiction to come out of the American Communist movement.[5] This story was later published as the play Can You Hear Their Voices? (see Writings by Chambers, below), and staged across America and in many other countries. His other works during this time include the English translation of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods.

In 1931, Chambers married Esther Shemitz (1900-1986[6]), a young artist and fellow Communist whom he had encountered at a party-organized textile strike in 1926; the couple would eventually have a son and a daughter.

The Ware Group

In 1932, Chambers was recruited to join the Communist underground and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU apparatus headed by Alexander Ulanovsky, aka Ulrich. Afterward, his main controller in the underground was Josef Peters (whom CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder later replaced with Rudy Baker). Peters introduced Chambers to Harold Ware, head of the Ware group, a Communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included:

Apart from Marion Bachrach, these people were all members of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer among Communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents which were delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRU Illegal Rezident (a Soviet spymaster who resides in the US undercover, rather than as an embassy employee).

The Karl group

"Karl" and "Carl" were codenames used by Chambers in the mid-1930s as courier between the CPUSA secret apparatus and Soviet intelligence. Thus "the Karl group" was used to refer to all the covert sources he dealt with. In addition to the Ware groupe mentioned above, members of the Karl group allegedly included:

Defection

Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938, but his faith in Communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by Josef Stalin's Great Purge, which began about 1936. He was also fearful for his own life, having noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignatz Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of his friend and fellow spy Juliet Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the Communist cause due to the Stalinist Purges.[7]

In his last years as a spy for the Soviets, Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow, worried that he might be "purged." He also started holding back some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use these, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" that would convince the Soviets that they could not afford to kill him.

In 1938, Chambers broke with Communism and took his family into hiding, storing the "life preserver" at the home of his nephew and his parents. Initially he had no plans for giving information on his espionage activities to the U.S. government. His espionage contacts were his friends, and he had no desire to inform on them.

FBI Report

The 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was reportedly the final straw for Chambers. He saw this as a betrayal of Communist values, and was also afraid that the information he had been supplying to the Soviets would be made available to Nazi Germany.[8]

In September of 1939, at the urging of anti-Communist, Russian-born journalist, Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle at Berle's home. Chambers was afraid that he would be found out by Soviet agents who had penetrated the government if he were to meet at the State Department. Levine had told Chambers that Walter Krivitsky had begun informing to American and British authorities concerning Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.[9] At the meeting, Chambers named eighteen current and former government employees as spies or Communist sympathizers. Many of the names he mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already widely suspected of being Communists. Other names were more significant and surprising, however: Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss and Laurence Duggan, all respected midlevel officials in the State Department; Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to Franklin Roosevelt. Another member of the ring was said to be working on a top secret bombsight project at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

There was little immediate result to Chambers's confession. He chose not to produce his envelope of evidence at this time, and Berle thought his information was tentative, unclear and uncorroborated. Berle took the information to the White House, but the President dismissed it, apparently with little objection from Berle.[10] Berle notified the FBI of Chambers's information in March of 1940. In February of that 1941 the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. The death was ruled a suicide, but it was widely speculated that Krivitsky had been killed by Soviet intelligence. Worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers too, Berle again told the FBI about his interview with Chambers, but the FBI took no immediate action. Although Chambers was interviewed by the FBI in May of 1942 and June of 1945, it wasn't until November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, that the FBI began to take him seriously.[11]

TIME Magazine

Meanwhile, after living in hiding for a year, Chambers had joined the staff of TIME Magazine in 1939. Starting at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee, he eventually rose to the rank of a senior editor. While at TIME, Chambers became known as a staunch anti-Communist, sometimes enraging his writers with the changes he made to their stories.[12] Some colleagues, led by Richard Lauterbach and Theodore White, tried to have publisher Henry Luce remove him, but Luce was also a staunch anti-Communist and respected Chambers' skill as a writer and editor.

By early 1948, Chambers had became one of the best known writer-editors at TIME. First came his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on the Yalta Conference (where, ironically, Hiss was a major participant). His cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson, Arnold Toynbee, Rebecca West, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on Marion Anderson (December 30, 1947) proved so popular that the magazine broke its rule of non-attribution in response to readers' letters: "Most TIME cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear. Certain cover stories, that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill, are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers."[13] Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss Case broke later that year.

