For its twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Time asked me to write an essay on the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary. I was asked by the same editor who had once said that he would not dare let me write Time’s Religion section.
In many ways, the Niebuhr essay was a statement of my own religious faith at the time. And since, six months later almost to a day, I was to begin to testify publicly against the Communist conspiracy, I believe that it is relevant to quote what I then felt. I began by saying:
“With prayer, with humility of spirit tempering his temerity of mind, man has always sought to define the nature of the most important fact of his experience: God. To this unending effort to know God, man is driven by the noblest of his intuitions—the sense of his mortal incompleteness—and by hard experience. For man’s occasional lapses from God-seeking end inevitably in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action. Modem man knows almost nothing about the nature of God, almost never thinks about it, and is complacently unaware that there may be any reason to....”
I tried to trace why this was so—what is in effect, and allowing for its gross simplifications, my indictment of the modem mind: “Under the bland influence of the idea of progress, man, supposing himself more and more to be the measure of all things, has achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption has been subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good, and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th-century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily by-passed.
“And yet, as 20th-century civilization reaches a climax, its own paradoxes grow catastrophic. The incomparable technological achievement is more and more dedicated to the task of destruction. Man’s marvelous conquest of space has made total war a household experience, and, over vast reaches of the world, the commonest of childhood memories. The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th-century faces. The more production multiplies, the more scarcities become endemic. The faster science gains on disease (which, ultimately, seems always to elude it), the more the human race dies at the hands of living men. Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the world.
“Yet liberal Protestants could do little more than chant with Lord Tennyson:O, yet we hope that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood....
“It was a good deal easier to see that Tennyson was silly than to see that the attitude itself was silly. That was the blind impasse of optimistic liberalism.”
Against that view, I set the findings of three men—the Danish theologian, Sören Kierkegaard, the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth and the Russian novelist, Feodor Dostoyevsky, whom I am not alone in holding to be one of the great religious voices of our time. I wrote: “Against liberalism’s social optimism (progress by reform) and the social optimism of the revolutionary left (progress by force), Dostoyevsky asserted the eternal necessity of the soul to be itself. But he discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom to the point where he was also free from God, it led him into tragedy, evil, and often the exact opposite of what he intended.” (I was thinking of myself.) Karl Barth had said: “Man cannot define God by talking about man, in however loud a voice. God is ganz anders—wholly different.” (Religion is not ethics or social reform.) Kierkegaard had asserted that, between man’s purposes in history and God’s purposes in eternity, was “an infinite qualitative difference.” That thought, in slightly different words, I was to repeat, a few months later, before the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York, and I felt, despite the habit of intellectuals of ridiculing the minds of plain men, that the Jury knew exactly what I was talking about.
Then, in the Niebuhr piece, I sought to make what was at that time my most personal statement about religious faith: “Christian faith is a paradox which is the sum of paradoxes. Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit—the paradoxic sadness of ‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief and the paradoxic triumph of Tertullian’s ‘Credo quia impossibile’ (I believe because it is impossible). Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son. ‘Why do you weep,’ asked a friend, 'since it cannot help?’ Said Solon: That is why I weep—because it cannot help.’”
If anyone seeks to know what the mind, the mood and character of Whittaker Chambers was like on the fore-eve of the Hiss Case, let him read the essay on Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr himself wrote me about it, quoting his brother: “Only a man who has deeply suffered could have written it.”
XXVII
In 1947, Life, looking for someone to write the text for its series on The History of Western Civilization, approached me. For it, I wrote the essays on the Middle Ages, the Venetian Republic, the Age. of Exploration, the Enlightenment and the Edwardians. The published ending of that glorification of the gluttonous pursuit of pleasure, secular good works and progress was not the one that I originally wrote for it. I had sought for something that would say in the fewest and most searing words that there was another side to the age of the Edwardians—the age whose downfall we are living through.
For that purpose I went back to the book most of which I had translated just after my break with the Communist Party—Dunant, The Story of the Red Cross. At the height of his fame and wealth, Dunant had gone bankrupt. He had lost everything. He was attacked and vilified. He disappeared almost from the face of the earth. But, now and again, someone would glimpse him, wandering a voluntary outcast in one of the great European cities, living in the slums, wearing ragged clothes and broken shoes, shunning alike men’s kindness and their blindness. At last, even the memory of him all but vanished. Dunant was reported to be dead.
Years later, an enterprising journalist found him still living, a white-bearded recluse, in a hospice in the Swiss mountains. A pang of conscience smote the world ( in those days it was still possible to speak of a public conscience). A Dunant fad set in. Admirers sought him out. He fled them. The penniless old man was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. He gave it away.
