Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  VII

  An interval, like a long silence, followed my radio charge against Alger Hiss. For weeks he took no public action. I went about my work, sometimes at Time, more often at the farm, with a curious sense of continuing something that has ended, as a man might feel who has been revived after his heart had stopped beating.

  It was the fall of the year. For the first time in my life, I felt the simple force of the words, the fall—the literal fall to the earth of all the leaves, which stripped away the illusion that summer had made of the world, leaving only its bare forms and opening space.

  My wife and I found ourselves walking out together to various vantage points on the farm, to feel the sun and to look into the new distances. In general, we are people who have cared little for beauty as spectacle. It takes a good deal of persuading to make us go to look at a sunset. One of our earliest and most lasting memories of the Hisses had been their insistence that we drive out with them to see the autumn foliage. At the time, we thought that it was an esthetic dutifulness, both charming and amusing. But it remained in our minds much more vividly than some more important things about the Hisses because it seemed to mark so sharp a difference in temper of mind between us.

  We like our beauty to be inherent in our way of life, not something we must make a special trip for. Thus, I have been suddenly struck, when I have put down the last hay at night before going to the house, by all the cattle gently munching at once in the warm comfort of the winter barn. Or I have wiped the puckering sweat out of my eyes suddenly to see, from the top of a hay load, the distant mountains stand out blue and massive in an hour of perfect light. Once, after a morning of mixing and chopping feed, following an exhausting week at Time, I slumped down on a full grain sack, thinking: “I can’t keep it up.” Then, in the hush of my fatigue, I saw the long shafts of sunlight piercing the cracks between the barn planks, with the meal motes dancing in them. High in the comb of the bam, all the pigeons cooed at once, and I knew: for this I can stand anything. The beauty glimpsed between bursts of the labor that justified our joy in it was the beauty that we felt. The kind of looking at the earth that my wife and I now found ourselves doing was new and different. We knew, without ever saying so, that it was a leave taking. It was looking at something we felt that we were leaving, or that was leaving us.

  Deeply emotional people, we had never been wordy (for that reason), about anything that deeply moved us. We understood each other’s feelings about most things, instinctively, without talk. Now we were more than ever reticent, not because of things that we did not need to talk about, but because of what we did not want to talk about. Silence seemed to absorb us. On my wife’s part, I think that this was due to the shock of finding herself abruptly cut off from the whole world. A number of friends, both in Westminster and elsewhere, remained doggedly loyal to us throughout the Hiss Case. But that could not change, that could only point up, the fact that beyond the borders of our farm, the world surged against us out of curiosity or hostility or lack of understanding. Only someone who has been alone against the world will know what that means.

  On my part, the enveloping silence, which no doubt communicated itself to my wife from me, had another cause. Its root lay close to what I meant when I spoke about the tragedy of history. It had to do with the spirit of man on the rack of necessity. The nerve was torn whenever the problem of informing arose, and it had now become the central problem of my days. Alger Hiss’s defiance had already forced me a long way down that road which anyone in my place could see must, as a necessity of action, lead to fuller testimony against him, and that in turn must unfailingly involve all the others. Hiss’s complete disregard for the suffering which must be caused those others, and which he could see just as certainly as I could, stiffened my own resistance to involving them by testimony which I considered irrelevant to the purpose of my main witness. I wondered at his inhumanity even while I understood its causes. In Communism the individual is nothing. But I knew that if I were compelled to testify in full against Hiss and the others, if I, who wished harm to no man, were driven by necessity to bring ruin upon so many lives, then, afterwards, I would never again really be able to live myself.

  There is in men a very deep-rooted instinct that they may not inform against those whose kindness and affection they have shared, at whose tables they have eaten and under whose roofs they have slept, whose wives and children they have known as friends—and that regardless of who those others are or what crimes they have committed. It is an absolute prohibition. It is written in no book, but it is more binding than any code that exists. If of necessity a man must violate that prohibition, and it is part of the tragedy of history that, for the greater good, men sometimes must, the man who violates it must do so in the full consciousness that there is a penalty. That penalty is a kind of death, most deadly if a man must go on living. It is not violent. It is not even a deepening shadow. It is a simple loss of something as when a filter removes all color from the light. I felt its foretouch. It was soon to be on me.

  VIII

  I do not know, of course, what Alger Hiss may have been thinking or doing during those same days. But the public pressures moving him to sue me were becoming irresistible. At the end of three or four weeks, his staunch friend, the Washington Post, deplored, editorially, the impression that must be caused by Hiss’s failure to file suit. The New York Daily News, in its terser style, merely asked: “Well, Alger, where’s that suit?”

  I knew that Hiss was preparing to sue by signs that at first confused me. Our farm is bounded at one end by a state road, clearly visible from the barn and yard. Along another side runs a county road. Without actually making a practice of it, over the years I have always kept half an eye on any cars that slowed down or parked near the farm because, if the Communist Party sent its agents against us, they would almost certainly arrive by one or the other of those roads.

