June 27, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation is one of the best-selling books in the United States during the 20th century, yet it is almost unknown to most Americans today. Greg Forster, on behalf of the Acton Institute, is here to tell the story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
The book Witness by author Whittaker Chambers, was one of
the biggest US bestsellers of the twentieth century, yet it
is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell the
(00:32):
story of the book and its author is Greg Forster
on Behalf of the Actin Institute. Forster is a Whittaker
Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction in
political philosophy from Yale University. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Chambers grew up in an unhappy home, a home full
of emotional neediness, manipulation, petty jealousies. He had a younger
brother named Richard, who was really popular at school, and
he was able to take solace in his friends. But
Chambers himself was awkward and socially inept, and he was
tormented as much as school as he was at home.
(01:12):
His only escape was into the woods. He spent long
days walking alone in the woods near his home. In
the world of nature, he said, nature gives peace to
anyone who comes to see and to hear, and not
to change. As a teenager, he ran away from home.
(01:34):
He got a job laying railways in the streets in Washington,
d c. On that job, he experienced the hopelessness and
the cruel mistreatment of the impoverished workers. On his very
first day on the job, as one of the streetcars
slowed down in order to move through the work site,
a laughing passenger leaned his head out of the window
(01:54):
and casually and deliberately spat tobacco.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Juice all over him.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
But among those workers, Chambers also experienced the unique compassion
and mutual assistance that the poor give to one another
in their affliction. After he was forced to return home,
Chambers went to Columbia University, looking around at the chaos
and the injustice of the world. Watching the developments in
(02:22):
and after World War One, and also his own experience,
he became convinced that society was sick, so sick that
only surgery could save it, and he became convinced that
communism was history surgeon. He would later write, nobody becomes
a communist because communism is intrinsically attractive. People become communists
(02:43):
because they confront the crisis of history in the modern world,
and they are driven to desperation because they can't find
any other answers, and also because the blurring of the
lines between good and evil is part of that crisis
of history. Well, his advice where a Columbia was Mark
van Doren, and Van Doren told him go see the
wave of the future. They're building it in the Soviet Union.
(03:06):
In order to get over to the Soviet Union, Chambers
joined a Quaker International relief team, and among the Quakers
he began to discover God, and he moved toward God.
He was powerfully moved by the peace of the Quaker meeting,
where they will sit in silence for long periods so
that the spirit of God can make his presence felt.
(03:28):
But then the Quakers discovered some atheistic writings that Chambers
had published in the student paper. They kicked him off
the relief team, and they cast him out of a meetinghouse.
Chambers said that if even one person had taken him
aside in that moment and asked him what is in
your heart? He would never have become a communist. But
(03:51):
instead he was left bitterly asking himself where in Christendom
is the Christian So he began calling himself a communist.
Eventually he dropped out of college in order to join
the Communist Party. During this time, his brother Richard had
also gone off to college, and Richard's life fell apart.
(04:13):
Richard was not as popular at college as he had
been at home, and without Thou friends and the popularity
to prop him up, the inner emptiness of his.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Life consumed him.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
He was reading pessimistic atheistic philosophy, and he came home
declaring that life is meaningless.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Suffering and folly.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
He said to his family, I'm not brave enough to
kill myself yet, but i will be soon. He began
drinking heavily, staying out all night. The parents saw what
was happening, but they felt helpless to do anything about it.
So it fell to Chambers to try to convince his
brother not to kill himself. They had endless arguments. Richard said,
(04:52):
look around you. Look at people. They're all hypocrites. Look
at the world, it's hopeless. Look at religion, even the
people who pretend to believe in it don't really. Look
at marriage, it's a fraud. Look at family. Look at
our family and children. It's a crime against nature to
bring children into this world. Chambers told him, it's not
the world that's evil. It's what people have made of
(05:15):
the world that's evil. The answer is to struggle against evil,
he said. Communism has found the way out. Richard just
spat at that the Communists are just another fraud like
all the others.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And besides, what does it matter.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
We're all going to die. Nothing waiting for us but
eternal oblivion. There's no hope to build anything meaningful with
death waiting for us all. After a prolonged period of
agony for the entire family, Richard finally killed himself. Chambers
began visiting Richard's grave every day before work, and then
(05:51):
again every day after work. Winter came and the graveyard
was covered with snow. On New Year's Eve, Chambers was
still there, standing at his brother's grave when midnight came
with the new year, and Chambers began to hear the
sound of celebration fireworks, bells, car horns, parties, the sound
(06:11):
of glass smashing against the cemetery wall, and standing there,
Chambers blamed those cele those partiers, and their whole world
for Richard's death, This materialistic, shallow world that wallows in
superficial pleasures and gave Richard nothing that was worth living for.
(06:32):
And he thought that the only thing he had worth
living for was the struggle to destroy that shallow and
materialistic society. So standing there in the graveyard, he consecrated
his life to the destruction of America. He would later write,
at that point, I had been a member of the
Communist Party for some time, but it was not until
(06:52):
that night that I truly became a Communist. I became
ear reconcilable. He walked out of the grave herod, and
he never went back there.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And you've been listening to Greg Forster tell a heck
of a story about Whittaker Chambers and particularly what drove
him right into the arms of pure, unfettered communism and
a deep anti Americanism. When we return more of the
story of Whitaker Chambers here on our American Stories. Here
(07:30):
are to our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories
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(07:51):
donate button. Give a little give a lot, help us
keep the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories
dot Com. And we returned to our American stories. When
(08:13):
we last left off, Whitticker Chambers had declared himself to
be an irreconcilable Communist and consecrated his life to the
destruction of America. Let's continue with our storyteller, Greg Forster.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
He worked in the Open Communist Party for several years
in a variety of roles. Then he was recruited into
the Soviet Underground and spent six years there as a spy.
At first in New York, he was part of a
smuggling operation shuttling messages and materials between the American underground
and the European Underground. Later he returned to Washington, where
he had laid rails, But now he had come to
(08:49):
organize one of several Soviet apparatuses that penetrated the United
States government. Chambers was a go between. He would bring
the commands of the Soviet government to a number of
highly placed American officials, and he would receive from them
copies of state secret documents to be copied and passed on.
(09:09):
In this period in the nineteen thirties, shockingly large numbers
of middle class intellectuals, the kind of people who populate
the US government, were becoming communists. It can be very
difficult for us today to recapture that moment in the
nineteen thirties when so many people in that group became
communists or were sympathetic enough to help them. Chambers said
(09:29):
at the time, capitalism is going to fall not because
we will break the locks, but because all the men
who have been trusted to hold the keys are joining
the conspiracy. In order to live under cover, Chambers had
to adopt the lifestyle of a respectable bourgeois and blend
in with the world around him. But there was one
(09:51):
thing he refused to compromise on. In order to blend in,
he had to hire a black woman as a housekeeper,
because that was the prevailing practice in the neighborhood. But
although it meant a risk of discovery, he refused to
pay her the lower negro wage that was the acceptable practice,
And even more risky than that, he invited her to
(10:14):
dine at the family dinner table with the family. As
a communist, Chambers refused to have segregated dining in his home.
