Whittaker Chambers: life, ideas and books

Life

Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers in Philadelphia in 1901. He joined the Communist Party in 1925 and edited the Daily Worker in 1927 and 1928. From about 1932 to 1938 he worked as a courier in a Soviet underground network, then broke with communism and went into hiding. He later became a senior editor at Time magazine, resigning in December 1948.

In 1948 he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, had been part of the same underground. Hiss denied it and was convicted of perjury in 1950. Chambers published his memoir Witness in 1952, joined National Review as a senior editor in 1957 and left in 1959. He died at his farm in Maryland in 1961 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

Ideas

Witness is part autobiography, part case history and part religious testimony. Chambers described communism as a faith that answers a real human hunger, the belief that men can arrange the world without God, and argued that the choice of his age was between that faith and a free, God-fearing order. He turned to Christianity after leaving the party.

He was a pessimist about the West's prospects. He also complicated the usual picture of the American right. He described himself as a man of the right who meant to uphold capitalism in its American version, but he held that capitalism is not by nature conservative, since markets dissolve the old ties that conservatives wish to keep. In a 1957 National Review review of Atlas Shrugged he criticised Ayn Rand's rejection of religion.

Major works

• Witness (1952), his memoir, a finalist for the 1953 National Book Award in nonfiction.
• Cold Friday (1964), essays collected after his death.

Why conservatives read him

Witness is one of the books through which postwar conservatives understood the Cold War as a spiritual conflict as well as a geopolitical one. Ronald Reagan credited it with part of his move from the New Deal Democratic party to the Republican one, and William F. Buckley Jr. recruited Chambers as an early member of the National Review circle.

The Hiss case remains contested in public memory, though many historians regard later disclosures from Soviet-era records as strengthening Chambers's account. His literary reputation is separate from that quarrel. Even readers who doubt his politics often admire the prose, the portraits of the 1930s underground and the sense that private conscience can break with a powerful ideology. His reflections on faith and freedom link him to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the later anticommunist canon, and the memoir is still one of the books most often given to young conservatives as a first long read. It is also a useful corrective to triumphalism, since its author never believed the right was certain to win and said so plainly, which is part of why it has lasted.