It was during this period after his defection that Chambers and his family became members of Pipe Creek Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, about twelve miles from his Maryland farm.

The Hiss case

On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here he gave the names of individuals he said were part of the underground "Ware group" in the late 1930s, including Alger Hiss. He thus once again named Hiss as a member of the Communist Party, but didn't yet make any accusations of espionage. In subsequent HUAC sessions, Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew Chambers, but on seeing him in person (and after it became clear that Chambers knew details about Hiss's life), said that he had known Chambers under the name "George Crosley". Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist, however. Since Chambers still presented no evidence, the committee had initially been inclined to take the word of Hiss on the matter. However, committee member Richard Nixon received secret information from the FBI which had led him to pursue the issue. When it issued its report, HUAC described Hiss's testimony as "vague and evasive."

"Red Herring"

The country quickly became divided over the Hiss-Chambers issue. President Truman, not pleased with the allegation that the man who had presided over the United Nations Charter Conference was a Communist, dismissed the case as a "red herring."[14] In the atmosphere of increasing anti-communism that would be later be termed McCarthyism, many conservatives saw the Hiss case as emblematic of the Democrat's laxity towards Communist infiltration and influence in the State Department. Many liberals saw the Hiss case as part of the desperation of the Republican party to regain the office of president, having been out of power for 16 years. Democrats could point to Truman's anti-communist foreign policy exemplified by his Truman Doctrine to show he was as anti-communist as the Republicans, if not more so. Truman also launched a system of loyalty checks which removed thousands of Communist sympathizers from government service.[15]

"Pumpkin Papers"

Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers on October 8, 1948. Under pressure from Hiss's lawyers, Chambers finally retrieved his envelope of evidence and presented it to the HUAC after they subpoenaed them. It contained four notes in Alger Hiss's handwriting, sixty-five typewritten copies of State Department documents and five strips of microfilm, some of which contained photographs of State Department documents. The press came to call these the "Pumpkin Papers" referring to the fact that Chambers had briefly hidden the microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin. These documents indicated that Hiss knew Chambers long after mid 1936, when Hiss said he had last seen "Crosley," and also that Hiss had engaged in espionage with Chambers. Chambers explained his delay in producing this evidence as an effort to spare an old friend from more trouble than necessary. Hiss's defenders pointed out that the failure to report a crime was in itself a crime. Until October, 1948, Chambers had repeatedly stated that Hiss had not engaged in espionage, even when he testified under oath. Chambers' was forced to testify at the Hiss trials that he had committed perjury under oath several times, which tended to impugn Chambers's credibility.

In 1975, the Justice Department released the contents of the "Pumpkin Papers," which showed that of the five rolls of microfilm that Nixon had described as evidence of the "most serious series of treasonable activities … in the history of America," one roll is completely blank and information on two more rolls are faintly legible copies of Navy Dept documents relating to such subjects as life rafts, parachutes and fire extinguishers, information which was obtainable at the time from the open shelves at the Bureau of Standards,[16] and two other rolls are photographs of State Department documents which were introduced as evidence at the two Hiss trials in 1949 and 1950, thus confirming Nixon's original claim.[17]

Perjury

Hiss could not be tried for espionage at this time, because the evidence indicated the offence had occurred over ten years prior to that time, and the statute of limitations for espionage was five years. Instead, Hiss was indicted for two counts of perjury relating to testimony he had given before a federal grand jury the previous December. There he had denied giving any documents to Whittaker Chambers, and testified he hadn't seen Chambers after mid 1936.

Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June of 1949, ended with the jury deadlocked eight to four for conviction. In addition to Chambers's testimony, a government expert testified that other papers typed on a typewriter belonging to the Hiss family matched the secret papers produced by Chambers. An impressive array of character witnesses appeared on behalf of Hiss: two U. S. Supreme Court justices, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, former Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis and future Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Chambers, on the other hand, was attacked by Hiss's attorneys as "an enemy of the Republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect for matrimony or motherhood."[14] In the second trial, Hiss's defense produced a psychiatrist who characterized Chambers as a "psychopathic personality" and "a pathological liar."[18] The second trial ended in January of 1950 with Hiss found guilty on both counts. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

After the Hiss case

Chambers had resigned from TIME in December 1948. After the trial, William F. Buckley, Jr. initiated the magazine National Review and Chambers briefly worked there as senior editor (most famously writing fellow National Review editor Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement when reviewing Atlas Shrugged).[1] He also wrote for Fortune and Life magazines.

In 1952, Chambers's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was combination of autobiography, an account of his role in the Hiss case and a warning about the dangers of Communism and liberalism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it one of the greatest of all American autobiographies, and Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.[14] Witness was a bestseller for more than a year and helped pay off Chambers' legal debts.

Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at the age of 60. He had suffered from angina since the age of 38, and had had several heart attacks previously.

His second book, Cold Friday, was published posthumously in 1964 with the help of Duncan Norton Taylor[19] . The book predicted that the fall of Communism would start in the satellite states surrounding the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

Recent evidence

At Chambers's first testimony before HUAC, he implicated Harry Dexter White as well as Alger Hiss as a covert member of the Communist party. White died shortly thereafter, so the case didn't receive the attention that the charges against Hiss did. Transcripts of coded Soviet messages decrypted through the Venona project, revealed in 1995, have added evidence regarding White's covert involvement with Communists and Soviet intelligence. Venona evidence regarding Alger Hiss is less conclusive, though it was sufficient for a bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to conclude "The complicity of Alger Hiss of the State Department seems settled. As does that of Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department."[20]

A review of Soviet intelligence files by former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev produced further corroboration of Chamber's Congressional testimony when a list of Soviet agents and intelligence sources from the period was found, apparently including Alger Hiss, Harry White, and Harold Glasser. Chambers's real name and code designation were also listed in the memorandum — as well as a notation listing him as a Soviet "traitor".[21]

This issue remains controversal, however, and others with access to the Soviet intelligence files insist that there was no mention of Hiss.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Alger Hiss petitioned General Dimitry Antonovich Volkogonov, who had become President Yeltsin's military advisor and the overseer of all the Soviet intelligence archives, to request the release of any Soviet files on the Hiss case. Russian archivists and researchers responded by reviewing their files, and in the fall of 1992 reported back that they had found no evidence that Alger Hiss had ever engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union or any evidence that Hiss was a member of the Communist Party. However, Volkogonov subsequently revealed that he had spent only two days on his search and had mainly relied on the word of KGB archivists.[22]

General-Lieutenant Vitaly Pavlov, who ran Soviet intelligence work in North America in the late 1930s and early 1940s, provided some corroboration of Volkogonov in his memoirs, stating that Hiss never worked for the USSR as one of his agents.[23]

In April, 2007, a daylong symposium entitled, Alger Hiss & History, was held at New York University and evidence was presented that Hiss was not a spy, and that ALES was not Hiss. Further testimonial of the absence of Hiss's name in Soviet archives was given by Russian researcher Svetlana A. Chervonnaya, who had been conducting research on this topic since the early 1990s.[24] Authors Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya presented evidence that a U.S. diplomat named Wilder Foote was the best match to ALES, based on the movements of all the officials present at the U.S.-Soviet Yalta conference.[25] They presented a Soviet cable dated March 5, 1945 which stated that ALES was in Mexico City, whereas Alger Hiss had returned from Mexico City in February and made a radio broadcast in the U.S. on March 3.[26]

Legacy

Chambers's book Witness is on the reading lists of the Heritage Foundation, The Weekly Standard, and the Russell Kirk Center. He is regularly cited by conservative writers such as Heritage's president Edwin Feulner.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism."[27] In 1988, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel granted national landmark status to the Pipe Creek Farm.[28] In 2001, members of the George W. Bush Administration held a private ceremony to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Chambers's birth. Speakers included William F. Buckley Jr.[29]

