Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  V

  I asked if I might read my statement. I read:

  “Almost exactly nine years ago—that is, two days after Hitler and Stalin signed their pact—I went to Washington and reported to the authorities what I knew about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists. For years, international Communism, of which the United States Communist Party is an integral part, had been in a state of undeclared war with this Republic. With the Hitler-Stalin pact that war reached a new stage. I regarded my action in going to the Government as a simple act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat.

  “At that moment in history, I was one of the few men on this side of the battle who could perform this service. I had joined the Communist Party in 1924. No one recruited me. I had become convinced that the society in which we live, Western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism. I did not understand the causes of the crisis or know what to do about it. But I felt that, as an intelligent man, I must do something. In the writings of Karl Marx, I thought that I had found the explanation of the historical and economic causes [of the crisis]. In the writings of Lenin, I thought I had found the answer to the question: what to do?

  “In 1937, I repudiated Marx’s doctrines and Lenin’s tactics. Experience and the record had convinced me that Communism is a form of totalitarianism, that its triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway and spiritual night to the human mind and soul. I resolved to break with the Communist Party at whatever risk to my life or other tragedy to myself or my family. Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: ”I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.’”

  The someone to whom I referred was, of course, my wife, though, in that public place I could not have brought myself to mention her. Now, as I relived, in that tense hearing before those strange faces and intently listening ears, that moment of fateful decision, and retraced the path that had brought me from it to this witness chair, there flooded back on me the days of flight, the nights of fear, my wife’s drawn face, and for an instant, my voice broke.

  I continued:

  “For a year I lived in hiding, sleeping by day and watching through the night with gun or revolver within easy reach. That was what underground Communism could do to one man in the peaceful United States in the year 1938.

  “I had sound reasons for supposing that the Communists might try to kill me. For a number of years, I had myself served in the underground, chiefly in Washington, D.C. The heart of my report to the United States Government consisted of a description of the apparatus to which I was attached. It was an underground organization of the United States Communist Party developed, to the best of my knowledge, by Harold Ware, one of the sons of the Communist leader known as Mother Bloor. I knew it at its top level, a group of seven or so men, from among whom in later years certain members of Miss Bentley’s organization were apparently recruited. The head of the underground group at the time I knew it was Nathan Witt, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. Later, John Abt became the leader. Lee Pressman was also a member of this group, as was Alger Hiss, who, as a member of the State Department, later organized the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco and the United States side of the Yalta Conference.

  “The purpose of this group at that time was not primarily espionage. Its original purpose was the Communist infiltration of the American Government. But espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives. Let no one be surprised at this statement. Disloyalty is a matter of principle with every member of the Communist Party. The Communist Party exists for the specific purpose of overthrowing the Government, at the opportune time, by any and all means; and each of its members, by the fact that he is a member, is dedicated to this purpose.

  “It is ten years since I broke away from the Communist Party. During that decade, I have sought to live an industrious and God-fearing life. At the same time, I have fought Communism constantly by act and written word. I am proud to appear before this Committee. The publicity, inseparable from such testimony, has darkened and no doubt will continue to darken my effort to integrate myself in the community of free men. But that is a small price to pay if my testimony helps to make Americans recognize at last that they are at grips with a secret, sinister and enormously powerful force whose tireless purpose is their enslavement.

  “At the same time, I should like, thus publicly, to call upon all ex-Communists who have not yet disclosed themselves, and all men within the Communist Party whose better instincts have not yet been corrupted and crushed by it, to aid in the struggle while there is still time.”

  With those irrevocable words, a segment of the greatest conspiracy in the nation’s history heaved through the slick of public indifference, at the moment in history and the place where its disclosure was most relevant—in the shadow of the Capitol it threatened.

  VI

  As my statement listed the recognizable public names, newsmen bounded for the telephones like rabbits for their burrows.

  The questioning in detail began, which would cement the public record.

  STRIPLING: Who comprised the cell or apparatus to which you referred?

  CHAMBERS: The apparatus was organized with a leading group of seven men, each of whom was the leader of a cell.

  STRIPLING: Could you name the seven individuals?

  CHAMBERS: The head of the group, as I have said, was at first Nathan Witt. Other members of the group were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer....

  MUNDT: What was Charles Kramer’s correct name?

  CHAMBERS: I think his original name was Krivitsky. And John Abt—I don’t know if I mentioned him before or not—and Henry Collins.

  RANKIN: How about Harold Ware?

  CHAMBERS: Harold Ware was, of course, the organizer.

  I was asked who was the guiding spirit of this apparatus. I answered : “J. Peters.” With that there emerged into public view the short, swart figure of that former Hungarian soldier, former official of the Hungarian Soviet under Bela Kun, close friend of Gerhardt Eisler and head of the entire underground section of the American Communist Party. Until then, most Americans had never even heard the name of that quiet, soft-spoken little man who, nevertheless, had so deeply influenced their lives.

