Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Once I had been “secretly reached by that life” of Quakerism, I felt a human completion such as I had never known before—an adulthood, a maturity, that marked off the forty years of my life as a childhood. I knew then that, however it might be with others, I could never be a complete man without God. I suspected that the same fatal deficiency that I had known was at the root of all the troubles of modern man and must result inevitably, as I was to write later on in Time, “in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action.” Evidences of that mortal incompleteness I found in most of the minds around me.

  As I acquired the power of overcoming myself and the habit of reaching beyond myself for help and guidance, I saw all men and women, no longer as creatures predominantly good or evil, kind or cruel, but as individual beings “tormented by destiny”—tormented more terribly because each was enclosed beyond the power to change in the ordeal of his individuality.

  Like the Bishop of Digne, in Les Misérables, I inclined by nature “toward the distressed and the repentant.” The “ferociously virtuous” always made me a little uncomfortable because they raised in the depth of my mind an unwanted question. For while I can grant at once the right of goodness to be ferocious, I suspect always that its ferocity, to ring clear, must be the ferocity of aroused compassion, which is rooted in the understanding of self-fallibility, not of self-righteousness.

  Moreover, it is only the sins of the spirit that really appal me. The sins of the flesh affect me chiefly as unseemly and embarrassing, like the lapses of children, and for the same reason, because they betray the terrible immaturity of the spirit, at whatever age they occur. And who that is human will call himself safe from that mortal recurrence? This is not to condone sin. This is to mark a distinction between those sins of the spirit which are condign, in part perhaps because they always partake of the rebellious sin of Satan, and those sins that are ugly, wasteful, shameful, because, among other things, they impair that “dignity of the human substance” which the Mass explicitly celebrates (Deus Qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti—God Who hast miraculously founded the dignity of the human substance).

  Now a truly wonderful thing began to happen to me. I do not know what force moved the gravitation, but little by little people began to open my office door at Time which in my own need few had ever opened. They would sit down, and after a rambling preamble, suddenly confide to me some distress that was destroying their peace or their lives. Sometimes their trouble concerned the trifling and absurd relationships of the office, which, nevertheless, could be personally harrowing and even disastrous. Sometimes there were technical problems of writing that were bringing a writer to the brink of breakdown. Sometimes there were personal confessions of the most desperate kind. They came from people at all levels of the organization, from top to bottom. Men and women both have burst into tears in my office while I rose to snap the lock on the door.

  I never spoke of religion to those sufferers unless I was specifically asked about it, and then reluctantly and little. I said very little at any time. For they did not often come to me, even though they might think that they did, for the comfort of words or practical guidance. They came for release from the cell in which they were locked alone with themselves. Why did they come to me? I think chiefly because, in ways that I do not understand, they sensed that I saw in each a subject to be consoled and not to be judged—the torment of destiny rules out judgment. From me they wanted not words, but the instinctive sense that I recognized what was peculiarly “that of God within them,” and because I made them recognize it in themselves. And this was true even when they were godless. They felt, too, that I would not betray their confidence even to the point of never mentioning it again to them.

  I never invited or even welcomed those confessions, which sometimes seriously hampered my work. But I could not ever turn anyone away, for, of course, they were not seeking me; they were seeking something that they felt through me. One of my favorite stories about the Bishop of Digne concerned the arrival of Jean Valjean in that town. Night was falling. He was hungry and needed lodging. Rough and menacing, he was thrown out of all the inns, turned away from all the houses and threatened with the police. He tried to crawl into a kennel. The dog attacked him. He drifted back to the main square and, in the dark, encountered a poor and pious woman. By then he was enraged by human inhumanity. He roughly asked for her money. She gave him what she had. She asked why he did not go to an inn. He told her. She asked why he did not seek lodging in a house. “Have you knocked at all the doors?” she asked. He said: “Yes.” She pointed to the meanest door on the square. It was the Bishop’s. “Have you knocked at that door?” she asked. He said: “No.” “Knock there,” she said.

  That is why, when someone slipped into my office with that look I came to know, and, after carefully closing the door, said: “I want to tell you something,” I sometimes nodded toward my door and said, in part to ease the tension, “Knock there.” I never explained what I meant, which, indeed, was chiefly a reminder to myself.

  Perhaps no part of my work at Time was so important, and perhaps it was less of a secret than I supposed. I suspected so one day after I had become an editor and my managing editor called me in and told me that I would have to take over a writer who was well on his way to a nervous breakdown. “I don’t know whether you can save him,” he said, “but nobody else can.”

  I came to feel that the problem of evil was the central problem of human life, and that it took as many forms as there were men and women. Through it, I thought I understood the meaning of that line of Charles Péguy’s: “No one is so competent a witness to the substance of Christianity as the sinner; no one, except, perhaps, the saint.”

  In nothing did my preoccupation with the problem of evil affect me more acutely than in my thoughts about my former comrades in the underground and what my attitude should be toward them.

