Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I no longer remember how this good man came to us, and I do not want to know; he is one of ourselves. He lives on a small farm two or three miles up the valley. But almost from the first month we were on this farm, most of his waking hours have been spent here. Throughout that time, in part the period of war wages, Mr. Pennington could have made over and over again somewhere else what I am able to pay him. No money can buy, just as no money can pay, the Penningtons of this world. Ours is a human relationship.

  My son and his son have played together almost since they could walk. They have worked together since they could drive a tractor and both could drive tractors like men by the time they were nine. Before their legs were long enough to reach the controls, they used to collaborate on driving a truck. One would handle the wheel, while the other on the floor would work the clutch and brake. When fair time rolls around, they are alone together, for days at a time, thirty, forty, fifty miles from home, fitting and showing cattle and sheep. Young Donald Pennington always addresses me respectfully as “Mr. Chambers.” But it amuses ( and greatly pleases) me that when I am out of earshot, both boys always call me “Papa.” During the Hiss Case, when it seemed as if my enemies must destroy me by mass of power and weight of numbers, I overheard Donald comforting my son. “They’ll never get Papa,” he said. “He’s too smart for them.” Somehow the faith of this child was like the faith of the race itself to me.

  My daughter, who is almost eighteen, has a hazy recollection of an earlier life. My son, John, who is fifteen, can remember nothing but this farm. It is their realm. When they step off the school bus at the end of our long lane, they are home in the oldest, primal meaning of that word. They are among the things they intimately love and know, and which fill the whole horizon and fiber of their lives. They have literally grown up with their calves, and there are cows in the milking herd that they can remember as fresh-dropped masses of wet leg and bulging eye—and do remember tenderly, feeling in this living form the touch of time. Their acres have no secrets from them; nothing escapes them.

  Even I do not know how they check and report on all that is sprouting and hiding—from mushrooms on the round-top to the pheasant hen brooding squat and invisible against the fallow field known as lower Legonier.

  There was a night in one crowded harvest when John raked hay long after dark, and in the beam of the tractor headlights, a fox appeared, then its mate, and as he drove, they ran circles around the machine. Small wonder that his face was transfigured when he told me. The next day, disking, he saw a doe lead its fawn along the edge of an alfalfa field. So a boy is born into the creation.

  The children take part in all the operations of the farm, and have since they could work. I have told them that no man owns land. Land belongs to the man who has worked it until he knows it so well that he can cross it in the blackest night and his feet will instinctively find anywhere on it where the little hollow lies and the rise begins.

  In summer, they are often away. For the focus of their interest is 4-H club work and showing their cattle and sheep at the state and county fairs. They suffered some very dashing defeats before they began to make headway on the show circuit. Now they have their share, and perhaps more than their share, of purple (championship ) and blue (first place) ribbons. There is scarcely anyone in the cattle or sheep business for miles around who does not know Ellen and Johnnie Chambers. Last year Ellen made the Maryland State cattle judging team.

  I sat at the ringside at the Maryland State Fair at Timonium one day during the Hiss Case. A big class of Guernsey junior yearling heifer calves was being shown. It was an open class, and most of those showing were men about my own age. But among them trudged a stubby little boy about twelve years old, his white duck show suit a good deal rumpled by then. He was John Chambers, showing his prize heifer with an awful seriousness. (“Him and that heifer,” the head of the Maryland 4-H said to me one day. ) The ring of calves and men circled slowly round and round. At last the judge motioned the boy out of the moving circle, which one by one, as the judge placed the calves, fell in below him, until the little boy headed the line of towering men. I remembered what my own life had been like at his age. I felt what men feel when they know that some prayers are granted.

  To give such life to children no sacrifice is too great. But we did not mean only to root our children in the soil. Above all, we meant to root them in the nation—that part of the nation each of whose days is a great creative labor. That is the part of the nation to which by choice I belong. The farm is the soil, in which, like my children, I spread my roots.

  XXXII

  In an age of crisis, the farm has been our way of trying to give our children what peace and security is left in the world. We have censored the world’s influences as much as we thought good. We have never supposed that we could shut them out. We have never supposed that our children could escape their age or its history. We have hoped that from the life we have given them, they would draw the inner strength to face the years ahead.

  Today I walked across the ridge from our home place to this house where I write. I climbed the first rise and the second, from which, in clear weather, we can see, far off, the dark blue wall of the Allegheny Front. As I passed the crest of the ridge, below me on the field in the hollow, my fifteen-year-old son was windrowing hay. He sat, small and brown, on the big green tractor while the side-delivery rake click-clicked behind. When I came down the slope in the sunlight, he waved to me—a wave that meant smiling pride in what he was doing and pleasure at seeing his father unexpectedly.