He would later write, by acting as a Communist must
I acted as a Christian should. However, he soon discovered
(10:35):
that most Communists were not as scrupulous as he was.
At first, he thought that by entering the underground he
would be escaping the petty factional squabbling, the recriminations, and
the constant cycles of purges and recriminations that were ubiquitous
in the open party. But he soon found out that
the underground had its own forms of destructive stupidity. The
(10:58):
rise of Communism to national power or in Russia was
producing a new kind of communist careerist, corrupt, cynical. The
Party is nothing but a path to power for them.
Chambers was forced to help the party to hurt people
and even kill people in petty disputes that had nothing
(11:18):
to do with the communist cause or advancing the world revolution.
He went along with it, he said, because the only
hope for a better world was communism, So if he
disobeyed the Communist Party and was thrown out, he would
lose the whole purpose of his life. But doubts were
beginning to grow in his mind. Something else happened to
(11:40):
Chambers as well. Into that world of death came the
unexpected power of new life, and I'd like.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
To share this with you.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
For one of us to have a child, my brother
had said in his agony, would be a crime against nature.
I longed for children, but I agreed with my brother
there had been enough misery in our line. What selfish
right had I to perpetuate it? And right had any
man or woman to bring a child into the twentieth
century world. They could only suffer its inevitable revolutions or
(12:14):
die in its inevitable wars. One extreme group among the
Communists held that it was morally wrong for a professional
revolutionist to have children at all. They could only hamper
or distract his work. That was one of the penalties
of being a communist. I did not belong to that group,
but in general I shared their views. As an underground Communist,
(12:35):
I took it for granted the children were out of
the question. Not only left wing an underground communist took
such matters for granted. Abortion was a commonplace of party life.
There were Communist doctors who rendered that service for a
small fee. Communists who were more choosy knew liberal doctors
who would provide it for a larger fee. Abortion, which
(12:58):
now fills me with physical horror. I then regarded, like
all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation. One day in
early nineteen thirty three, my wife told me that she
believed she had conceived. No man can hear from his wife,
especially for the first time, that she is carrying his child,
without a physical jolt of joy and pride. I felt it,
(13:24):
But so sunk were we in that life that it
was only a passing joy and was succeeded by a
merely momentary sadness that we would not have the child.
We discussed the matter, and my wife said she must
go at once for a physical check and to arrange
for the abortion. When my wife came back, she was
quiet and noncommittal. The doctor had said there was a child.
(13:47):
My wife went about preparing supper. What else did she say?
Speaker 3 (13:51):
I asked.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
She said, I'm in good physical shape to have the child.
My wife went on working very slowly. The truth dawned
on me. Do you mean, I asked that you want
to have the child? My wife came over to me,
took my hands, and burst into tears. Dear heart, she said,
(14:15):
with a pleading voice, we couldn't do that awful thing
to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
A wild joy swept over me.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and
its theories, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, crumbled.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
At the touch of the child.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Both of us simply wanted a child. If the points
on the long course of my break with Communism could
be retraced, that is probably one of them. Not at
the level of conscious mind, but at the level of
unconscious life. The child, even before her birth, had begun
(14:58):
invisibly to lead us out out of that darkness that
we could not even realize, toward that light which we
could not even see. As his daughter grew, Chambers used
to love sitting there, watching her in her tie chair,
smearing porridge on her face or meditatively dropping it on
(15:18):
the floor. One day, he noticed her ear, how intricate
and complex the human ear was, and the thought came
burning into his mind that could not have happened by accident.
Only an immense design could have created that. The thought
(15:39):
was unwanted, and he shoved it aside, but it would
return to haunt him. In nineteen thirty seven, Stalin's purges
reached their peak. Chambers watched as people who he had
known and cared about for years. Dedicated communists who had
given their lives to the cause and to the Party
were brutally murdered for no good reason, and his superiors
(16:01):
laughed and joked about it.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
They enjoyed the cruelty.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
His doubts growing, Chambers read a book by a man
who had escaped from a Soviet labor camp. He began
to be haunted by the screams of those whom he
had helped to hurt and to kill. Chambers said, the
vision of communism is the vision of the almighty mind
of man. So no one ever really stops being a
Communist until they discover that there is something in man
(16:30):
that is greater than the mind.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Those screams of.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
The people in Agony were the cry of something inside
human beings that is greater than mine. Was the cry
of the human soul, and they were crying out to
the only thing that can hear, a human soul, another
human soul. Listening to the screams caused Chambers to realize
(16:55):
that those people he was hurting had souls, and that
he had a soul too.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And listening to Greg Forster and Foster is a Whittaker
Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction and
political philosophy from Yale University. And that story about the
pregnancy of Whittaker Chambers bride and her willingness to sacrifice
(17:20):
the child for the good of the party and for
the good of mankind, because why on earth bring a
child into this world that would suffer? So this was
the beginning of the end of his flirtation and commitment
to communism. He didn't know it yet, Whittaker Chambers, but
(17:41):
this was the beginning of the end, this realization of
the inhumanity of communism. When we come back more of
the story of Whittaker Chambers and the book Witness. Here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
(18:11):
stories and the story of Whittaker Chambers and the story
of his remarkable book Witness. I'd urge you to pick
it up, go to Amazon dot com and read it.
So much of what's happening today in the world was
happening then too, and so many of the same arguments
and so many of the same spiritual battles. In nineteen
(18:31):
thirty seven, word of Stalin's torture and murder was becoming
public knowledge in America. Whittaker Chambers, the American turned Communist spy,
struggled to reconcile his commitment with these truths. Let's return
to Greg Forster.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
It began to dawn on him that the problem was
not that Stalin had perverted communism. The problem was Communism itself.
As he said, the problem is not this Dallin is evil,
but Communism is even more evil. And only at the
very end of that process did he finally allow himself
to return to that thought that he had suppressed years earlier.