  Now I became aware that there were at least two strange cars prowling around the edge of the farm. One bore New York license plates. The other car was a conspicuously light gray or yellow convertible. I sighted it once from the ridge, creeping out of the back of the farm, which is far from the house. There was nothing we could do about these prowlers and intruders unless we cornered them somewhere on the property, which might be dangerous. Most of the time, they kept to the public roads. We had no protection of any kind and never have had any but what we could provide for ourselves.

  At that time, it made perfectly good sense to suppose that the Communist Party might decide to remove me as the one dangerous witness against the conspiracy. That was our first thought. As the simplest precaution, we distributed bullets for handy use in all the rooms, not knowing just how we might be surprised. Much greater was our fear for the children. We had always felt a special anxiety that the Communist Party or its agents might kidnap one of the children to hold as a hostage. Now we warned the schools not to permit either child to leave the grounds, and, above all, to let no one take either child away on any pretext whatever. Both schools co-operated to the full.

  Soon strangers began to question the neighbors about us. A young man in the New York car represented himself as a newsman who was writing a series of articles about the Hiss Case. Then he would put his questions. He was always careful to say knowingly that the full facts in the Hiss Case had not come out yet, but when they did, it would be seen that Hiss was innocent. This system served the double purpose of collecting information and attempting to rouse the suspicions of our neighbors against us.

  The other stranger asked chiefly factual questions. He inquired in great detail how many cattle we had, how many chickens, how much farm machinery, how much corn we planted, etc. He became exasperated with one neighbor who insisted that we had no hogs. “I’ve been told that they have ninety hogs,” he insisted. Most of these activities were reported to us the same day or soon after.

  I said to my wife, “Those are Hiss’s paid investigators. He is getting ready to sue.”

  I
X

  One morning while my wife and I were still busy with our chores, a stranger, whom at first I took for one of my neighbors, came up to me at the calf barn. He asked if I were Whittaker Chambers. “I guess I have been expecting you,” I said. He was a United States marshal and he handed me a summons and complaint to defend myself in the United States District Court in Baltimore in a suit for libel brought against me by Alger Hiss whose reputation, the complaint charged, I had wilfully and knowingly damaged to the amount of $50,000.

  The Associated Press promptly asked me what I had to say. I said: “I welcome Alger Hiss’s daring suit. I do not minimize the ferocity or the ingenuity of the forces that are working through him. But I do not believe that, ultimately, Alger Hiss, or anybody else, can use the means of justice to defeat the ends of justice.” By the “forces that are working through him,” I meant, of course, the Communist Party.

  A day or so later, Alger Hiss’s attorneys decided that my statement to the AP had further injured his reputation to the extent of $25,000.64

  At the time that Alger Hiss filed suit, my wife and I had perhaps two or three thousand dollars in the bank. We had several outstandingdebts. Pipe Creek Farm was worth perhaps $30,000 and against it was a $7,500 mortgage held by the Westminster Savings Bank, which had first claim to its money. Not only was the sum of $75,000 fantastic as compared with any ability I had to pay it, even assuming that Hiss won the libel suit and that the jury would award him the full sum. But it was impossible for him to collect any judgment from me in any case. For any judgment would have been against me alone. But Pipe Creek Farm, like most property in Car-roll County, is jointly owned by my wife and me, and could not be attached or sold to satisfy any judgment that was not against both of the co-owners.

  In my future actions in the Hiss Case, the problem was never, though I am convinced that many people suppose so, a problem of saving myself from a judgment in the libel suit. No doubt, the Hiss defense intended to force me to ruin myself financially by the costs of defending such a suit. But that was soon taken care of in another way. The developments that resulted from the libel suit were as unforeseen by Hiss as by me. But the motives that made them possible had nothing to do with dollars and cents. On my part, they were the same motives that began the Case.

  X

  Almost immediately after Hiss filed suit, I was suddenly subpoenaed to appear before the Grand Jury of the Southern District of New York. This sudden development surprised and puzzled me. For the Grand Jury had been hearing testimony on Communist espionage for months—three-quarters of its term of service had, in fact, expired. It had heard both Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White (though that fact I did not then know). But I did know that in all that time the Government had never seen fit to call me before the Grand Jury, although the F.B.I. was checking with me frequently about the very people whom the Grand Jury was investigating, or questioning.

  The Grand Jury sat in the Federal Building in New York City. The day I went to testify, that building (officially, the United States Courthouse) was picketed by a chanting chain of Communists protesting the trial of their eleven leaders which was presently to begin before Judge Harold R. Medina. I hesitated for a moment and stood watching the bawling pickets. I wondered if they might recognize me and decide to extemporize an incident around me. Then I walked through the line. No one recognized me. I recognized none of them. A whole new generation of Communists was chanting in the streets.

  I made my way to the witnesses’ waiting room next door to the Grand Jury room. Tom Donegan, a special assistant to the Attorney General, greeted me pleasantly. “It won’t take long,” he said. “There’s been so much in the papers, we thought we’d better have you in.”