  I thought: “Surely, this is a moment in a man’s life, when he can stand in his fields and see such a son, to whom he has given life, and a tranquil, orderly way of living, wave his gratitude for that life and for that way of living it.”

  With that thought, there came between us, like a cloud shadow, the memory of the thousands of other children who have been crippled, body and soul, by the wars and revolutions of this distracted century, and still will be.

  I thought: “In three years time, he and his generation will take their places in the most terrible of children’s crusades. By every minute that he rakes this sunlit field, by every turn of the tractor wheels, he is a little less my son, and a little more a soldier of the inevitable war. That wave of his is, in fact, the saddest of farewells.”

  XXXIII

  Shortly before Christmas, 1947, Time asked me to write a cover story about Rebecca West and her new book, The Meaning of Treason.

  I began the piece by saying: “When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

  “Other ages have had their individual traitors—men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modem form was specifically the treason of ideas.”

  I also wrote: “The horror of treason is its sin against the spirit. And for him who violates this truth there rises inevitably Bukharin’s ‘absolutely black vacuity,’ which is in reality a circle of absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution. For this loneliness is a penalty inflicted by a justice that transcends the merely summary justice of men. It is the retributive meaning of treason because it is also one of the meanings of Hell.”

  A million people more or less read the words. No one, presumably, heard in them a tocsin of calamity. No one, presumably, asked himself: “What manner of man could think such thoughts?” No one sensed that, in those words, he was heari
ng the presentiment of an event that would shock the nation, that he was listening to a man, sitting at his desk in a bare office, twenty-nine floors above the Rockefeller Plaza, talking to himself on paper. Nor did anyone know that that curious conversation was part of a decade-long conversation and that, not long afterwards, the man who held it with himself would rise from his desk because, under the impact of history, he had reached a sad conclusion.

  That conclusion was that the time for the witness of words was over and the time for the witness of acts had begun—that the force of words alone was not enough against the treason of ideas. Acts were also required of a man if there was something in him that enabled him to act. It was hard because it is always peculiarly hard for a man who has once saved himself from a burning building to force himself to go back for any reason into the flames. But nothing less was required, if a man did not mean smugly to rot in peace and plenty, if, instead, against the dimension of treason in our time, he meant to raise at least a hand to help save what was left of human freedom, and, specifically, that nation on which the fate of all else hinged.

  11

  THE HISS CASE

  I

  On Sunday, August 1, 1948, I was sitting in my office on the 29th floor of the Time and Life Building when the telephone rang. Washington was calling and I was told that David Sentner of Hearst’s Washington Bureau wanted to speak with me. I had not heard that name in some thirty-seven years. But I remembered Sentner. When I had been a student at Columbia University, trying to write poetry, I had once been introduced to him.

  To me the introduction had been awesome. Sentner was then a student in the School of Journalism. He was a veteran of the First World War. He not only wrote poetry; he got it published in the campus magazines. He was a symbol of worldly experience and literary success. He, of course, knew nothing of my thoughts—we so seldom know what is passing behind the eyes that rest on us.

  This flash-back, which took only an instant, was the first wrench, though I did not then know it, in an excruciating process of recollection that was to last the better part of two years and to amount almost to a total recall of mv whole life.

  Sentner did not remember me. “Are you the Time editor,” he asked, “who has just been subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities?” I said that I did not know. From the sudden silence, I realized that Sentner thought that I did know. It was the first flick of that universal disbelief that was to envelop me for more than two years.

  Later, the New York ]ournal-American called and asked the same question. I still did not know the answer.

  Karl Marx wrote that the great scenes of history are always enacted twice—the first time as tragedy, the second time as comedy. The Hiss Case reversed the Marxian order. The tragedy to come was prefigured by no sound of Fate knocking at the door, which, when opened, would reveal that the enemy was within the citadel, and had been for at least a decade. The Great Case began with a flourish of that showmanship which had dogged the Committee all its days, and which had been played up and exaggerated by countless enemies in the press and public life. Yet showmanship was almost the only weapon the Committee possessed. Without that flair for showmanship, which was the peculiar talent of the Committee’s Chief Investigator, Robert Stripling, the extremely important work which the Committee had done in exposing the Communist conspiracy would have been smothered in silence and reduced to nullity.

  The comedy with Sentner and the press occurred because the Committee, without notifying me that a subpoena was coming, had already released the news to the press in Washington. “Is Chambers a Communist?” one newsman had asked Stripling. Stripling hemmed and said that he did not know. Possibly he did not. It is incredible, but it seems to be quite true that, at that time, few members of the Committee had more than a vague inkling of what I might testify, or even if they could get me to testify at all.

  But Stripling’s answer exasperated my friend, Frank McNaughton, who then covered the Capitol for Time. “I’ve known Whit Chambers for ten years,” he snapped, “and you know damned well that he’s no more a Communist than you are.” His was the first voice raised in my behalf.