  XX

  Two years after I had talked with Adolf Berle, a special agent of the F.B.I. called me up at Time and asked to talk to me. I have forgotten his name. I shall call him Special Agent Smith. Half an hour later, he walked into my office accompanied by another special agent, whose name I have also forgotten, and whom I shall call Jones. They were the first F.B.I. agents I had ever seen.

  Special Agent Jones took a seat to one side of me and just beyond my range of vision where he sat in complete silence throughout the interview. Special Agent Smith sat in front of my desk and began to ask me questions about underground activities in Washington.

  I said that before I could answer his questions, I must first make a telephone call. The agent objected, but I insisted. I asked the Time operator to get me Adolf A. Berle at the State Department. The call went through at once. “Mr. Berle,” I said, “there are two F.B.I. agents in my office. Have I your permission to tell them what I told you in 1939?” There was a moment’s pause at the State Department end of the wire. “Of course,” said Berle, “of course.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Special Agent Smith looked slightly puzzled. He did not tell me, of course, that neither he, nor anybody else in the F.B.I., had ever heard of the Berle notes (The Berle notes first passed into the hands of the Government after this interview). The F.B.I. had not come to me because of my conversation with Berle, but for an entirely different reason. My old friend, Ludwig Lore, had denounced me—a fact that I did not learn from the F.B.I., but from another security agency of the Government.

  I no longer recall most of the details of that first conversation with the F.B.I., except that I told Special Agent Smith that in talking to Berle, I had omitted the names of Harry Dexter White and George Silverman.

  Special Agent Smith seemed almost as excited as Assistant Secretarv of State Berle had once been by what I had to tell him. He asked if I would agree to meet him somewhere else for a long conversation. He suggested a hotel room.

  At once my suspicion was aroused. In those days I did not know w
hat degree of control the Administration exercised over the F.B.I., about which, in fact, I knew almost nothing. But by then I was certain that the Administration was more interested in suppressing my story than in discovering the facts. From what I knew of history and politics, I did not doubt for a moment that it would resort to any feasible means to suppress them. Therefore, I told Special Agent Smith that I would meet him at any time in my office, but nowhere else.

  As he was leaving, Special Agent Jones uttered his first remark. “You interest me greatly,” he said. Special Agent Smith promised to be back in a few days. I never saw those special agents again. In fact, I did not see another agent of the F.B.I. for almost a year, and then only for a few moments. After that, I did not see another F.B.I. agent for almost two years.

  Let that surprise no one. It should be pointed out that, in those days, the F.B.I. was gravely understaffed, and that, during the war, its chief assignment was German, not Soviet, espionage. Yet to me the inference then seemed inescapable that only a resolute lack of interest outside the F.B.I. in circles far above it could have checked for so long an investigation of my story which was slowly becoming an open secret known to Government officials and newsmen. Meanwhile my own feelings about informing underwent a decisive change.

  In those years, too, unknown to me, most of the underground Communists were rapidly rising in the Government. For it should also be borne in mind that for nine years I had no communication of any kind with my former comrades, and, with one or two exceptions, almost never heard their names mentioned. Even about those one or two I knew practically nothing.

  XXI

  A few days after my first visit by the F.B.I., I was made a senior editor of Time. The appointment closed my third term as a Books writer, this time teamed with my friend, James Agee, probably the most gifted writer who ever worked for Time. A new insight had made the job very pleasant to me. I had perceived that Time’s Books section, usually the last section in the magazine, and rather looked down on as something outside the main stream of the news, was, in fact, Time’s editorial page. For no one could comment on books without at the same time commenting on the whole range of views and news. The Communists understood this just as well as I did, and, throughout my Books assignment, I wrote under a barrage from them and their unwitting friends. But it was no longer a massacre; it had become an artillery duel. “Every week,” said one of my amused friends, “that mortar goes off in the last five pages of Time.”

  I wrote with a new ease and authority. But I found Time’s five-day week too short for my writing needs. I began the practice of working through a day, a night and the following day without sleep, that I was to follow (with one enforced interruption) throughout my years at Time.

  Agee and I soon brought the Books section to the number one spot in the readers’ polls, and Books began to be used as a text in English classes in the schools. The section also caught the eye of the editor-in-chief of Time, Life and Fortune, Henry R. Luce, who asked me, in addition, to edit a series of philosophical essays for Fortune. That was my first association with Luce, with whom, over the years, I came to feel a bond of common editorial and journalistic intuition, and, more important, a common religious concern. For the world, which is accustomed to thinking of Luce as a publishing tycoon, does not know that he is also an intensely religious man.

  As a senior editor, I first edited some seven sections in the Back-of-the-Book—Art, Books, Religion, Medicine, etc. One day Luce called me to his office, at the top of the Time and Life Building and asked me if I thought that one man could edit all the Back-of-the-Book. I said yes. He asked me if I would undertake to do it. I said yes. I was not taking anyone’s job. One of Time’s periodical changings of the guard was in full swing. While the former managing editor traveled around the world and his successor to be (still unannounced ) ran Time’s London bureau, Luce himself edited the magazine.

