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Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its improbably twists and turns, and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions.
A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.
- Sales Rank: #983444 in Books
- Published on: 1998-04-28
- Released on: 1998-04-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.18" h x 1.32" w x 6.06" l, 1.70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 656 pages
Amazon.com Review
A coolly objective look at the most controversial figure in the postwar crusade against American Communists. Whittaker Chambers (1901-61) made headlines in 1948 with his sensational accusation that former State Department official Alger Hiss was not only a Communist, but a spy, charges Hiss denied until his death in 1996. This scrupulously evenhanded biography concludes that Chambers told the truth, even as it pitilessly delineates his tortured family background, anguished sexual confusion, and political ruthlessness, which might well prompt doubts about his trustworthiness. Chambers' life makes a perfect case study of the most morally fraught period in American history.
From Publishers Weekly
One of the strangest political martyrs was the disheveled, overweight, once-bohemian defector from communism Whittaker Chambers, the nemesis of Alger Hiss. A sterling State Department intellectual, Hiss by 1948 was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Then Chambers, a disillusioned former Soviet courier who had turned his writing flair into an editorship at Time, charged that Hiss had been an agent for Moscow since the early 1930s. In a retrial after a hung jury, Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. Tanenhaus takes the position that Chambers's accusation was thereby validated. The case made a national figure of House Un-American Activities Committee member Richard Nixon and lent credibility to the Reds-everywhere charges by a reckless senator, Joseph McCarthy. Hiss spent almost four years in prison, Nixon and McCarthy prospered for a time and Chambers, suddenly jobless, wrote his anguished memoir, Witness. He contended that even at the risk of self-destruction, it was important to examine why some of the best and brightest of the interwar years had embraced communism, why some persisted in self-deception and disloyalty and why others broke ranks and recanted. Tanenhaus (Literature Unbound) persuasively and movingly examines such double lives of these communists, lives which were driven by a perverse idealism that functioned almost as a new religion. Only when the Cold War exposed Soviet infiltration into policy-making levels of government and the wartime snatching of atomic secrets did politically orchestrated paranoia begin in the U.S. The Washington apparatus served by Chambers had been of little practical use to the Soviets, but when he saw it anew as the worm in the goodly apple, he committed what Arthur Koestler would admiringly call "moral suicide" to confront Hiss and his like with the bankruptcy of their illusions. To some a toweringly humane hero, Chambers nonetheless made McCarthyism possible, and?posthumously, as he died in 1961?made Nixon President. Here a tarnished saint, Whittaker Chambers is a John le Carre figure in the extreme. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC dual main selection; History Book Club selection. (Feb.) FYI: The 92-year-old Alger Hiss died in Manhattan this past November 15.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A life of the man who brought down Alger Hiss, from his years as a Soviet agent to his anti-Communist crusade after defection.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
A Wonderful Biography About a Complicated Man
By Craig Matteson
Whittaker Chambers still arouses great passions. He accused Alger Hiss (and others) of spying for the Soviet Union and claims he knew that it was true because he was himself a communist spy and was Hiss's contact. But that story, while a part of this book, isn't the sole focus of this magnificent book. You can read the story of the trials of Alger Hiss, the testimony given, and more about that story in Allen Weinstein's very fine "Perjury" (a book which also arouses strong emotions).
The story of Chambers' life is also told by Chambers himself in his powerful autobiography "Witness". His life is a rather involved tale, and though the spy story is why Chambers became famous (infamous) it isn't reason why he is important. It is hard to recapture the vast esteem in which Stalin and the Soviet Union were held by the "literate" classes in American Society. But it doesn't take too much reading to peel back current revisionist writing that pretends the left rejected Stalin. It wasn't so. They loved Uncle Joe at the time of the Hiss case and made apologies for him even after the horrors of the Gulag were revealed. Even after Hiss' guilt has been proven beyond all but the most determined and self-blinded doubt, you can find those who insist on his innocence.
Whittaker Chambers was a gifted writer and a well regarded editor at Henry Luce's Time magazine. When he admitted his role in spying for the USSR and International Communism it represented the initial break in the dam. In "Witness", Chambers' autobiography, Chambers describes the agony he went through in realizing he had no choice but to take the course of trying to stop Hiss and thereby ruining his own life and irreparably harming his family.
Chambers was pessimistic about the West surviving a mortal struggle with Communism. He is often linked with McCarthy, but he thought McCarthy's recklessness more of a benefit to the other side.
"Witness" was an important best seller and is still in print. In it Chambers pours out his conscience and how his atheism turned to a deep faith and why that turned him against the movement he had embraced and had helped prosper through his gifts as a writer and editor.In this amazing book.
In this wonderful biography, Tanenhaus gives us context for all of this and so much more detail. The author also provides verification (and refutation) of claims made by and about Chambers. This book is beautifully written and carefully researched. The author shows great judgment and insight into all of the issues involved in this rich life at the extremes of human philosophy.
It is wrong to condemn this book and its author because of anger with Chambers. It is beyond all doubt that the thrust of Chambers' story was the truth. In my judgement, it is the truth in all but a few details. Tanenhaus is the reporter of fact and wishes that reality were different cannot change the facts. What is the old saying? You are entitled to your own interpretations, but not your own facts.
We owe Tanenhaus a great deal for putting such wonderful talent and years of hard work in giving us this outstanding book. This book was the subject of a great interview on Booknotes and is still available online. I am glad to see that this book is now part of the Modern Library series. It should be widely read.
