Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  In 1936, when my wife lay in the hospital ward after the difficult birth of our son, she asked me to bring her a book to help her over the painful days of recuperation. I brought her Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, which had just been published. The title struck me in some hidden way and sent me back to reading Milton’s Samson Agonistes, where Huxley had found it. Often and unaccountably in the winter of 1937, Samson’s opening lines kept running through my mind:Promise was that I

  Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver.

  Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him

  Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

  XXIII

  I have reached that point in my narrative at which this book began—the point at which I repudiated Communism and violently broke away from the slaves of the Communist mill. So great an effort, quite apart from its physical and practical hazards, cannot occur without a profound upheaval of the spirit. No man lightly reverses the faith of an adult lifetime, held implacably to the point of criminality. He reverses it only with a violence greater than the force of the faith he is repudiating. It is not a matter of leaving one house and occupying another—especially when the second is manifestly in collapse and the caretakers largely witless. That faith is not worth holding which a man is not willing to reach, if necessary, through violence, and to hold through suffering.

  Julian Wadleigh has told, in a series of reminiscences that he published between the Hiss trials, how, in 1937, he was once complaining to me about his troubles and I answered that I had known trouble that kept me awake all night at my window. I remember that night well. It was the night when I faced the fact that, if Communism were evil, I could no longer serve it, and that that was true regardless of the fact that there might be nothing else to serve, that the alternative was a void. It was that void that I faced throughout the night until the alley below me again took form out of the opacity of a sultry dawn.

  Nor did I mention that night to Wadleigh merely to relieve my feelings. I hoped to implant some dim sense of turmoil to him as the only way I knew of disturbing Wadleigh’s faith, too. It was about as far as I dared go with anyone. For if they had known what my turmoil was about, my fellow slaves would gladly have tried to prevent my escape.

  Therefore, I prepared my break carefully over the months, taking a series of practical precautions, which I have described earlier, and whose chief purpose was to deter my pursuers from killing me. Those were the days in which I bought a weapon, a car, induced the Communist Party to get me a job in the United States Government, organized a hiding place for my family and concealed the last consignments of copied documents, memos and film from the Washington sources. Those precautions have been called overprudent and crafty. Let anyone who sincerely thinks so, secure the safety of a woman and two small children, as well as his own, under the eyes of prudent, crafty, and conscienceless conspirators. I used against the Communist Party exactly the conspiratorial methods which it had taught me to use against others. In any case, God commands us to have courage; He does not command us to be fools.

  How well-taken those precautions were, and how necessary, the Hiss Case proved ten years later. For had I not taken them in 1938, in 1948 Alger Hiss would have destroyed me without a second thought, as a party reprisal too long delayed. Had he succeeded, the fight against Communism would have suffered such a reverse that no second man would have dared for a long time to stand up against the secret Communist Party whose entrenched power would have been more untouchable than before. Or are there people who still believe that in 1948 Alger Hiss, impenitent and defiant to this hour, was not still an active Communist, working as such in close touch with some of the highest power centers in the country? Are there people who still do not see that in removing his power for evil in 1948, the secret apparatus that I had failed to smash singlehanded in 1938 was at least damaged?

  In that sense, not only the safety of my family and myself, but the safety of many families, turned on the spin of my decision when I broke out of the Communist Party and fled from our house on Mount Royal Terrace, the last of the houses we had lived in in Baltimore. Had I acted by all that the world calls realistic and practical, or even prudent and crafty, I should never have broken.

  I was just turned thirty-seven years old. The best years of my life were gone. I had no profession and no job, no usable experience, no standing in any community and the depression was still on. I had a wife and two small children to support. I was a fugitive from my own Government. I was a fugitive from the Soviet Government and its international apparatuses which I knew to be operating around me. I was a fugitive from the Communist Party whose people were more or less everywhere. The logical thing for the Soviet apparatuses and the Communist Party to do was to kill me. They must sometimes have thought bitterly since about their failure to do so.

  My son was about two years old when I carried him to the car where his five-year-old sister was waiting for their mother to drive them out of those dangers that they had no inkling of toward a future that was blank to all of us.

  Two things made that break and that flight possible. One was the devotion of my wife—devotion of a kind that asks only danger, trial and great hazard to prove its force. The other was a faith that, if I turned away from evil and sought good, I would not fail; but whether or not I failed, that was what I was meant to do, at all costs, without the measuring of consequences.

  Of course, we do not simply step from evil to good, even recognizing that any human good and evil is seldom more than a choice between less evil and more good. In that transition we drag ourselves like cripples. We are cripples. In any such change as I was making, the soul itself is in flux. How hideous our transformations then are, wavering monstrously in their incompleteness as in a distorting mirror, until the commotion settles and the soul’s new proportions are defined.