(19:12):
When he noticed his daughter's ear, he finally allowed himself
to ask, what is it that we are missing that
communism always goes so wrong?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Could it be God?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
He had reached what he called the division point, the
point where you have to choose.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
One path or the other.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
He got down on his knees and prayed, and he
began praying every day, and he came to need prayer
like food and water. By turning to God, he was
discovering who he really was. That illusion of the almighty
mind of man began to fade away. Chambers said, reason
(19:57):
is good, but there's a flaw in humanity, a flaw
that causes great evil and suffering, and it goes beyond
the realm where reason can reach. As he put it,
the death camps exist first in our minds. When he
finally left the Communist Party in April nineteen thirty eight,
(20:18):
he left absolutely everything that he had except his wife
and children. He had no career, and the depression was on.
He had no standing in any community, no relationships. He
was a fugitive from both the American government and the
Soviet government. He knew that the party's first instinct would
be to kill him, possibly getting to him through his family,
(20:39):
so he got himself a car and a weapon. He
took his last stash of stolen documents and he gave
it to a cousin to hide, to use as leverage
against the party in case they kidnapped his wife or child,
and then he fled into hiding for six months or so.
After that, he emerged from hiding and he went back
and contacted his former contacts in the underground, and he
(21:00):
tried to persuade them to leave the party, to defect
from the Communist Party, and he threatened to denounce them
to the authorities if they wouldn't. In nineteen thirty nine
came the Hitler Stalin Pact, the alliance between the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany, and Chambers knew that the Soviet
underground in Washington would be put at Hitler's disposal to
(21:20):
use against the US, and so it had become his
duty to become an informer. Becoming an informer was physically
and spiritually repulsive to Chambers because it involved using people's
trust in you to destroy them. It was a sort
of slow motion spiritual death for him, even though it
was morally the right thing to do. And the worst
(21:42):
of it was he went to the government and he
told them everything he knew and they didn't do anything
about it. Through a friend, Chambers got the opportunity to
apply for a job at Time magazine. He worked his
way up from book reviews to senior editor. He became
a Quaker. He returned to the deep peace of the
Quaker Meeting.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
From his college days.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
The Chambers has moved to a family farm which they
worked entirely themselves. On top of chambers more than a
full time job as a senior editor of Time magazine,
the farm was their witness against the materialism of the
modern world. The farm said, we choose this life of
great hardship and great satisfaction because the modern world has
(22:24):
nothing better than this to offer us. Over the course
of nine years at time, Chambers watched as the people
who had worked for him as Soviet spies moved their
way up in.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
The New Deal administration.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Harry Dexter White led the creation of the World Bank
and served as its first president, and a Harvard trained
lawyer named Alger Hiss, who had become the closest friend
of Chambers whole life during their service together in the
Soviet underground, became a major architect of US foreign policy
in the post World War Two period. Hiss, who was
(23:00):
a Soviet spy, sat directly behind President Roosevelt across the
table from Stalin at the Alta Conference. His was essential
in the creation of the United Nations. He later became
the president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace and
in the initiatives of the New Deal, which involved not
(23:20):
only safety net programs but also massive central planning and
quasi nationalization of many industries. Chambers thought that he heard
not communism, but a milder and more liberal form of
that destructive vision of the almighty mind of man. In
(23:42):
nineteen forty eight, ten years after he left the party
and after nine years a time, Chambers was summoned to
testify before the House on American Activities Committee. He's still
at a large mortgage. He knew that by testifying he
could lose his job and the farm.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
He did, in fact.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Lose his job as a result of his testimony, although
he did manage to keep the farm going until much later.
He could have saved himself, saved a job, saved disposition
at the top of American society a Time magazine, by
just pretending not to remember very much. But he decided
to tell what he knew. The nation did not understand
either the extent or the totalitarian nature of the communist threat. Now,
(24:24):
most of chambers contacts from his underground days by that
time had either already admitted that they were communists, or
had left the country, or had died or pled The fifth,
but almost alone of the whole group, Alger Hiss, Chambers's
closest friend in the whole world, stood up in public
(24:44):
and denied everything. The public hearing at which Chambers and
Hiss confronted one another was the first televised congressional hearing
In fact, you can actually see television footage of the
hearings on YouTube. I'm going to play a quick clip here.
This is a point where Algerhiss has been listing a
long list of highly respectable and powerful people that he's
(25:07):
worked with, and he's bragging about his credentials.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
So let's roll that.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Ask them if they ever found in me anything except
the highest adherence to duty and honor, then the committee
can judge, and the public can judge whether to believe
a self discredited accuser whose names and aliases are as
numerous and as casual as his accusations. The other side
of this question is the reliability of the allegations before
(25:32):
this committee, the undocumented statements of the man who now
calls himself Whittaker Chambers. Is he a man of consistent reliability,
truthfulness and honor. Clearly not. He admits it, and the
committee knows it. Chambers, who has already sworn that he
pleaded with Hiss to join him in leaving the party,
is recalled in the middle of the dramatic nine hour
(25:53):
session ask why he singled out Hiss. He replies, the
story is and testifying against mister Hiss.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
I'm working at some old grudge from modicant event.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
Or hatred.
Speaker 6 (26:13):
I don't hate mister his We were close friments, but
we are court in the tragedy of history.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
Mister Hiss represents the concealed and me against which we
are all fighting and fighting. I testified against him with remorse.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
And and you're listening to Greg Forster tell the story
of Witaker Chambers and the story of Wittaker Chambers best
selling book Witness, And there's a terrific line in the
beginning of this segment. The problem wasn't that Stalin subverted communism.
The problem was Communism itself. And he began to get
(27:04):
on his knees and pray. And ten years later he's
a senior editor at Time, and he is a Quaker,
and he's leading the charge to expose the Communists in
the highest ranks of American life. The story of Whittaker
Chambers continues here on our American stories, and we return
(27:38):
to our American stories and to Greg Forster's story of
Whitacre Chambers and Whitacre chambers book Witness, which again I
urge you to go on Amazon and buy it is
one of the best books you'll ever read. And it's
relevant today is when it was written in the mid
(27:58):
twentieth century. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
You can really see the contrast, can't you. Hiss, this
beautiful man, well spoken and accustomed to public speaking and
close friends with half the people who run the institutions
of American society, and.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Chambers, this.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Overweight, awkward, shy, soft spoken, halting man. The case became
a national sensation. The confrontation was fascinating. After he testified,
Chambers was shocked to discover that his fellow news reporters
had no interest in gathering the facts. They all went
(28:38):
and interviewed Hiss, but none of them interviewed him. Throughout
the case, the national media did its best to portray
Chambers in the most negative light possible. Chambers went on
Meet the Press, where the panel of reporters interviewing him
was moderated by a reporter who had personally recommended ALGERR.
Hiss for his position as president of the Carnegian Downment.
(29:00):
Pposedly neutral objective reporters treated Chambers so shamefully that after
the show his son asked him, Papa, why do those men.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Hate you so?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
As the testimony unfolded, it became clear that Hiss was lying.
