Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I had once told the managing editor of Time, who was also my friend, that the one section of Time I really felt equipped to edit was Foreign News. When the Foreign News editor elected to go abroad during the war, I was moved into his post to edit for two months. I remained for more than a year—one of the most strenuous years of my life. The tacit ban on Chambers’ editing or writing of Soviet or Communist news had at last been broken. My assignment sent a shiver through most of Time’s staff, where my views were well known and detested with a ferocity that I did not believe possible until I was at grips with it. With my first few Foreign News sections, the shiver turned into a shudder.

  For I held certain facts to be self-evident on the basis of almost every scrap of significant foreign news: 1) the Soviet Union was not a “great ally”—it was a calculating enemy making use of World War II to prepare for World War III; 2) the Soviet Union was not a democracy; it was a monstrous dictatorship; 3) the Communist International had been dissolved in name only; in effect, it still functioned; 4) the Soviet Union was not a thin-skinned, underprivileged waif that must at any cost be wheedled into the family of free nations, but a toughly realistic world power whose primary purpose at that moment of history was conquest of the free world; 5) the indispensable first step in that conquest was the control of Central Europe and China; 6) the Chinese Communists were not “agrarian liberals,” but Chinese Communists, after the Russian Communist Party, the Number One section of the Communist International.

  History has proved that, in the main, these views were right—at least, I think, no soldier in Korea would seriously question them. But, in 1945, when it was most important to assert them because there was then still time to avert some of the catastrophe that would inevitably follow from a failure to grasp their reality, those views were anathema. They challenged an impassioned, powerful and all but universal official and unofficial pro-Soviet opinion. The nation can thank Time, and specifically Henry R. Luce, that week by week in that critical period, it pointed out, against a tide of foaming opinion, the true meaning of events. The files are there for those who have forgotten.

  The effort that made this service possible cost a price. It is not my intention here to go into the details of that weekly struggle, which would make a most informative book in itself. But Foreign News was quickly nicknamed “bloody angle,” and editing it turned into a kind of irrepressible conflict. Violently opposed to my interpretation of the news, on one side, were most of my colleagues on the editorial staff of Time. On the other side were half a dozen friends of varying degrees of like-mindedness, and myself. Fortunately, one or two of my friends were highly placed or I would not have edited Foreign News for a month.

  I had scarcely edited it so long when most of Time’s European correspondents joined in a round-robin protesting my editorial views and demanding my removal. They were seconded by a clap of thunder out of Asia, from the Time bureau in Chungking. Let me list the signers of the round-robin, or those among Time’s foreign correspondents who supported it, and continued to feed out news written from the viewpoint that the Soviet Union is a benevolent democracy of unaggressive intent, or that the Chinese Communists are “agrarian liberals,” for I think that they are enlightening. Foremost among them were: John Hersey, John Scott (son of my old teacher of the law of social revolution, Scott Nearing), Charles C. Wertenbaker, the late Richard Lauterbach, Theodore White. Those are the top names; there were others. Most of them are no longer with Time.

  The fight in Foreign News was not a fight for control of a seven-page section of a newsmagazine. It was a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted into the exact opposite of their true meaning. In retrospect, it can be seen that this critical struggle was, on a small scale, an opening round of the Hiss Case. The same basic issues, the same forces, the same fierce passions motivating the same people came into play.29 Because of it, though most people had never heard my name, I was fairly widely known among liberal newsmen, who were itching to get at me. The Hiss Case gave them their chance. What made the Foreign News episode enlightening to me, and worth reporting in such detail, is the fact that the people who were implacably opposed to my editorial views on the Soviet Union and Communism were not Communists. Here and there, a concealed Communist may have been at work. But the overwhelming might of the opposition came from people who had never been Communists and never would be.

  They were people who believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no price was too high to pay, including the price of wilful historical self-delusion. Yet they had just fiercely supported a war in which one of their ululant outcries had been against appeasement; and they were much too intelligent really to believe that Russia was a democracy or most of the other upside-down things they said in defense of it. Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with. a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others. Let me call their peculiar condition which, sometimes had unconsciously deep, and sometimes very conscious, political motives that it would perhaps be unmannerly to pry into here—the Popular Front mind.

  Nor can it be repeated too often that most of those who suffered from it were not Communists. Yet Communists, at a critical spin of history, had few more effective allies. The Popular Front mind dominated American life, at least from 1938 to 1948, and it is still grossly premature to count it out. Particularly, it dominated all avenues of communication between the intellectuals and the nation. It told the nation what it should believe; it made up the nation’s mind for it. The Popular Fronters had made themselves the “experts.” They controlled the narrows of news and opinion. And though, to a practiced ear, they never ceased to speak as the scribes, the nation heard in their fatal errors the voice of those having au-the thority. For the nation, too, wanted peace above all things, and it simply could not grasp or believe that a conspiracy on the scale of Communism was possible or that it had already made so deep a penetration into their lives.