  In that change, practicality and precaution are of no more help than prudence or craft. It is a transit that must be made upon the knees, or not at all. For it is not only to the graves of dead brothers that we find ourselves powerless at last to bring anything but prayer. We are equally powerless at the graves of ourselves, once we know that we live in shrouds.

  At that end, all men simply pray, and prayer takes as many forms as there are men. Without exception we pray. We pray because there is nothing else to do, and because that is where God is—where there is nothing else.

  9

  THE DIVISION POINT

  I

  When I was a small boy on Long Island, sitting up in bed to listen in awe to the ocean pounding the beaches on winter nights, Rainer Maria Rilke stood one day on the tower of the castle of Duino near Trieste. There, while a storm hurled the Adriatic Sea, two hundred feet below him, at the tower’s base, he heard a voice, partly within and partly without him, ask this question:Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich aus der Engel

  Ordnungen?

  Who, if I cried out, would hear me from among the orders Of the angels?

  It fills me with hope that, in my own lifetime, a few years before the war that would change the life and destiny of mankind, there was still left in the world a man who could hear such a question in a storm. The question is as changeless as the voice that asks it. The failure of an age or a man is not to hear it.

  I have reached the division point of my life and of my book. Up to this point, I have been painfully sketching the personal sins and follies of a weak man. I have made no attempt to report them in full or in detail. Looked back upon once a man has left it behind, all sin seems childish, and, in my experience, most men feel childishly presumptuous about their sins. As if, were they to shout to their kind: “Ho, wayfarers!” the echo that answered them would not be the voice of humanity itself.

  I have sought, too, to report, more painfully, how out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century, which is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive
part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form, so that the characteristic experience of the mind in this age is a political experience. At every point, religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men—those who reject and those who worship God—becomes irrepressible. Those camps are not only outside, but also within nations.

  The most conspicuously menacing form of that rejection is Communism. But there are other forms of the same rejection, which in any case, Communism did not originate, but merely adopted and adapted.

  Until 1937, I had been, in this respect, a typical modem man, living without God except for tremors of intuition. In 1938, there seemed no possibility that I would not continue to live out my life as such a man. Habit and self-interest both presumed it. I had been for thirteen years a Communist; and in Communism could be read, more clearly with each passing year, the future of mankind, as, with each passing year, the free world shrank in power and faith, including faith in itself, and sank deeper into intellectual and moral chaos. Yet, in 1938, I gave a different ending to that life.

  Again, in 1948, exactly ten years later, I was leading a life prosperous beyond most men’s and peaceful beyond my hopes. On its surface, this was the other typical life of my time—the life of career and success. Again, there seemed no possibility that I would not lead that second life to its close. I did not do so.

  In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral. They give men the heart to suffer the ordeal of a life that perpetually rends them between its beauty and its terror. If my story is worth telling, it is because I rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of life in our time—the revolutionary ending and the success ending. I chose a third ending.

  I am only incidentally a witness to a weak man’s sins and misdeeds or even the crimes that are implicit in the practice of Communism. In so far as I am a true witness, it is because twice in my life I came, not alone, for I had my wife and children by the hand, to a dark tower, and, in a storm of the spirit, listened to that question that was both within and without me: Who, if I cried out, would hear me from among the orders of the angels? And because each time the question was answered.

  The rest of this book is about what happened—translated into the raw, painful, ugly, crumpled, confused, tormented, pitiful acts of life—when I heard the first and the second cry.

  10

  THE TRANQUIL YEARS

  I

  I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939.

  On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as its cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German panzer divisions.

  In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish smile, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war. Soon the Stukas would be screaming above the screaming babies, pushed or carried by long lines of frantic women, along roads jammed by the clutter of soldiers and civilians fleeing the collapse of armies, cities, nations, order, civilization. This was the war that, for as long as I had been a Communist, every Communist had foreseen and dedicated himself to struggle against. That a Communist had unloosed it upon mankind was a fact so monstrous that it absolved every man from the bonds of common humanity with that breed and made it a pious act to raise his hand in any way against them.

  I was on the plane for that reason. Specifically, I was afraid that, with the Communist-Nazi Pact, the Soviet Government and the American Communist Party would at once put their underground apparatuses at the service of the Nazis against the United States. I had been told that in the past German and Russian intelligence groups had co-operated in the United States.

  To prevent that, I had decided to do the only thing that I could do. I had decided to become an informer. I was flying to Washington to lay the facts about the underground apparatuses before Adolf A. Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security.

  II

  To be an informer....