The evidence was all against him. Hiss started dodging questions.
He had to keep changing his story. That didn't affect
the media coverage. However, on the contrary, the more clear
it became that Hiss was in trouble, the mor to
media covered up for him and found ways to attack Chambers.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
So it was not until many.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Years later that the nation at large fully realized how
clearly and unambiguously the evidence had been against Hiss from
the beginning. President Truman made the case into an election issue.
He denounced Whittaker Chambers at rallies in front of big,
cheering crowds. The security official that Chambers had gone to
in nineteen thirty nine to tell all he knew lied
(29:52):
about what Chambers had told him, and the lie would
have stuck. But the man's notes were introduced into evidence
and they contradicted his story. In the trials that came
out of the case, two sitting Supreme Court justices took
the stand as character witnesses for Alderhiss. Who do you
think took the stand as a character witness for Whittaker Chambers,
(30:15):
The housekeeper, the black woman, he had hired and refused
to pay the lower wage. She paid her a decent wage,
and he invited her to sit at the table and
eat with the family. As Chambers put it, in our
dining room, we gave her back her human dignity, and
on the witness stand, she gave me back my human dignity.
Hiss's main strategy was to smear Chambers. In the courtroom,
(30:38):
the chair of the Harvard Psychiatry Department took the stand
and testified under oath that he had diagnosed Whittaker Chambers
as a delusional and dangerous mentally ill man solely on
the basis of reading his articles in Time magazine. At
the trial, Chambers was questioned on the stand at great
length by Hiss' attorneys about the suicide of his brother,
(31:00):
and at the time he didn't understand why. It was
because the Hiss forces were hoping that the jury had
heard the rumors that they had been spreading that Chambers
had abused his brother and that that's why his brother
committed suicide. These claims were widely believed. No claim was
too outrageous to be believed if it made the Harvard man,
the respectable lawyer, the New Dealer, the architect of the
(31:22):
United Nations and friend to half the people who run
the institutions of the country as the hero, and the
fat weirdo Quaker as the villain. But then Hiss's lawyers
made their fatal mistake. They demanded that Chambers turn over
any documents from Hiss that he might have in his possession.
They assumed, of course, that he would have nothing, and
(31:43):
that this would be embarrassing for him. But Chambers remembered
he had taken that last parcel of stolen documents and
handed it to his cousin to hide to use his
leverage against the Party in case his wife or child
were kidnapped. He didn't remember what was in it. He
went back to his cousin to get it. It had
sat in a dumbwaiter shaft for ten years. It had
(32:05):
sixty five pages of handwritten documents, and canisters of microfilm that,
when they were developed, produced a stack of documents four
feet high. Proved beyond a doubt that Hiss was lying.
There were documents in Hiss's handwriting and typed on his
Hiss's typewriters. There were copies of secret documents that only
Hiss could have acquired, and that he had no legitimate
(32:27):
reason to be making copies of On the stand, Hiss
actually said under oath, I am amazed, and to my
dying day, I will wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into
my house to use my typewriter. Hiss went to jail
for perjury. More importantly, the nation was awakened to the
(32:48):
real nature of communism. There would be no more cheap
and easy talk about a peaceful and democratic Soviet Union
or agrarian liberals in China. Chambers description of communism, his
powerful testimony to what it was, and his willingness to
endure all suffering and sacrifice in order to oppose it,
had exposed the true nature of the threat. In his retirement,
(33:10):
Chambers was sought out by William F. Buckley, who at
that time was building what would become the Conservative movement,
and the two of them became very close friends. For
a short time, Chambers wrote for National Review, including a
deconstruction of Anne RAN's Atlas Shrug, which remains to this
day one of the key documents of American intellectual life.
Chambers interaction with Buckley and with the other Conservatives forced
(33:33):
him to recognize something he had never been willing to
admit before that human freedom is inextricably linked to economic
and technological development.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
This was a huge change for Chambers.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
He had spent his entire adult life denouncing the mechanization
of the modern world, building that family farm, trying to
get back to the land, to get back to the
woods from his unhappy childhood, where nature offers peace to
those who come to see and to hear and not
to change.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
But near the end of.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
His life he wrote to Buckley, I have decided that
the machine is not the enemy. Chambers was critical in
breaking through the wall of lies and forcing a public
confrontation with the true nature of communism. And that's another
meaning of the title witness. But above all, Chambers bore
(34:27):
witness that America had lost its way spiritually. He said,
the modern world is in crisis because technological progress and
economic development have brought an end to older ways of
life that were bound by traditions. In those older ways
of life, traditions had dictated to people what the meaning and.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
The purpose of their life was.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
But today, in the advanced modern world, we have to
figure out the meaning of our lives for ourselves. We
find ourselves facing a basic question, God or Man. Do
we believe that the human mind is the highest thing
that there is, that the solution to our problems is
the almighty mind of man remaking the world to eliminate war, poverty,
(35:17):
and injustice.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
Or do we believe that there is a.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Power higher than the human mind, that the destiny of
man is not in the hands of man, Chambers said,
without God, man cannot organize the world for man. Without God,
sooner or later, we are going to start lying, cheating,
and stealing, and eventually torturing and murdering on a massive
(35:44):
scale in order to remake the world. Believing that because
our destiny is in our own hands, that means we
have the power to set the world free, set the
world free from war and power and injustice, if only
we are willing to pay the price, if only we
(36:06):
are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Chambers said, the
communist East has chosen man, and it practices totalitarianism and
mass murder because it has the courage of that conviction.
The capitalist West, meanwhile, has also chosen man, but it
(36:29):
does not practice mass murder because it is haunted by
the specter of its Christian past. That's the highest meaning
I think of the of the title witness. Chambers had
grown to love his country very dearly, and because he
loved it so much, he bore witness against a prophetic
witness against our American version of this monstrous vision of
(36:53):
the almighty mind of man that can remake the world.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
And a terrific job on the editing and production and
storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and his special thanks
to Greg Forster who made this speech, gave this talk
on behalf of the Acting Institute. And what a story
it is the story of what it could Chambers, he
had spent his entire life denouncing the machine. Near the
(37:20):
end he realized that the machine was not the enemy,
and the basic question that haunted him was does God
reign supreme or man? Is it the almighty mind of
man that is the higher power? Or is there a
power higher than the mighty mind? Without God? He said,
(37:41):
Man can't organize the world for man. The communist Estas
chosen man, Horster said, But the capitalist West chose man too.