  I do not mean to give the impression that I did not know that I might some time be subpoenaed. Several months before, a young newsman, also an ex-Communist, had dropped in at my office and told me a curious story. A young woman who had formerly worked in a Soviet underground apparatus in Washington had broken with the Communist Party. Knowing that Communists have their people posted pretty nearly everywhere, especially in cities like New York and Washington, she had first gone to the F.B.I. in Connecticut. There, she thought, the danger of eavesdropping would be less. She had told her story in great detail. “The F.B.I. asked her,” said the newsman, “if she had ever known you. She had never heard your name. But she had heard mention once or twice of ‘the man who went sour.’” I did not then learn the defected Communist’s name.

  On pleasant mornings, after the barn work is done, my wife and I sometimes stroll together down our long lane to get the daily mail. This little walk is one of our brief breathers, when we relax and look around us, note the growth of things that we have planted and the dozens of jobs to be done. It is our quiet time in the sun.

  One July morning, I drew the local paper out of the mail box and saw that Elizabeth Bentley was to testify in Washington. I guessed that she was the former underground worker. I showed the story to my wife. I said: “I think that I may be called to testify too.” “What will you do?” she asked. I said: “I shall testify.”

  We walked along in silence. On one side, the pasture sloped down steeply past the little brook and up to the state road—a green sweep. We had planted it. On the other side, was the third field that I had ever ploughed. When I first turned it under, the wild lettuce was so high that it reached up to the tractor seat; the rocks were so embedded that they kept breaking the plough point. Now it was a rolling field of alfalfa.

  “What about the children?” my wife asked. I said: “We must be grateful that we have brought them along so far in happiness and peace.” We did not mention the subject again. My wife said nothing at all about the fact that there was a $7,500 mortgage on the farm and that, as a result of my testifying, there was a distinct possibility that we might lose our farm and all of our lives that we had put into it. (This mortgage is still on the farm.)

  I thought about those things a moment that August evening after the telephone call from Washington, sitting quietly in the gathering dark. Then I snapped on the light and wrote my managing editor and understanding friend a brief memo. I told him that I expected to be subpoenaed. I told him that any act a man performs, even the simplest and best, may set up reverberations of evil whose consequences it is beyond our power to trace; that my action might cause great suffering. But one man must always be willing to take upon himself the onus of evil that other men may be spared greater evil. For the sake of his children and my own, that all children might be spared the evil of Communism, I was going to testify.

  The next morning I had coffee with Henry R. Luce, the editor-in-chief of Time, Life and Fortune. He had not heard of the expected subpoena. I said: “It seems to me that you will not want me around here any longer.” “Nonsense,” he said. “Testifying is a simple patriotic duty.”

  A reporter and a photographer arrived. I refused any comment or pictures until I should be subpoenaed. About noon the server arrived. I accepted the subpoena. A colleague suggested that I write a brief statement to give the Committee some background about me. I wrote one quickly. My colleague read it and approved. Then I took the train for Washington.

  I was to spend the night with Frank McNaughton, who then lived far out in a northwest suburb of Washington. As we drove along, my cab driver began to talk about his chief interest in life. It was bees. He told me that he spent most of the time, when he was not hacking, among his beehives. He told me, slowing down to prolong his pleasure, about his troubles with swarms, winter killing, weak hives, robber
bees. His tone of voice and language were somewhat less than Harvard. But I was impressed by his loving knowledge of the complex life and care of his insects. I thought of him driving all kinds of irrelevant people ( including witnesses before Congressional Committees) through night-time Washington, while his mind lingered in his bee-yard. When I got out, he showed me frames and bottles of honey that he kept in the back, of his cab—to give away, he said, but also, I suspect, to keep beside him a token of the things he really cared for. By this odd chance, I felt comforted as I took my first step into the inferno. I thought: the things I love too are still near me if only I can keep a grip on them.

  Of my midnight talk with Frank McNaughton, I remember only a scrap. “There is one man on the Committee who asks shrewd questions,” he said, “Richard Nixon of California.”

  II

  It was late. I did not have many hours to sleep, and I did not sleep much. I felt something that was not only fear, though I felt fear, too. What I felt was what we see in the eye of a bird or an animal that we are about to kill, which knows that it is about to be killed, and whose torment is not the certainty of death or pain, but the horror of the interval before death comes in which it knows that it has lost light and freedom forever. It is not yet dead. But it is no longer alive.

  This sense of having become the still live prey of forces that were impersonal to me in every way but that of destruction, began with the beginning of the Hiss Case, and never lifted from me until its end, and perhaps not wholly then. One of the torments of the Case for me would be the days when I was reprieved to return to my family and for a few hours became once more a man, a beloved husband and father, before I must return to that public dock where I was simply living prey existing to be rent.