  Out of my experience on Foreign News, I began to suffer a feeling that would steadily grow stronger as the Soviet danger monthly grew greater and public apathy in contrast seemed to grow deeper. I began to sense that the struggle could never be won by words. It must also be fought by acts.

  I was arguing desperately with my managing editor one day as to how to handle news about the Bretton Woods conference, where the Assistant Secretary of Treasury, Harry Dexter White, presided, and the World Bank was set up of which he subsequently became the head. At last I exclaimed: “But I know that Harry White is a Soviet agent.” “Well, damn it,” said my editor, “if that is true, why can’t somebody prove it?” “Because nobody wants to prove it,” I said hopelessly. But I thought: “You can.”

  XXIII

  Threads of the future Hiss Case wound through the Foreign News experience in other ways. The climax of that experience was probably reached over Yalta. The week of that diplomatic disaster the extraordinary security regulations blacked out all news about the conference. Yet Time had to report something about it. What it would have reported had I then known that Alger Hiss was sitting not far behind Franklin Roosevelt, I cannot say.

  At last, I decided to make the fantastic news blackout itself the take-off for a story. In the absence of firm news, I closed my office door for a day, and wrote a political fantasy in which I put into the mouths of the Muse of History and the ghosts of the late Tsar Nicholas and the Tsarina, foregathered on the roof of the Livadia Palace at Yalta, the hard facts about Soviet foreign aggression that I found it all but impossible to report in any other way. Shortly before I began to testify in the Hiss Case, Time, in an unusual gesture, reprinted The Ghosts on the R
oof, to show how uncannily right it had been about foreign affairs at a time when so many had been wrong.

  To get the piece into print, I had had to make a common journalistic compromise. I agreed to lop off the end which described the Soviet Union and the United States as two jet planes whose political destiny could be fulfilled only when one destroyed the other.

  To most of my colleagues, The Ghosts on the Roof was a culminating shocker. Feeling ran so high against it, the general malevolence swelled into my office so fiercely, that again I closed my door, this time to edit in a semblance of peace. One of the writers who dropped in described the hubbub outside my closed door, as The Ghosts on the Roof went to press, as “like the night of a lynching bee.” It took courage in those days for Time to run a piece like The Ghosts on the Roof.

  XXIV

  A Hiss Case ghost also brushed me at Time not long afterwards. Among Time’s war correspondents was a young man named William Walton, who was once pointed out to me, but whom I do not recall ever having met. I knew only that he was personable and well thought of. Everyone spoke highly of his courage in parachuting into Normandy on or around D-Day.

  After the collapse of Germany, Walton, for some reason, got to Prague. From there, he filed a ten or twelve-page cable describing how, under Soviet occupation, “a middle-class revolution” or a “white-collar revolution” had taken place in Czechoslovakia.

  I read the long cable over several times with astonishment. I had no first-hand facts about the situation in Prague. But I knew something about how Communists could be expected to mask their control there. Above all, I knew that, in a country as intensely middle class as Czechoslovakia, a “middle-class revolution” is a contradiction in terms. Whatever Walton thought that he had seen, it could not be a “middle-class revolution.” I concluded (quite correctly, we now know) that Walton’s “middle-class revolution” meant that the Communists had moved into controlling positions in the Czech Government. If I ran the cable, as I was urged to do, a million Americans would gain a completely mistaken notion of the balance of political forces in the country of which Bismarck had said: “Who controls Bohemia controls Europe.” I refused to run the cable or any part of it.

  The ensuing storm swept from the editorial to the executive floors of Time. Clearly, I was behaving like a despot. Part of an editor’s business, I pointed out, is to be a brute. But it was felt that I was questioning the integrity of a correspondent.

  I was not questioning Walton’s integrity at all, of course. I was questioning the political discernment of a war correspondent. I thought that Walton was an inexperienced young American who had been sold a bill of goods, and that is what I said. There was never any question of firing Walton. I believe it was two or three years later that he subsequently left Time entirely under his own steam.

  Testifying in public session before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, on August 25, 1948, Alger Hiss said that a newspaperman had told him that a man on Time had told him that Whittaker Chambers was mentally unstable. Hiss was reluctant to name his ultimate Time source, but under pressure he did so. The source was William Walton.

  Hiss also testified that he had heard a year or two before from someone that “a man at Time” was calling him a Communist. One wonders who that “someone” was, for he is nowhere identified. To me the conclusion is inescapable that Alger Hiss had long known that the “man at Time” was his old friend Carl; that, in fact, Hiss was able to keep a rather close check on me through friends and contacts at Time, and that he knew a great deal about me at a time when I knew almost nothing about him.30

  XXV

  It is all but impossible to convey briefly the special pressures that can be brought to bear upon a man who finds himself almost alone in a struggle for control of an important political department of the news. Those pressures are of many kinds, personal, social, corporative, editorial, political, disruptive, slanderous, and, above all, unremitting. A single man gets tired, craves respite, and wants especially to get on with his job and not to fight. The big battalion can rest its forces piecemeal; it is always refreshed and its whole job is fighting.