  Stripling broke into the testimony to say for the record that the Committee had in its possession a false passport in the name of Isidore Boorstein on which Peters had once traveled abroad. Obviously, Peters was a most important witness for the Committee, which had issued a subpoena for him in 1947. It had never been served. “We have never,” said Stripling, “been able to locate him, and we have asked for assistance from the Department of Justice and Immigration authorities, but still we have been unable to serve the subpoena upon this individual.” Said Congressman Mundt: “The presumption is that the top direction of these espionage activities carried on throughout our Government departments was conducted by a man who was not an American citizen.” Nobody questioned the word espionage.

  I was trying to restrict my testimony to the years 1934 and 1935. But one question threw a loop beyond the directory of the Ware Group which I had been describing to the Bykov apparatus and a later period of time. It concerned the late Harry Dexter White, who until shortly before that time had been an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. I was asked if White was a Communist. I answered: “I can’t say positively that he was a registered member of the Communist Party, but he certainly was a fellow traveler so far within the fold that his not being a Communist would be a, mistake on both sides.”

  If the Committee had expected my testimony merely to provide some depth of background for Elizabeth Bentley’s, it must by then have realized uneasily that the background was m
ore startling than the foreground. About the most sensational of the names I mentioned there had been rumors for years. Now, for the first time, a man had stood up and said: “I was there, I knew them. The rumors are facts.”

  But in the hearing room, the impact of my testimony was somewhat dribbled off by the Committee’s method of questioning. This is inevitable whenever the members of a large, diverse group of men, like the Committee, each has a question he wishes to ask. The result is to interrupt important lines of inquiry, which are not later followed up. Members go romping down irrelevant bypaths in which they have some personal interest. A crisp focus is lost in the effort to crowd everything into the picture. Though the Committee struggled against this diffusion, it never quite overcame it. As anyone who reads the transcript of his testimony can see, Alger Hiss was a master at sidetracking unwelcome questions by this means.

  But if, on August 3rd, the full effect of what had been said was somewhat blurred, the main fact was clear enough: after ten years the conspiracy had been brought to light. No one can take the credit for that success from the Committee. I, too, had done what I set out to do. I had disclosed a conspiracy and named the conspirators as Communists. I had tried to shield those who were most deeply involved from the darker charge of espionage. Alger Hiss’s name received scarcely more emphasis than Nathan Witt’s or Lee Pressman’s. “Would you say the purpose was, on the part of the Communists,” Robert Stripling asked me, “to establish a beachhead or base from which they could move farther into the Government and obtain positions of power, influence and possible espionage?” “I would say power and influence were the paramount objectives.” “At that time?” “Yes, at that time.”

  Just as I began to feel a little less tense, it was over. With a courtesy and an understanding of my personal position wholly at variance with the popular view of the Committee, Congressman Mundt thanked me. Congressman Rankin added: “Speaking for the minority, I want to say that the gentleman has made a splendid witness, and I only regret that every patriotic American could not be here to hear his testimony.” A few days later, under the spell of Alger Hiss, he would change his mind.

  I walked over to Frank McNaughton. “You behaved with dignity and nobility,” he said, and, though I knew that it was not true, I welcomed the charitable words as an exhausted man welcomes a sip of raw spirits. Then Frank did something of great human tact. He said that it was his custom to spend one afternoon a month in the National Gallery and asked if I would go there with him that day. I realized that he was summoning me to a sanctuary he had found for his own trials. In that quiet and cool haven, among the paintings where other souls had permanently fixed their vision of the human condition, we passed the afternoon of my first day’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  VII

  There were a number of unintentional errors in my testimony at that first public hearing. A few were due to the strain of testifying publicly. More were due to the fact that I was reviewing the past in detail for the first time in years. Thus, I then supposed that I had joined the Communist Party in 1924. It was not until the second Hiss trial that the Hiss defense corrected me. I had joined in 1925, as they knew from one of two letters from me which my old faculty adviser at Columbia College, Mark Van Doren, had. without informing me, turned over to A. J. Liebling, then of the New Yorker, who, in turn, had obligingly handed them over to Hiss’s lawyers.

  I also supposed that I had first gone to Washington in 1935 and broken with the Communist Party in 1937. I soon realized that the latter date was wrong, and corrected it before the Committee. It was much later when, in untangling the sequence of past events, I realized that I had first gone to Washington in 1934.

  In this way, Elizabeth Bentley had a great advantage in testifying. Her recollections were more current, and she had had the inestimable advantage of clarifying step by step in advance in her statement to the F.B.I. and her testimony before the Grand Jury. Quite apart from my effort to shield my former friends, I began to testify “cold.” Even today, after exhaustive recollection, I sometimes remember fresh details that had slipped my mind.