50 of 56 people found the following review helpful.
The factual side of Chambers' spiritual journey
By Dan Berger
Chambers' autobiography "Witness" had left me speechless. It was a magnificent book, but unknown in most circles. I was hungry to learn more about Chambers' own life and times. It didn't take me long to get to Tanenhaus's fine biography, which gave me an outside perspective and did not disappoint. Tanenhaus is at his most valuable recounting Chambers' post-Hiss-Case life, not covered in "Witness"; in fleshing out the HUAC cast like Nixon, Mundt and Hebert, putting their careers and ambitions into perspective; and in covering the seamier sides of Chambers' personal and family background in even greater detail than Chambers had.
In "Witness", Chambers focuses on his spiritual journey, managing to keep a reader fascinated when that might easily have become eye-glazing. Tanenhaus pounds facts, availing himself of documents and accounts not available to Chambers in 1951. He remains objective about Chambers but ultimately finds little to criticize. Chambers was a man who put his career and life on the line to expose a conspiracy, as he saw it, threatening the world and eating away this nation from within. Despite circumstances strongly suggesting his veracity - would anyone throw away a lucrative career, as he did, to falsely accuse someone? - few believed him. History proved he was telling the truth - one worth hearing, since Chambers was the second-ranking U.S. man in the Communist underground espionage network.
Certain striking aspects of Chambers' character emerge here, some suggested by his autobiography but better to have confirmed independently. He was one of the great intellectuals of his time, the equal of better known friends and contemporaries from his Columbia days - Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman among them. His command of languages was exceptional. (Fabulous piece of trivia: Chambers translated the novel "Bambi" from the German in the 1920s, later inspiring the Walt Disney film.) His command of the classics, ditto. This was a man who never finished college - when he died, he was enrolled in a local college attempting to finish - but who dropped Dante quotations into interviews with ham-and-egger newspaper reporters. He was one of the greatest writers Time magazine ever had, writing first-class cover stories on philosophy, religion and other intellectual pursuits beyond most journalists. I was inspired to search out an available collection of his magazine work.
Chambers' continuing intellectual and political development did him credit. He became a father figure to the modern conservative movement, inspiring those like the young Bill Buckley who shaped it. But Chambers refused to follow them where his own conscience and intellect did not dictate. He wouldn't pursue a scorched earth policy against Republican moderates like Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, unlike Buckley and others, despite Chambers' personal closeness with them: Buckley had more or less rescued him from professional and financial oblivion in the 1950s. Chambers regarded the struggle against Communism as far more important than a Republican civil war over doctrinal purity. He backed Sen. Joseph McCarthy initially, but ultimately broke with him, fearing his recklessness "would lead him and us into trouble," jeopardizing the entire anti-Communist movement, Chambers wrote in declining to endorse Buckley's pro-McCarthy book.
And Chambers was willing, in his later years, to seek a politics that did not rationalize away the world's woes in favor of purist conservatism. It would have been easy for a man treated like Chambers was - who had seen the blindness of liberalism up close in the 1930s and 1940s, and had felt the savagery and hypocrisy of its backlash during the Hiss case - to become more extreme in his rejection of it. But he did not. Chambers expressed, in dealings with young writers, a fascination with the Beat poets then emerging. He saw in Columbia-tied bohemians like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg a reflection of his own distant youth. Very unBuckleyesque.
Tanenhaus treats the Hiss case conservatively, letting the record speak rather than relying on Chambers' detailed account of it in "Witness". Chambers drew vividly his and his wife's close relationships with Alger and Priscilla Hiss, placing it chronologically in the 1930s when it happened. In contrast, Tanenhaus's treatment of Chambers' life in the 1930s mentions Hiss only in passing. He instead takes Hiss on in the context of the hearings and trials, as the two sides jousted over whether Hiss and Chambers, from very different walks of life, knew each other at all. The question was a proxy for the greater question of espionage, although Hiss was never tried specifically for that charge. He was, however, convicted of perjury in denying he had given Chambers government documents, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
It is sad we have had to wait so long to have this case studied in such fine perspective. The Hiss case put the New Deal itself on trial, asking whether its leadership was pervaded with Communists; whether those leaders had followed the Communist Party line in shaping U.S. policy; whether they had tainted American war and China policy during and after World War II. And whether liberals were either so blind to these problems or so secretly sympathetic to them as to forever render them incapable of loving and protecting their homeland as it was.
36 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
The Moral Lodestone of the 20th Century
By Robert J. Donahue
I grew up under the cultural shadow of Alger Hiss, stupidly thinking the term "commie" was a funny way to mock anyone concerned about the threat of Communism.
But, being a victim of bad education, I knew nothing of the epic, mid-twentieth century showdown between Hiss (now known to have been a communist spy and traitor, though still, ludicrously revered as innocent by left intelligentsia) and Whittaker Chambers, the moral lodestone of the twentieth century ,who offered up his own life as a sacrifice of sorts to unmask and quell the poison tentacles of communist Russia that reached high into the U.S. Government of the New Deal era. And Chambers was not only a former communist spy himself, but a burgeoning literary icon. This is the history of a clash of ideas, submerged in the clash between two men caught up in the rush of modern history. The truth, as always, is right in front of us. Only ideological dogma can prevent one from pretending not to see it.
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