  Men shrink from that word and what it stands for as from something lurking and poisonous. Spy is a different breed of word. Espionage is a function of war whether it be waged between nations, classes or parties. Like the soldier, the spy stakes his freedom or his life on the chances of action. Like the soldier, his acts are largely impersonal. He seldom knows whom he cripples or kills. Spy as an epithet is a convention of morale; the enemy’s spy is always monstrous; our spy is daring and brave. It must be so since all camps use spies and must while war lasts.

  The informer is different,25 particularly the ex-Communist informer. He risks little. He sits in security and uses his special knowledge to destroy others. He has that special information to give because he knows those others’ faces, voices and lives, because he once lived within their confidence, in a shared faith, trusted by them as one of themselves, accepting their friendship, feeling their pleasures and griefs, sitting in their houses, eating at their tables, accepting their kindness, knowing their wives and children. If he had not done those things, he would have no use as an informer.

  Because he has that use, the police protect him. He is their creature. When they whistle, he fetches a soiled bone of information. He and they share a common chore, which is a common complicity in the public interest. It cannot be the action of equals, and even the kindness that seeks to mask the fact merely exasperates and cannot change it. For what is the day’s work of the police is the ex-Communist’s necessity. They may choose what they will or will not do. He has no choice. He has surrendered his choice. To that extent, though he be free in every other way, the informer is a slave. He is no longer a man. He is free only to the degree in which he understands what he is doing and why he must do it.

  Let every ex-Communist look unblinkingly at that image. It is himself. By the logic of his position in the struggles of this age, every ex-Communist is an informer from the moment he breaks with Communism, regardless of how long it takes him to reach the police station.

  For Communism fixes the consequences of its evil not only on those who serve it, but also on those, who, once having served it, seek to serve against it. It has set the pattern of the warfare it wages and that defines the pattern of the warfare its deserters must wage against it. It cannot be otherwise. Communism exists to wage war. Its existence implies, even in peace or truce, a state of war that engages every man, woman and child alive, but, above all, the ex-Communist. For no man simply deserts from the Communist Party. He deserts against it. He deserts to struggle against Communism as an evil. There would otherwise be no reason for his desertion, however long it may take him to grasp the fact. Otherwise, he should have remained within the Communist Party, and his failure to act at all against it betrays the fact that he has not broken with it. He has broken only with its organization, or certain of its forms, practices, discomforts of action or political necessity. And this, despite the sound human and moral reasons that may also paralyze him—his reluctance to harm old friends, his horror at using their one-time trust in him to destroy them—reasons which are honorable and valid.

  But if the ex-Communist truly believes that Communism is evil, if he truly means to struggle against it as an evil, and as the price of his once having accepted it, he must decide to become an informer. In that war which Communism insists on waging, and which therefore he cannot evade, he has one specific contribution to make—his special knowledge of the enemy. That is what all have to off
er first of all. Because Communism is a conspiracy, that knowledge is indispensable for the active phase of the struggle against it. That every ex-Communist has to offer, regardless of what else he may have to offer, special skills or special talents or the factors that make one character different from another.

  I hold that it is better, because in general clarity is more maturing than illusion, for the ex-Communist to make the offering in the full knowledge of what he is doing, the knowledge that henceforth he is no longer a free man but an informer. That penalty those who once firmly resolved to take upon themselves the penalties for the crimes of politics and history, in the belief that only at that cost could Man be free, must assume no less firmly as the price of their mistake. For, in the end, the choice for the ex-Communist is between shielding a small number of people who still actively further what he now sees to be evil, or of helping to shield millions from that evil which threatens even their souls. Those who do not inform are still conniving at that evil. That is the crux of the moral choice which an ex-Communist must make in recognizing that the logic of his position makes him an informer. Moreover, he must always make it amidst the deafening chatter and verbal droppings of those who sit above the battle, who lack the power to act for good or evil because they lack any power to act at all, and who, in the day when heaven was falling, were, in Dante’s words, neither for God nor for Satan, but were for themselves.

  On that road of the informer it is always night. I who have traveled it from end to end, and know its windings, switchbacks and sheer drops—I cannot say at what point, where or when, the ex-Communist must make his decision to take it. That depends on the individual man. Nor is it simply a matter of taking his horror in his hands and making his avowals. The ex-Communist is a man dealing with other men, men of many orders of intelligence, of many motives of self-interest or malice, men sometimes infiltrated or tainted by the enemy, in an immensely complex pattern of politics and history. If he means to be effective, if he does not wish his act merely to be wasted suffering for others and himself, how, when and where the ex-Communist informs are matters calling for the shrewdest judgment.