One morning, in his whitewashed cell, Dunant was found dead. He had left a testament. It said: “I wish to be carried to my grave like a dog without a single one of your ceremonies which I do not recognize.... I am a disciple of Christ as in the first century, and nothing more.”
That was the ferocious little parable with which I ended the Edwardians. Life’s managing editor frowned. “It’s like being slapped across the face with a wet towel,” he said. That was what I had meant it to be. But since we were both professional journalists, we agreed that it must be killed.
My last effort for Life, written at the express request of Henry R. Luce, after several other writers had failed, was The Devil, a religious essay the response to which astonished Life’s editors, who, like so many others, did not know that the American people is, above all, a religious people.
By New Year’s, 1948, simply by trying to do what I believed needed to be done, I found myself again at the top of the stairs. I had become the joint property of Time and Life, and my salary was suddenly and startlingly upped to something close to that much-publicized figure of $30,000 a year. I am so constituted—so peculiarly constituted, the world would say—that I did not know (or care) exactly what I was earning until it became a matter of public concern.
XXVIII
Between man’s purposes in time, and God’s purpose in et
ernity, there is an infinite difference of quality. What should a man like me do about the Communist conspiracy and my former comrades in the underground? I was acutely aware of them as Communists. But, through the years, I was more and more aware of them as individual souls. I was more and more preoccupied with the wonder of the grace of strength which had enabled me to free myself from Communism, and of the grace of time, which had enabled me to restore myself to life. Why should those others be denied a similar grace by any act of mine? Who appointed me their judge or executioner? What right had I to complicate destinies that were inherently divine with a wholly human fatality? I had acted once and nothing had come of it. What sanction had I to act again?
There developed in my mind that conflict between my urgent sense that Communism must be fought and a concern to shield, from the worst consequences of their acts, the conspirators who to me were not simply enemies, or Communists or anything that can be neatly labeled, but living men and women whose souls, though they specifically denied them, pled with my compassion. It was a conflict that I would resolve only in the climax of the Hiss Case, and then only when their defiant evil had deprived me of any right to shield them further, and the failure of my final utmost effort to remove myself physically as a witness against them left me no choice but to go on to the end.
The problem was constantly with me. Early in the war, the agents of the Civil Service Commission flitted in and out of my office, seeking information about people who were entering Government service.
I was early in touch with an officer of the Naval Intelligence. I saw him rather frequently. He told me, years later, that the information I had given him was classified top secret by the Office of Naval Intelligence. In time we became personal friends. In 1950, I was having supper with him one night at the University Club, in New York, when he was called to the telephone. He told me that he had just been asked to become the minority counsel for the Tydings Committee, and asked what I thought he should do.
I urged him to accept. The country is more familiar with him now as Robert Morris, chief counsel to the sub-committee on internal security of the Senate Judiciary Committee (the McCarran Committee).
I had also had two visits from an officer of the State Department, one of the best-informed men on Communist matters whom I have ever known. On his second visit, I asked him if he thought that Alger Hiss was still a Communist. Tito (still at one with Stalin ) had just shot down an American military plane and captured or killed its crew. “I can answer like this,” my visitor said. “We’re having Alger Hiss draft the note of protest: one, to put him on the spot; two, so he will tell the Russians secretly that we mean business.” It was this man, too, who first told me that Alger Hiss had been at Yalta. “Imagine,” he said, “what kind of a deal we got with Hiss sitting five feet from Stalin.”
And yet, I was not convinced that Hiss was still a Communist. An irrational factor came into play which Hede Massing has put her finger on in This Deception. She remarks that she believed for a time that Noel Field had broken with the Communist Party. She believed it, not because of the evidence, but because we expect those who are our friends to do what we ourselves have thought it right to do. At that time, I had heard nothing at all for five or six years about my former friends in the underground. I found it almost unthinkable that Hiss and Collins, who had been my friends, could have remained Communists all that time. On the other hand, it would not have surprised me greatly to learn that Wadleigh, with whom I was not particularly friendly, was still in the Communist movement. Yet it was just he who had broken.
From 1946 through 1948, special agents of the F.B.I., too, were frequent visitors. Usually, they were seeking information about specific individuals. For some time they were much interested in Victor Perlo, Harry Dexter White, Dr. Harold Glasser, Charles Krivitsky, John Abt and others. At that time, I had no way of knowing that they were checking a story much more timely than mine—that of Elizabeth Bentley.