See also

Associated people

Biographers

Notes and references

Main references

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.wargs.com/other/chambers.html
  2. ^ Tanenhaus 1998
  3. ^ Tanenhaus 1998, p. 28
  4. ^ Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press. pp. pp 28, 29. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  5. ^ Tanenhaus 1998, pp. 70–71
  6. ^ "Widow of Chambers Dies". New York Times. August 20, 1986. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ Tanenhaus 1998, pp. 131–133
  8. ^ Tanenhaus 1998, pp. 159–161
  9. ^ Weinstein, Allen (1978). Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House. pp. p. 292. ISBN 0-679-77338-X. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  10. ^ Tanenhaus 1998, pp. 163, 203–204
  11. ^ Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press. pp. pg. 32. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  12. ^ Sterling, Dorothy (Feb 28, 1984). "Whittaker Chambers: Odd Choice for the Medal of Freedom". Letters to the Editor. New York Times.
  13. ^ "TIME'S People and TIME'S Children". TIME. March 8, 1948. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. ^ a b c Linder, Douglas. "The Alger Hiss Trials". "Famous Trials". University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law.
  15. ^ http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst203/documents/loyal.html Executive Order 9300 (1947)
  16. ^ Stone, I.F. (April 1, 1976). The New York Times. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  17. ^ "Justice Department releases copies of the "Pumpkin Papers"". The New York Times. August 1, 1975.
  18. ^ Weinstein, Allen (1978). Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House. pp. pp. 487, 493. ISBN 0-679-77338-X. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  19. ^ "Duncan Norton-Taylor Dies; A Retired Editor of; Fortune". New York Times. September 18, 1982. Retrieved 2007-04-02.
  20. ^ "Appendix A; SECRECY; A Brief Account of the American Experience" (PDF). Report Of The Commission On Protecting And Reducing Government Secrecy. United States Government Printing Office. 1997. pp. A-37.
  21. ^ Vassiliev, Alexander (2005). "Notes on Anatoly Gorsky's December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks".
  22. ^ Tanenhaus, Sam (April 1993). "Hiss: guilty as charged". Commentary. V. 95.
  23. ^ "Russians Say Hiss Was Not a Soviet Spy". The Alger Hiss Story; Venona and the Russian Files. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
  24. ^ Pyle, Richard (5 April 2007). "Researcher adds to Alger Hiss debate". Associated Press..
  25. ^ "Researcher adds to Alger Hiss debate". The New York Times. April 5, 2007.
  26. ^ Smith, David (April 8, 2007). "Top Cold War spy 'innocent'". The Observer (London, England).
  27. ^ "Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Whittaker Chambers". March 26, 1984. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  28. ^ "Site in Hiss-Chambers Case Now a Landmark". The New York Times. May 18, 1988. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  29. ^ "Witness and Friends: Remembering Whittaker Chambers on the centennial of his birth". August 6, 2001 (republished online November 22, 2005). {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