  Actually, none of the errors that I made in my first day’s testimony, and subsequently, was serious. They did not greatly perturb me, for I assumed that most people are sensible enough to know that, few men could testify without some error to details of ten, or even fourteen years, ago. I knew what the main outlines of the conspiracy had been, but I testified to details with much less reflection than was necessary. For I was completely unfamiliar with legal practice, and only gradually did I become aware of the necessity for absolutely exact statement in testifying.

  I was slow, too, in becoming aware of something else. I had just disclosed a shocking conspiracy which had the further effect of corroborating some of Elizabeth Bentley’s disclosures. Yet, when I rose from the witness chair, only one newsman of the many who stared at me (I thought) with a curious unfriendliness, asked me an amplifying question. He asked me how to spell a German word I had used. At the time, my reaction was merely professional. I thought: “If I had been covering this story, I would certainly have talked with the witness.” It took me some time to realize that a part of the press itself, the fact gatherers, was to play a role of active hostility to me.

  I had had a slight forewarning. While I was testifying, I had been conscious of only one person near me. He was a rather owlish newsman who, now and again, turned to stare at me so fixedly that I found myself turning involuntarily toward him. As Frank McNaughton and I left the Senate Press Room, I saw this owlish man whispering with another in a corner. I asked McNaughton who he was. “That’s the Tass man,” he said (Tass is the Soviet Government’s official news service.) “The other is from the Federated Press“—(the Communist-controlled news service of my Daily Worker days). The two men stopped whispering as we passed. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw them staring at us.

  Congressman Nixon also had a curious encounter at about the same time. As he was leaving the hearing room, a young woman stepped up to him. He supposed that she was a newswoman. “Don’t you know,” she asked, “that Whittaker Chambers is an incurable drunkard?” Before he could question her, she had disappeared in the crowd.

  The smear had begun.

  VIII

  I did not go home at once. I spent the night of my first day’s testimony at the farm of friends at Olney, near Washington. I was most deeply concerned about the effect which the news of my testimony would have on my wife and children. Though I was outwardly calm, my nerves were spun tight. I wanted to give myself a cooling-off period before I met my family. I thought that my neighbors, too, needed some time to think things over before I appeared again among them.

  A great weakness also contributed to my postponement of the train trip from Washington to Baltimore—my almost physical antipathy to being stared at publicly. I have learned to control it, but I have never mastered it. To avoid some of that, I telephoned my wife and asked her to drive to Baltimore to meet me.

  When we met, the children flung their arms around me and my wife smiled courage. In the main, the news from home was reassuring. The first radio broadcasts about my testimony had electrified the countryside, but friends, including Quakers from our Meeting, had come at once to be with my wife. Farmers are pretty level-headed people, and although there was no doubt a great hubbub among them, those who lived closest to us had watched us working among them for years; they stood by us. They never changed. I have an impression that the first news was more incredible than anything else. Perhaps, the initial surprise was summed up by our family doctor, who, on hearing that I had testified that I had once been a Communist, snorted: “I don’t believe it. ”

  The principal of my son’s school immediately wrote me, saying that he understood why I was testifying, thanking me for doing so and offering to help in any possible way. Both my son’s and my daughter’s school quietly took all possible measures to protect the children from any schoolyard harassment, of which th
ere were only two examples, so minor as to be meaningless.

  But the day I came home, I could not foresee that. I thought that it might be necessary to sell the cattle and send the children away from the farm to another part of the country, where they would be separated for a while from their too public father. We discussed the problem as we drove from Baltimore to Westminister.

  “What about Mr. Pennington?” I asked my wife. “He went away,” she said, “when the first news broke, and he hasn’t come back.” Almost nothing could have struck me harder, for he was a man on whom, like Duncan, I built an absolute trust. His disappearance more than anything else darkened our trip home.

  When we arrived, Stanley Pennington met me at the barn. He had done his thinking and come back. He wrung my hand and said something about men’s courage. I had to walk away.

  The next day he would draw my wife aside and say that we must not think of paying him during our troubles. Several times, afterwards, when he knew that the going was hard, he would offer to work for us as long as he could possibly do so without wages.

  There was one other man and his family whose friendship meant a great deal to me. He was Paul Morelock, and his family was his wife, Ruth, and her sisters, Miss Agnes and Miss Margaret Reese. Paul Morelock is a breeder of Percheron horses and purebred Angus cattle; a grower of hybrid seed corn and acres of gladioli and pyrethrum. He and his family, now in their vigorous sixties, work their hereditary farm near ours.

  I had not been home long before the Morelocks and Reeses drove up. As usual, the women were loaded down with flowers. While they chatted with my wife, Paul drew me aside. He wanted to get something straight at once. “I don’t know anything about Communism,” he said. “I’d rather be dead than be a Communist. But what I say is this: when a man is down, that’s when he needs friends to stand by him. Yes, sir, when a man is down, that’s when he needs friends to stand by him. So me and the women came over.”