Most of these investigators went about their work in a kind of dogged frustration, overwhelmed by the vastness of the conspiracy, which they could see all around them, and depressed by the apathy of the country and the almost total absence in high places of any desire to root out Communism. I had heard constant rumors about the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York which was reported to be looking into Soviet espionage. I would have been astonished had I known that, in February, 1948, Alger Hiss had appeared before it—six months before I began to testify—and had denied that he had ever been a Communist. This fact I first learned from William Marshall Bullitt, one of the trustees of the Carnegie Endowment, after Hiss was convicted. I would have been equally surprised to learn that the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry D. White, had also been questioned by the Grand Jury.
One day I asked someone who should have known about the Grand Jury rumors. He said that the Grand Jury was in session. “But take it from me,” he added bitterly, “nothing will ever come of the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York.” Seldom has a man been so mistaken in an answer, especially in view of the man to whom he was making it. Some eight months later, the same Grand Jury indicted Alger Hiss.
To fight Communism while sparing my former friends, I had made a simple compromise. I informed about their Communist membership and their activities short of espionage. Those parts of the story that bore on the espionage angle, I suppressed. That still left the central core of Communists in the Government in full view. But there were individuals connected with espionage whom, because of the immediate danger they constituted, I felt obliged to name. One such was the head of the steel experimental laboratory whom I have mentioned earlier. Knowledge of the structure and membership of the Ware Group had been in the hands of the Government years before I began to testify publicly. The espionage implications were inescapable even to an inexperienced mind. The F.B.I. was chafing to develop them. The apathy, I concluded, lay elsewhere.
XXIX
During the decade from 1938 to 1948, the temper of my mind changed as completely as the cell structure of the body is said to change every few decades. It was deeply and continually preoccupied with the problem of writing—another of those problems that no one ever solves. To write or edit under pressure of deadlines almost every week for nine years is an exclusive experience that leaves little energy for anything that does not bear directly on it. At the same time, I was reintegrating myself in a new way of life with special ways of thought and conduct. I was constantly meeting new people and pushing out my intellectual horizon. And I was deeply engaged in developing a new way of life on the land, which I shall soon discuss.
Ten years is a short time in any man’s middle age into which to crowd a new life. Perhaps it is not strange that in my haste I did not have to force the details of the past out of my mind. The pressure of my own transformation crowded them out. The main outlines of the past persisted as the plan of a structure can be traced in its ruins. But dates, time intervals, faces, places, names, happenings tended to run together or disappear. Two years of hard work, of excruciating effort of recollection, and corroboration wherever possible, were later necessary to reconstruct my picture of the past. Even so, some things have undoubtedly faded forever. Nor is it possible to say whether they may be important or not. For there seems to be no order of importance in what the mind retains and what it forgets. I may remember distinctly after years something completely trivial—a gesture, a wry remark, a shadow on a wall—and be incapable of recalling an important address, like the photographic workshop in Washington.
At what point in my years at Time did there fade from my mind the recollection of what I had given my wife’s nephew to hide for me? I do not know. Probably very early, for I met him very occasionally in the ten years between the day, in 1938, when he took the envelope from me and the day, in November, 1948, when I took it back. This much is certain: if during the last six or seven years of that decade, anyone had asked me, “What is your wife’s nephew hiding for you?” I should have a
nswered, “Two or three scraps of Alger Hiss’s handwriting and perhaps something of Harry White’s.” The heap of copied State Department documents, the spools of microfilm, had sunk from my memory as completely as the Russian regiments in World War I sank into the Masurian swamps.
It is extremely important to bear this failure of memory in mind. For no one who does not realize that it happened, or who cannot believe it possible, can rightly understand what happened in the Hiss Case. I believe that the notion is widespread that I began to testify against Alger Hiss knowing that I had the documents and films secreted as a weapon. That is completely untrue. I began to testify against Hiss, as it were, bare-handed. I had charged him over the air with having once been a Communist more than a month before his own attorneys demanded any specimens of Hiss’s handwriting that I might have, and thus compelled me to look and to find the terrible evidence of the documents where I had had it secreted but forgotten it.
Nor can anyone who does not realize that understand the degree to which I find providential most of the happenings of the Hiss Case. And it is particularly the fact that I had forgotten the documents in which I feel this most clearly. For if I had remembered them, it is entirely within my character to have destroyed them, not as evidence, but so that I might never be tempted to use them, even if provoked, as I destroyed certain other things, and even today almost invariably destroy letters or communications which wound or arouse me, to deprive my mind of any reminder of human meanness.
Witness Page 63