  It was humanly possible for one man to edit the whole Back-of-the-Book, just as it is humanly possible for a man to lift a yearling heifer. It is harder to hold it aloft for five days on end. Henry Luce is a dynamic editor. Editing thirteen sections with Luce editing the whole book was an invaluable experience. But it was also somewhat like working directly behind a buzz saw, chewing metal faster than the eye can follow and throwing off an unremitting shower of sharp and shining filings.

  As my immediate assistant, I had chosen my closest friend at Time, the late Calvin Fixx, a man who had curbed a naturally violent temper to become one of the wisest, gentlest and mellowest souls I will ever know. I have forgotten how long we worked together. Often we ended our week at four o’clock in the morning after having worked for thirty-six hours, almost without stopping and wholly without sleep. We kept up the pace by smoking five or six packs of cigarettes and drinking thirteen or fourteen cups of coffee a day.

  One night, some of our colleagues found Fixx wandering dazedly on the street. His heart had given out. Though slowly, he recovered, and Time generously cared for him, then and afterwards, he was not destined to live many more years. He died while I was testifying during the Hiss Case. In him, and in the late Joseph L. Roesch, a New York attorney27 who died about the same time, I lost two of the friends who had been closest to me in my middle years, and at the moment when I most needed them.

  My turn came a few weeks after Fixx’s. For some time, I had suffered intermittently from pains that began in my chest and shot down my left arm. Friends urged me to go to a doctor. I kept putting it off. But when at last pain forced me to go, the doctor diagnosed angina pectoris and ordered immediate, absolute rest.

  I seemed to have reached another great divide. But if I must undergo a long convalescence, I was determined that it should not be at an expensive hospital. If I were going to die, I meant to die at home. I was much more concerned about my family’s situation than my own. The farm was not paid for. It was bringing in no income. We were like people who have started across a shaky bridge and have been caught midway of it by disaster. Those were gray days. The children were worried and silent. As usual, my wife prepared without the slightest sign of dismay to carry on.

  I had never rested in my life. I did not know how to rest. My mother had immediately come to be with my wife. One day I found her sanding a cabinet. I tried to help her. The slight exertion was a final touch. In half an hour, the problem of how to rest was settled for me. I went to bed. I did not get up again for several months.

  My illness was memorable for one incident. I awoke one night about two o’clock in the morning. My heart seemed to be swelling out of my chest and I could scarcely breathe. I thought that that was probably the crisis. My first instinct was to call my family. Then I thought: “No. There is nothing that they can do for me. Why should their memory of me be one of fear and pain, instead of the peaceful good night that we have already said?” But I was deeply troubled by the thought of what would become of them. Then I realized that I had reached a point in experience where I could do nothing at all about them or about anything else in the world. They and all of life were completely beyond my help and therefore my concern. I said the simplest of prayers and felt complete peace in surrendering myself, my wife and children to God.

  A very different kind of incident also took place during that illness. An F.B.I, agent called one morning. My doctor’s orders were not to move my hands or arms even to shave. My third special agent found me propped up in bed with several months’ growth of beard on my face. He stayed only a few moments. He had come for one purpose. He showed me a picture and asked me if I knew who it was. It was J. Peters.

  A specialist later rejected the diagnosis of angina. I have no memory for symptoms which I always minimize, and I forget pain almost as soon as it has passed. For some time, I accepted the opinion that I had suffered a physical breakdown due to complete exhaustion. Later, it seemed impossible that I could have lived through the Hiss Case if my heart had been ailing. But of late, after a lapse of years, the paralyzing pains have returned again. Only, now,
they have lost their power to make me anxious in any way.

  This was the illness that the Hiss defense worked hard to build into a mental collapse. Unfortunately, the medical records are complete in great detail, and my doctor had attended me almost every day throughout my illness. There was no trace even of nervous breakdown, let alone mental collapse, so that it became impossible for the defense to use the story in court though it was fed out widely as a rumor. Perhaps the final flourish was given it by a nationally syndicated columnist who electrified his millions of readers on the eve of the first Hiss trial by asking: “Was that Whittaker Chambers who was seen leaving a Park Ave. psychiatrist’s office?” At the time, I was in Maryland, a fact that could have been checked instantly by telephoning me.

  XXII

  I returned to Time seven or eight months after I had left it. At first, I edited only two or three departments of the magazine. My office had been furnished with a couch and my orders were to lie down at least two or three times a day. Sometimes I lay down oftener. For, though I told no one, I still suffered slight pains. But no company is geared to convalescence. Slowly, as my strength returned, I went back to editing seven sections. For, henceforth, the Back-of-the-Book was divided between two editors, one of them, at that time, a cousin of Priscilla Hiss’s first husband.28