  But perhaps the most potent pressure is the simple question, which is constantly buzzed about, and which a single man must constantly ask himself: “How can one man be right when so many say that he is wrong?” With it goes another morale sapper: “Is end worth the effort?” “It ought not to be so hard,” one of my waggish anti-Communist colleagues once said in the days when Time cost less, “to get out a fifteen-cent magazine.”

  But in the end the most fatal pressure was simply the extra hard work that was a result of the situation. If writers wrote stories in which the interpretation of events or the general tone seemed to me only slightly wrong, I could wave such copy along, and, because of deadlines, often had to even against my better judgment. But if writers wrote stories about important situations in which the interpretation of news and the general tone seemed to me fantastically wrong, I could not then ask them to rewrite the news along lines which they did not believe in, even though in my opinion, those lines were right and theirs wrong. I could only do one of three things. I could ask another writer to write the same story over again. That was an invidious morale shaker that I tried to avoid. I could rewrite the story myself. Or, when I could plainly foresee controversy, I could assign myself the story in the first place and write it in the gasps of editing. Sometimes, I found myself writing or rewriting a fourth to a third of the Foreign News section. Every sound editor knows that is a ruinous way to edit anything—ruinous to the very concept of an editor and ruinous to the man who must shoulder the load. I had no choice. Once more, a working day without sleep became my standard practice.

  One morning, coming to work, I blacked out on the train. I was unwise enough to admit it and ask for a week’s rest. It was granted and I never went back to editing Foreign News (except on special occasions). Time, which had been through one long illness with me, firmly refused to let me work myself into another. At the time, I suspected that that was not the real reason for my removal from Foreign News. Now I am convinced that it was.

  But, in any case, the civil war in “bloody angle” had to have an end. Almost no editor could have withstood indefinitely the pressures that played on me. No publication can endure indefinitely an editor who is a target twenty-four hours a day. But I had set an editorial course in Foreign News from which Time would never veer far again.

  One point I must touch upon since others have publicly raised it. I think that I can say unqualifiedly that no other editor at Time would have stood for a week the insubordination, hostility and insulting behavior to which certain members of my staff treated me. I bore it as something to be borne. I tried to bear it as a Quaker should. I never lodged a complaint against any member of my staff (though some of them went to the managing editor about me). No man or woman ever lost his job because of me. Some would have lost their jobs had it not been for me. For I covered up many things even in cases when I knew that the individuals involved were my enemies.

  All of the regular Foreign News writers subsequently became my good friends. All of them came to share my basic views on Soviet policy and Communism. But no report of my Foreign News experience would be complete without mention of two people. One was John Barkham (then a Foreign News writer, now editor of Coronet) whose unfailing loyalty, patience, evenness of temper, kindness and courage sometimes gave me about all the courage I had to go on. The other was Marjorie Smith, then a Time researcher, who fought the war beside me. Nor must I forget Yi Ying Sung, still a Time researcher. She too knew that the Chinese Communists were not “agrarian liberals.”

  XXVI

  From Foreign News I fell down the whole flight of editorial steps. For the fourth time, I was set to writing Books. I was practically back where I began in 1939. Inevitably, I felt the bitterness of a man who has suffered defeat by doing a job whose merit was reflected in the steady upward climb of his salary (to use the crudest and least per
sonal yardstick). But that only made matters worse, for I was no longer justifying the salary I had reached in Foreign News.

  I did the only thing that a man can do who has fallen down a flight of steps. I lay perfectly quiet until my head had cleared a little and I could look around me more realistically. Occasionally, I uttered a yelp of pain and rage. But for the most part I lay still.

  But we are probably never as friendless, or even as battered, at the foot of the stairs as we think we are. Presently, a new post was devised for me. It was called Special Projects. It was a new department of the magazine whose staff consisted of my friend, James Agee, and me. Its purpose was to provide Time chiefly with cover stories which, because of special difficulties of subject matter or writing, other sections of Time were thought to be less well equipped to handle. Thus, I became the only Time editor who both wrote and edited his own copy (subject to final editing by the managing editor). When I was not working on Special Projects, I edited any other section of the magazine that needed an editor for a week or a month.

  At first, I regarded Special Projects with a deep distaste. Then I perceived that what I had taken for a final defeat was, in fact, my greatest opportunity. It gave me, on a scale impossible in Books, an opportunity to justify the ways of God to man that I had taken as my writing purpose. The brief Christmas cover of 1946, on the end of the war, was the first result of that discernment. It was followed by a cover on Albert Einstein and the atom bomb (a collaboration ). The cover stories on Arnold Toynbee’s philosophy of history, and the Christmas cover story of 1947 on Marian Anderson continued my purpose. Among many letters that reached Time, asking who wrote the Marian Anderson story, was one from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who ventured a guess: “I believe that Whittaker Chambers wrote it.” For the first time in its history, Time decided to break its precedent of never divulging the authorship of a story. In a publisher’s letter it quoted the author of The Yearling and added: “Novelist Rawlings is right.” Most writers are like little children in such matters; I was very much pleased.