But America luckily was still haunted by its own Christian past,
by its own Christian conscience. The story of Whittaker Chambers
(38:02):
the story of communism in the twentieth century, and forces
like it attacking the West today. Here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
The book Witness by author Whittaker Chambers, was one of
the biggest US bestsellers of the twentieth century, yet it
is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell the
(00:32):
story of the book and its author is Greg Forster
on Behalf of the Actin Institute. Forster is a Whittaker
Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction in
political philosophy from Yale University. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Chambers grew up in an unhappy home, a home full
of emotional neediness, manipulation, petty jealousies. He had a younger
brother named Richard, who was really popular at school, and
he was able to take solace in his friends. But
Chambers himself was awkward and socially inept, and he was
tormented as much as school as he was at home.
(01:12):
His only escape was into the woods. He spent long
days walking alone in the woods near his home. In
the world of nature, he said, nature gives peace to
anyone who comes to see and to hear, and not
to change. As a teenager, he ran away from home.
(01:34):
He got a job laying railways in the streets in Washington,
d c. On that job, he experienced the hopelessness and
the cruel mistreatment of the impoverished workers. On his very
first day on the job, as one of the streetcars
slowed down in order to move through the work site,
a laughing passenger leaned his head out of the window
(01:54):
and casually and deliberately spat tobacco.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Juice all over him.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
But among those workers, Chambers also experienced the unique compassion
and mutual assistance that the poor give to one another
in their affliction. After he was forced to return home,
Chambers went to Columbia University, looking around at the chaos
and the injustice of the world. Watching the developments in
(02:22):
and after World War One, and also his own experience,
he became convinced that society was sick, so sick that
only surgery could save it, and he became convinced that
communism was history surgeon. He would later write, nobody becomes
a communist because communism is intrinsically attractive. People become communists
(02:43):
because they confront the crisis of history in the modern world,
and they are driven to desperation because they can't find
any other answers, and also because the blurring of the
lines between good and evil is part of that crisis
of history. Well, his advice where a Columbia was Mark
van Doren, and Van Doren told him go see the
wave of the future. They're building it in the Soviet Union.
(03:06):
In order to get over to the Soviet Union, Chambers
joined a Quaker International relief team, and among the Quakers
he began to discover God, and he moved toward God.
He was powerfully moved by the peace of the Quaker meeting,
where they will sit in silence for long periods so
that the spirit of God can make his presence felt.
(03:28):
But then the Quakers discovered some atheistic writings that Chambers
had published in the student paper. They kicked him off
the relief team, and they cast him out of a meetinghouse.
Chambers said that if even one person had taken him
aside in that moment and asked him what is in
your heart? He would never have become a communist. But
(03:51):
instead he was left bitterly asking himself where in Christendom
is the Christian So he began calling himself a communist.
Eventually he dropped out of college in order to join
the Communist Party. During this time, his brother Richard had
also gone off to college, and Richard's life fell apart.
(04:13):
Richard was not as popular at college as he had
been at home, and without Thou friends and the popularity
to prop him up, the inner emptiness of his.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Life consumed him.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
He was reading pessimistic atheistic philosophy, and he came home
declaring that life is meaningless.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Suffering and folly.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
He said to his family, I'm not brave enough to
kill myself yet, but i will be soon. He began
drinking heavily, staying out all night. The parents saw what
was happening, but they felt helpless to do anything about it.
So it fell to Chambers to try to convince his
brother not to kill himself. They had endless arguments. Richard said,
(04:52):
look around you. Look at people. They're all hypocrites. Look
at the world, it's hopeless. Look at religion, even the
people who pretend to believe in it don't really. Look
at marriage, it's a fraud. Look at family. Look at
our family and children. It's a crime against nature to
bring children into this world. Chambers told him, it's not
the world that's evil. It's what people have made of
(05:15):
the world that's evil. The answer is to struggle against evil,
he said. Communism has found the way out. Richard just
spat at that the Communists are just another fraud like
all the others.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
And besides, what does it matter.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
We're all going to die. Nothing waiting for us but
eternal oblivion. There's no hope to build anything meaningful with
death waiting for us all. After a prolonged period of
agony for the entire family, Richard finally killed himself. Chambers
began visiting Richard's grave every day before work, and then
(05:51):
again every day after work. Winter came and the graveyard
was covered with snow. On New Year's Eve, Chambers was
still there, standing at his brother's grave when midnight came
with the new year, and Chambers began to hear the
sound of celebration fireworks, bells, car horns, parties, the sound
(06:11):
of glass smashing against the cemetery wall, and standing there,
Chambers blamed those cele those partiers, and their whole world
for Richard's death, This materialistic, shallow world that wallows in
superficial pleasures and gave Richard nothing that was worth living for.
(06:32):
And he thought that the only thing he had worth
living for was the struggle to destroy that shallow and
materialistic society. So standing there in the graveyard, he consecrated
his life to the destruction of America. He would later write,
at that point, I had been a member of the
Communist Party for some time, but it was not until
(06:52):
that night that I truly became a Communist. I became
ear reconcilable. He walked out of the grave herod, and
he never went back there.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And you've been listening to Greg Forster tell a heck
of a story about Whittaker Chambers and particularly what drove
him right into the arms of pure, unfettered communism and
a deep anti Americanism. When we return more of the
story of Whitaker Chambers here on our American Stories. Here
(07:30):
are to our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories
of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a
great and beautiful country that need to be told. But
we can't do it without you. Our stories are free
to listen to, but they're not free to make. If
you love our stories in America like we do, please
go to our American Stories dot com and click the
(07:51):
donate button. Give a little give a lot, help us
keep the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories
dot Com. And we returned to our American stories. When
(08:13):
we last left off, Whitticker Chambers had declared himself to
be an irreconcilable Communist and consecrated his life to the
destruction of America. Let's continue with our storyteller, Greg Forster.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
He worked in the Open Communist Party for several years
in a variety of roles. Then he was recruited into
the Soviet Underground and spent six years there as a spy.
At first in New York, he was part of a
smuggling operation shuttling messages and materials between the American underground
and the European Underground. Later he returned to Washington, where
he had laid rails, But now he had come to
(08:49):
organize one of several Soviet apparatuses that penetrated the United
States government. Chambers was a go between. He would bring
the commands of the Soviet government to a number of
highly placed American officials, and he would receive from them
copies of state secret documents to be copied and passed on.
(09:09):
In this period in the nineteen thirties, shockingly large numbers
of middle class intellectuals, the kind of people who populate
the US government, were becoming communists. It can be very
difficult for us today to recapture that moment in the
nineteen thirties when so many people in that group became
communists or were sympathetic enough to help them. Chambers said
(09:29):
at the time, capitalism is going to fall not because
we will break the locks, but because all the men
who have been trusted to hold the keys are joining
the conspiracy. In order to live under cover, Chambers had
to adopt the lifestyle of a respectable bourgeois and blend
in with the world around him. But there was one
(09:51):
thing he refused to compromise on. In order to blend in,
he had to hire a black woman as a housekeeper,
because that was the prevailing practice in the neighborhood. But
although it meant a risk of discovery, he refused to
pay her the lower negro wage that was the acceptable practice,
And even more risky than that, he invited her to
(10:14):
dine at the family dinner table with the family. As
a communist, Chambers refused to have segregated dining in his home.