  Soon, an attendant ushered me, for the first time, into that Grand Jury room, which I was to see so many times again. I sat at the far end of a long table. At my left sat the foreman and, perhaps, the assistant foreman or secretary of the Grand Jury. At my right sat the official reporter. At the other end of the table, which was in effect the other end of the long room, Tom Donegan sat on a slightly raised platform behind a table or desk. At my right, sat four or five long rows of grand jurors, one row raised slightly above the other. Those completely strange men and women gazed at me (and into my life) with an expression, which on that day, seemed to me faintly amused and skeptical. So this was Whittaker Chambers—this little round man!

  I had never heard of Tom Donegan before (though I never knew him well, I thought that I came to appreciate him better as man and public servant during the long grind of the Hiss trials). To me, he was simply the representative of the Justice Department. At that time, I was convinced, however mistakenly, that no one of any power in the Government wanted to know the real truth about Communism in Government. I was convinced that, on the contrary, the official purpose was to bypass or stifle that truth wherever it threatened to emerge. I submit that few men in my place would have had much reason to think anything else.

  I no longer remember much of my testimony on that day. I remember describing in some detail the operations of the first Soviet apparatus I had known. I talked about Dr. Rosenbliett and how the Soviet underground had come into possession of the Chrystie tank data. I believe that I was asked about the Ware Group.

  Two questions I remember vividly. I was asked why I had broken with the Communist Party. No simple answer could convey the heart of that experience to anyone. I told the Grand Jury how I had read Professor Tchernavin’s book (I Speak for the Silent), and that it had had an impact upon me. But about religious matters I could speak only to the most intimate of friends, and not often then. In so far as my break was a religious experience, I felt that it was personal to a degree that made it impossible for me to describe it to those unknown people in that public place, even had I then been able to find the words to make what I must tell them comprehensible. I could only say to them that I had suffered some kind of religious experience. Even while I said it, I felt that it was unconvincing.

  It was not until months later, when I testified before the succeeding Grand Jury, that I spoke without reserve. Then it was no longer a question of overcoming my natural diffidence. By then, all the defenses and shelters which ordinarily give the soul sanctuary in life had been torn down. Shyness, reticence, had become as incongruous as the legal fiction that I was still a person in the common meaning of the word. I had ceased to be a person. By then I was a witness, to whom, as such, I was given to know, as men seldom are in life, the meaning of two lines that often ran through my mind:Quidquid latet adparebit,

  Nil inultum remanebit.65

  Then, when I was asked the same or a similar question, I spoke as a man speaks who, in the ordinary sense is no longer living. When I had finished, a grave juryman in one of the upper tiers first broke the silence. “I may be out of order,” he said, “but after the soul-searing testimony we have just heard, I do not see how anyone can fail to believe this witness.” “You are certainly out of order,” said the foreman of the Grand Jury.

  But the second question that I was asked on that first occasion was even more difficult for me to answer. A juror asked me if I had had direct knowledge of Soviet espionage. If I answered yes, there would be no choice but to tell the whole story, implicating all the others. I asked to be permitted to think about the question overnight. (I had been told that I would appear again the next day.) Then I was excused.

  Why did I ask for time to consider? What was there to think about? Whether or not I would destroy with shame and suffering people most of whom would gleefully destroy me?66 I did not believethat the Government had the slightest intention of proceeding against any of them. Recent experience gave me sound reason to suppose that its special wrath was reserved for anyone who might raise the issue of Communism in Government. Why should I act against the Communists as individuals? I knew what my answer would be, though my true answer still lay, as far as I knew, in Adolf Berle’s files.

  The next morning, Donegan spoke to me again before I
entered the Grand Jury room. “I’m just going to run through the names of about twenty people,” he said, “and you answer yes or no as to whether you knew them or not.” I knew personally only a few of the names that I was asked. Most of them, if I remember rightly, were members of Elizabeth Bentley’s groups. On the first day I had been before the Grand Jury perhaps three-quarters of an hour. The second day, I was before it about twenty minutes. Then I was dismissed.

  That second day the grand juror repeated his question about espionage. I knew that there was no other way than by answering no that I could possibly jeopardize myself before the law. I answered : no.

  XI

  My no to the Grand Jury stands for all men to condemn. I will say only this about it. No man can have watched his brother die a spiritual death by inches, or have dragged him, half-dead, across the frozen ground, or have heard his mother scream as she learned that her son was at last dead, or have listened to her tears choke her in sleep as she lay beside his corpse, or have stood at night beside his brother’s grave and listened to a rioting world smash a flask against the cemetery wall-no man can have known these things without feeling for all humanity, in its good and evil an absolving pity that becomes the central mood of his life. Not to add to the sum of suffering that even in the happiest lives is almost more than can be borne.... I have always seen all life first with pity. The necessity springs from something deeply ingrained and unchangeable in my nature. It is that which has always whispered to me that, if a man can perform a saving act for others, and feels within himself the strength to bear the penalty for that act, he must perform it. For it is the soul which must prevail, or life has no more meaning than a gutter full of scum and algae.