Books on the Hiss-Chambers case

  • De Toledano, Ralph and Lasky, Victor (1950). Seeds of Treason - The True Story of the Hiss-Chambers Tragedy. Funk and Wagnalls.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Cooke, Alistair (1950). A Generation on Trial: USA v. Alger Hiss. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23373-X.
  • Morris, Richard Brandon (1952). Fair trial: Fourteen who stood accused from Anne Hutchinson to Alger Hiss. Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Jowitt, William Allen (1953). The Strange Case of Alger Hiss. Hodder and Stoughton.
  • Kempton, Murray (1955 (2003 reprint)). Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties. NYRB Classics. ISBN 1-59017-087-3. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Hiss, Alger (1957). In the Court of Public Opinion. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-090293-0.
  • Cook, Fred J. (1958). The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 1-131-85352-0.
  • Andrews, Bert & Andrews, Peter (1962). A Tragedy Of History: A Journalist's Confidential Role In The Hiss-Chambers Case. Robert B. Luce.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Zeligs, Meyer A. (1967). Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. New York Viking Press. ISBN 1-199-49987-0.
  • Seth, Ronald (1968). The Sleeping Truth: The Hiss-Chambers Affair Reappraised. Frewin. ISBN 0-09-086890-0.
  • Smith, John Chabot (1976). Alger Hiss, The True Story. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 0-03-013776-4.
  • Hiss, Tony (1977). Laughing last: Alger Hiss. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-24899-X.
  • Weinstein, Allen (1978). Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. Random House. ISBN 0-679-77338-X.
  • Levitt, Morton and Levitt, Michael (1979). Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss. Random House. ISBN 0-517-37134-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Theoharis, Athan (Editor) (1982). Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War. Temple University Press. ISBN 0-87722-241-X. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
  • Reuben, William A (1983). Footnote on an Historic Case: In Re Alger Hiss, No. 78 Civ. 3433. Nation Institute.
  • Moore, William Howard (1987). Two Foolish Men: The true story of the friendship between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Moorop Press.
  • Hiss, Alger (1989). Recollections of a Life. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 1-55970-024-6.
  • Gwynn, Beatrice (1993). Whittaker Chambers: The Discrepancy in the Evidence of the Typewriter. Mazzard Publishers. ISBN 0-9518738-1-4.
  • Worth, Esme J. (1993). Whittaker Chambers: The Secret Confession. Mazzard Publishers. ISBN 0-9518738-0-6.
  • Oeste, Bob (1996). Last Pumpkin Paper (novel). Random House. ISBN 0-679-44837-3.
  • Hiss, Tony (1999). The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir. Alfred E. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40127-X.
  • Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
  • Swan, Patrick (Editor) (2003). Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. ISI Books. ISBN 1-882926-91-9. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
  • White, G. Edward (2005). Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-518255-3.
  • Levine, Isaac Don (1973). Eyewitness to History. Hawthorn Books, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 72-4919.
  • Ruddy, T. Michael (2004). The Alger Hiss Espionage Case. Wadsworth Publishing. ISBN 0-15-508560-3.
  • Tanenhaus, Sam (2007). An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers. Old Street Publishing (UK). ISBN 978-1-905847-07-5.

Film on or including the Hiss-Chambers case

Chambers and Soviet espionage

  • Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (2000). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08462-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Andrew, Christopher and Mitrokhin, Vasili (2000). The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00312-5. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Weinstein, Allen and Vassiliev, Alexander (2000). The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era. Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75536-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Schecter, Jerrold and Schecter, Leona (2003). Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History. Potomac Books. ISBN 1-57488-522-7. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (2003). In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. Encounter Books. ISBN 1-893554-72-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Fiction or Partial Fiction

  • Trilling, Lionel (2002). The Middle of the Journey. New York Review of Books. ISBN 1-590170-15-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Buckley, William F. (1999). The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316115-89-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)


Writings by Chambers

Books and Plays

  • Chambers, Whittaker (1932). Can You Hear Their Voices?. International Pamphlets.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1952 (1984, 1997)). Witness. Random House (republished by Regnery). ISBN 0-89526-571-0. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Luce, Clare Boothe (editor) (1952 (1993)). Saints for Now (with article by Whittaker Chambers). Sheed & Ward (republished by Ignatius Press). ISBN 0898704766. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1964). Cold Friday. Random House. ISBN 0-394-41969-3.

Online

Collections

  • Chambers, Whittaker (1987). Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley Jr. 1954-1961. Regnery Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-89526-567-2.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1997). Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers/Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960. Regnery Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-89526-425-0.
  • Chambers, Whittaker (1989). Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959. Regnery Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-89526-765-9. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Important Magazine Articles

Video on Chambers

  • YouTube.com Red Spy Films. Chambers Farm, Secret Doc. 1948/12/06 (1948) time: 00:00:51
  • RAM Whittaker Chambers on "close friends"
  • RAM Alger Hiss Story - Chambers on the "tragedy of history"
  • RAM Alger Hiss defends himself

Photos

  • 1931 Whittaker Chambers
  • 1939 Whittaker Chambers
  • 1948 Whittaker Chambers before HUAC
  • 1950 Whittaker Chambers reading of Hiss guilty verdict
  • 1961 Whittaker Chambers near the time of his death
  • 1948 A young Richard Nixon posing with the "Pumpkin Papers" microfilm
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