He would later write, by acting as a Communist must
I acted as a Christian should. However, he soon discovered
(10:35):
that most Communists were not as scrupulous as he was.
At first, he thought that by entering the underground he
would be escaping the petty factional squabbling, the recriminations, and
the constant cycles of purges and recriminations that were ubiquitous
in the open party. But he soon found out that
the underground had its own forms of destructive stupidity. The
(10:58):
rise of Communism to national power or in Russia was
producing a new kind of communist careerist, corrupt, cynical. The
Party is nothing but a path to power for them.
Chambers was forced to help the party to hurt people
and even kill people in petty disputes that had nothing
(11:18):
to do with the communist cause or advancing the world revolution.
He went along with it, he said, because the only
hope for a better world was communism, So if he
disobeyed the Communist Party and was thrown out, he would
lose the whole purpose of his life. But doubts were
beginning to grow in his mind. Something else happened to
(11:40):
Chambers as well. Into that world of death came the
unexpected power of new life, and I'd like.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
To share this with you.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
For one of us to have a child, my brother
had said in his agony, would be a crime against nature.
I longed for children, but I agreed with my brother
there had been enough misery in our line. What selfish
right had I to perpetuate it? And right had any
man or woman to bring a child into the twentieth
century world. They could only suffer its inevitable revolutions or
(12:14):
die in its inevitable wars. One extreme group among the
Communists held that it was morally wrong for a professional
revolutionist to have children at all. They could only hamper
or distract his work. That was one of the penalties
of being a communist. I did not belong to that group,
but in general I shared their views. As an underground Communist,
(12:35):
I took it for granted the children were out of
the question. Not only left wing an underground communist took
such matters for granted. Abortion was a commonplace of party life.
There were Communist doctors who rendered that service for a
small fee. Communists who were more choosy knew liberal doctors
who would provide it for a larger fee. Abortion, which
(12:58):
now fills me with physical horror. I then regarded, like
all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation. One day in
early nineteen thirty three, my wife told me that she
believed she had conceived. No man can hear from his wife,
especially for the first time, that she is carrying his child,
without a physical jolt of joy and pride. I felt it,
(13:24):
But so sunk were we in that life that it
was only a passing joy and was succeeded by a
merely momentary sadness that we would not have the child.
We discussed the matter, and my wife said she must
go at once for a physical check and to arrange
for the abortion. When my wife came back, she was
quiet and noncommittal. The doctor had said there was a child.
(13:47):
My wife went about preparing supper. What else did she say?
Speaker 3 (13:51):
I asked.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
She said, I'm in good physical shape to have the child.
My wife went on working very slowly. The truth dawned
on me. Do you mean, I asked that you want
to have the child? My wife came over to me,
took my hands, and burst into tears. Dear heart, she said,
(14:15):
with a pleading voice, we couldn't do that awful thing
to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
A wild joy swept over me.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and
its theories, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, crumbled.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
At the touch of the child.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Both of us simply wanted a child. If the points
on the long course of my break with Communism could
be retraced, that is probably one of them. Not at
the level of conscious mind, but at the level of
unconscious life. The child, even before her birth, had begun
(14:58):
invisibly to lead us out out of that darkness that
we could not even realize, toward that light which we
could not even see. As his daughter grew, Chambers used
to love sitting there, watching her in her tie chair,
smearing porridge on her face or meditatively dropping it on
(15:18):
the floor. One day, he noticed her ear, how intricate
and complex the human ear was, and the thought came
burning into his mind that could not have happened by accident.
Only an immense design could have created that. The thought
(15:39):
was unwanted, and he shoved it aside, but it would
return to haunt him. In nineteen thirty seven, Stalin's purges
reached their peak. Chambers watched as people who he had
known and cared about for years. Dedicated communists who had
given their lives to the cause and to the Party
were brutally murdered for no good reason, and his superiors
(16:01):
laughed and joked about it.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
They enjoyed the cruelty.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
His doubts growing, Chambers read a book by a man
who had escaped from a Soviet labor camp. He began
to be haunted by the screams of those whom he
had helped to hurt and to kill. Chambers said, the
vision of communism is the vision of the almighty mind
of man. So no one ever really stops being a
Communist until they discover that there is something in man
(16:30):
that is greater than the mind.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Those screams of.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
The people in Agony were the cry of something inside
human beings that is greater than mine. Was the cry
of the human soul, and they were crying out to
the only thing that can hear, a human soul, another
human soul. Listening to the screams caused Chambers to realize
(16:55):
that those people he was hurting had souls, and that
he had a soul too.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And listening to Greg Forster and Foster is a Whittaker
Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction and
political philosophy from Yale University. And that story about the
pregnancy of Whittaker Chambers bride and her willingness to sacrifice
(17:20):
the child for the good of the party and for
the good of mankind, because why on earth bring a
child into this world that would suffer? So this was
the beginning of the end of his flirtation and commitment
to communism. He didn't know it yet, Whittaker Chambers, but
(17:41):
this was the beginning of the end, this realization of
the inhumanity of communism. When we come back more of
the story of Whittaker Chambers and the book Witness. Here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
(18:11):
stories and the story of Whittaker Chambers and the story
of his remarkable book Witness. I'd urge you to pick
it up, go to Amazon dot com and read it.
So much of what's happening today in the world was
happening then too, and so many of the same arguments
and so many of the same spiritual battles. In nineteen
(18:31):
thirty seven, word of Stalin's torture and murder was becoming
public knowledge in America. Whittaker Chambers, the American turned Communist spy,
struggled to reconcile his commitment with these truths. Let's return
to Greg Forster.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
It began to dawn on him that the problem was
not that Stalin had perverted communism. The problem was Communism itself.
As he said, the problem is not this Dallin is evil,
but Communism is even more evil. And only at the
very end of that process did he finally allow himself
to return to that thought that he had suppressed years earlier.
(19:12):
When he noticed his daughter's ear, he finally allowed himself
to ask, what is it that we are missing that
communism always goes so wrong?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Could it be God?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
He had reached what he called the division point, the
point where you have to choose.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
One path or the other.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
He got down on his knees and prayed, and he
began praying every day, and he came to need prayer
like food and water. By turning to God, he was
discovering who he really was. That illusion of the almighty
mind of man began to fade away. Chambers said, reason
(19:57):
is good, but there's a flaw in humanity, a flaw
that causes great evil and suffering, and it goes beyond
the realm where reason can reach. As he put it,
the death camps exist first in our minds. When he
finally left the Communist Party in April nineteen thirty eight,
(20:18):
he left absolutely everything that he had except his wife
and children. He had no career, and the depression was on.
He had no standing in any community, no relationships. He
was a fugitive from both the American government and the
Soviet government. He knew that the party's first instinct would
be to kill him, possibly getting to him through his family,
(20:39):
so he got himself a car and a weapon. He
took his last stash of stolen documents and he gave
it to a cousin to hide, to use as leverage
against the party in case they kidnapped his wife or child,
and then he fled into hiding for six months or so.
After that, he emerged from hiding and he went back
and contacted his former contacts in the underground, and he
(21:00):
tried to persuade them to leave the party, to defect
from the Communist Party, and he threatened to denounce them
to the authorities if they wouldn't. In nineteen thirty nine
came the Hitler Stalin Pact, the alliance between the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany, and Chambers knew that the Soviet
underground in Washington would be put at Hitler's disposal to
(21:20):
use against the US, and so it had become his
duty to become an informer. Becoming an informer was physically
and spiritually repulsive to Chambers because it involved using people's
trust in you to destroy them. It was a sort
of slow motion spiritual death for him, even though it
was morally the right thing to do. And the worst
(21:42):
of it was he went to the government and he
told them everything he knew and they didn't do anything
about it. Through a friend, Chambers got the opportunity to
apply for a job at Time magazine. He worked his
way up from book reviews to senior editor. He became
a Quaker. He returned to the deep peace of the
Quaker Meeting.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
From his college days.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
The Chambers has moved to a family farm which they
worked entirely themselves. On top of chambers more than a
full time job as a senior editor of Time magazine,
the farm was their witness against the materialism of the
modern world. The farm said, we choose this life of
great hardship and great satisfaction because the modern world has
(22:24):
nothing better than this to offer us. Over the course
of nine years at time, Chambers watched as the people
who had worked for him as Soviet spies moved their
way up in.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
The New Deal administration.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Harry Dexter White led the creation of the World Bank
and served as its first president, and a Harvard trained
lawyer named Alger Hiss, who had become the closest friend
of Chambers whole life during their service together in the
Soviet underground, became a major architect of US foreign policy
in the post World War Two period. Hiss, who was
(23:00):
a Soviet spy, sat directly behind President Roosevelt across the
table from Stalin at the Alta Conference. His was essential
in the creation of the United Nations. He later became
the president of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace and
in the initiatives of the New Deal, which involved not
(23:20):
only safety net programs but also massive central planning and
quasi nationalization of many industries. Chambers thought that he heard
not communism, but a milder and more liberal form of
that destructive vision of the almighty mind of man. In
(23:42):
nineteen forty eight, ten years after he left the party
and after nine years a time, Chambers was summoned to
testify before the House on American Activities Committee. He's still
at a large mortgage. He knew that by testifying he
could lose his job and the farm.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
He did, in fact.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Lose his job as a result of his testimony, although
he did manage to keep the farm going until much later.
He could have saved himself, saved a job, saved disposition
at the top of American society a Time magazine, by
just pretending not to remember very much. But he decided
to tell what he knew. The nation did not understand
either the extent or the totalitarian nature of the communist threat. Now,
(24:24):
most of chambers contacts from his underground days by that
time had either already admitted that they were communists, or
had left the country, or had died or pled The fifth,
but almost alone of the whole group, Alger Hiss, Chambers's
closest friend in the whole world, stood up in public
(24:44):
and denied everything. The public hearing at which Chambers and
Hiss confronted one another was the first televised congressional hearing
In fact, you can actually see television footage of the
hearings on YouTube. I'm going to play a quick clip here.
This is a point where Algerhiss has been listing a
long list of highly respectable and powerful people that he's
(25:07):
worked with, and he's bragging about his credentials.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
So let's roll that.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Ask them if they ever found in me anything except
the highest adherence to duty and honor, then the committee
can judge, and the public can judge whether to believe
a self discredited accuser whose names and aliases are as
numerous and as casual as his accusations. The other side
of this question is the reliability of the allegations before
(25:32):
this committee, the undocumented statements of the man who now
calls himself Whittaker Chambers. Is he a man of consistent reliability,
truthfulness and honor. Clearly not. He admits it, and the
committee knows it. Chambers, who has already sworn that he
pleaded with Hiss to join him in leaving the party,
is recalled in the middle of the dramatic nine hour
(25:53):
session ask why he singled out Hiss. He replies, the
story is and testifying against mister Hiss.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
I'm working at some old grudge from modicant event.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
Or hatred.
Speaker 6 (26:13):
I don't hate mister his We were close friments, but
we are court in the tragedy of history.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
Mister Hiss represents the concealed and me against which we
are all fighting and fighting. I testified against him with remorse.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
And and you're listening to Greg Forster tell the story
of Witaker Chambers and the story of Wittaker Chambers best
selling book Witness, And there's a terrific line in the
beginning of this segment. The problem wasn't that Stalin subverted communism.
The problem was Communism itself. And he began to get
(27:04):
on his knees and pray. And ten years later he's
a senior editor at Time, and he is a Quaker,
and he's leading the charge to expose the Communists in
the highest ranks of American life. The story of Whittaker
Chambers continues here on our American stories, and we return
(27:38):
to our American stories and to Greg Forster's story of
Whitacre Chambers and Whitacre chambers book Witness, which again I
urge you to go on Amazon and buy it is
one of the best books you'll ever read. And it's
relevant today is when it was written in the mid
(27:58):
twentieth century. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
You can really see the contrast, can't you. Hiss, this
beautiful man, well spoken and accustomed to public speaking and
close friends with half the people who run the institutions
of American society, and.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Chambers, this.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Overweight, awkward, shy, soft spoken, halting man. The case became
a national sensation. The confrontation was fascinating. After he testified,
Chambers was shocked to discover that his fellow news reporters
had no interest in gathering the facts. They all went
(28:38):
and interviewed Hiss, but none of them interviewed him. Throughout
the case, the national media did its best to portray
Chambers in the most negative light possible. Chambers went on
Meet the Press, where the panel of reporters interviewing him
was moderated by a reporter who had personally recommended ALGERR.
Hiss for his position as president of the Carnegian Downment.
(29:00):
Pposedly neutral objective reporters treated Chambers so shamefully that after
the show his son asked him, Papa, why do those men.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Hate you so?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
As the testimony unfolded, it became clear that Hiss was lying.
The evidence was all against him. Hiss started dodging questions.
He had to keep changing his story. That didn't affect
the media coverage. However, on the contrary, the more clear
it became that Hiss was in trouble, the mor to
media covered up for him and found ways to attack Chambers.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
So it was not until many.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Years later that the nation at large fully realized how
clearly and unambiguously the evidence had been against Hiss from
the beginning. President Truman made the case into an election issue.
He denounced Whittaker Chambers at rallies in front of big,
cheering crowds. The security official that Chambers had gone to
in nineteen thirty nine to tell all he knew lied
(29:52):
about what Chambers had told him, and the lie would
have stuck. But the man's notes were introduced into evidence
and they contradicted his story. In the trials that came
out of the case, two sitting Supreme Court justices took
the stand as character witnesses for Alderhiss. Who do you
think took the stand as a character witness for Whittaker Chambers,
(30:15):
The housekeeper, the black woman, he had hired and refused
to pay the lower wage. She paid her a decent wage,
and he invited her to sit at the table and
eat with the family. As Chambers put it, in our
dining room, we gave her back her human dignity, and
on the witness stand, she gave me back my human dignity.
Hiss's main strategy was to smear Chambers. In the courtroom,
(30:38):
the chair of the Harvard Psychiatry Department took the stand
and testified under oath that he had diagnosed Whittaker Chambers
as a delusional and dangerous mentally ill man solely on
the basis of reading his articles in Time magazine. At
the trial, Chambers was questioned on the stand at great
length by Hiss' attorneys about the suicide of his brother,
(31:00):
and at the time he didn't understand why. It was
because the Hiss forces were hoping that the jury had
heard the rumors that they had been spreading that Chambers
had abused his brother and that that's why his brother
committed suicide. These claims were widely believed. No claim was
too outrageous to be believed if it made the Harvard man,
the respectable lawyer, the New Dealer, the architect of the
(31:22):
United Nations and friend to half the people who run
the institutions of the country as the hero, and the
fat weirdo Quaker as the villain. But then Hiss's lawyers
made their fatal mistake. They demanded that Chambers turn over
any documents from Hiss that he might have in his possession.
They assumed, of course, that he would have nothing, and
(31:43):
that this would be embarrassing for him. But Chambers remembered
he had taken that last parcel of stolen documents and
handed it to his cousin to hide to use his
leverage against the Party in case his wife or child
were kidnapped. He didn't remember what was in it. He
went back to his cousin to get it. It had
sat in a dumbwaiter shaft for ten years. It had
(32:05):
sixty five pages of handwritten documents, and canisters of microfilm that,
when they were developed, produced a stack of documents four
feet high. Proved beyond a doubt that Hiss was lying.
There were documents in Hiss's handwriting and typed on his
Hiss's typewriters. There were copies of secret documents that only
Hiss could have acquired, and that he had no legitimate
(32:27):
reason to be making copies of On the stand, Hiss
actually said under oath, I am amazed, and to my
dying day, I will wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into
my house to use my typewriter. Hiss went to jail
for perjury. More importantly, the nation was awakened to the
(32:48):
real nature of communism. There would be no more cheap
and easy talk about a peaceful and democratic Soviet Union
or agrarian liberals in China. Chambers description of communism, his
powerful testimony to what it was, and his willingness to
endure all suffering and sacrifice in order to oppose it,
had exposed the true nature of the threat. In his retirement,
(33:10):
Chambers was sought out by William F. Buckley, who at
that time was building what would become the Conservative movement,
and the two of them became very close friends. For
a short time, Chambers wrote for National Review, including a
deconstruction of Anne RAN's Atlas Shrug, which remains to this
day one of the key documents of American intellectual life.
Chambers interaction with Buckley and with the other Conservatives forced
(33:33):
him to recognize something he had never been willing to
admit before that human freedom is inextricably linked to economic
and technological development.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
This was a huge change for Chambers.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
He had spent his entire adult life denouncing the mechanization
of the modern world, building that family farm, trying to
get back to the land, to get back to the
woods from his unhappy childhood, where nature offers peace to
those who come to see and to hear and not
to change.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
But near the end of.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
His life he wrote to Buckley, I have decided that
the machine is not the enemy. Chambers was critical in
breaking through the wall of lies and forcing a public
confrontation with the true nature of communism. And that's another
meaning of the title witness. But above all, Chambers bore
(34:27):
witness that America had lost its way spiritually. He said,
the modern world is in crisis because technological progress and
economic development have brought an end to older ways of
life that were bound by traditions. In those older ways
of life, traditions had dictated to people what the meaning and.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
The purpose of their life was.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
But today, in the advanced modern world, we have to
figure out the meaning of our lives for ourselves. We
find ourselves facing a basic question, God or Man. Do
we believe that the human mind is the highest thing
that there is, that the solution to our problems is
the almighty mind of man remaking the world to eliminate war, poverty,
(35:17):
and injustice.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
Or do we believe that there is a.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Power higher than the human mind, that the destiny of
man is not in the hands of man, Chambers said,
without God, man cannot organize the world for man. Without God,
sooner or later, we are going to start lying, cheating,
and stealing, and eventually torturing and murdering on a massive
(35:44):
scale in order to remake the world. Believing that because
our destiny is in our own hands, that means we
have the power to set the world free, set the
world free from war and power and injustice, if only
we are willing to pay the price, if only we
(36:06):
are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Chambers said, the
communist East has chosen man, and it practices totalitarianism and
mass murder because it has the courage of that conviction.
The capitalist West, meanwhile, has also chosen man, but it
(36:29):
does not practice mass murder because it is haunted by
the specter of its Christian past. That's the highest meaning
I think of the of the title witness. Chambers had
grown to love his country very dearly, and because he
loved it so much, he bore witness against a prophetic
witness against our American version of this monstrous vision of
(36:53):
the almighty mind of man that can remake the world.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
And a terrific job on the editing and production and
storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and his special thanks
to Greg Forster who made this speech, gave this talk
on behalf of the Acting Institute. And what a story
it is the story of what it could Chambers, he
had spent his entire life denouncing the machine. Near the
(37:20):
end he realized that the machine was not the enemy,
and the basic question that haunted him was does God
reign supreme or man? Is it the almighty mind of
man that is the higher power? Or is there a
power higher than the mighty mind? Without God? He said,
(37:41):
Man can't organize the world for man. The communist Estas
chosen man, Horster said, But the capitalist West chose man too.
But America luckily was still haunted by its own Christian past,
by its own Christian conscience. The story of Whittaker Chambers
(38:02):
the story of communism in the twentieth century, and forces
like it attacking the West today. Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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