Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I think I can say with complete truth that the loss of $30,000 never played any real part in my own thoughts. Nothing disturbed my wife and me less than the thought that we were now poor and that, even if nothing worse happened to us, I was now practically unemployable.77 We had lived in a barn before and had been very happy in it. Not the roof, but the minds and souls it covers matter. And so we reminded the children.

  My real pang at leaving Time was quite different. I simply felt that I had had friends, and that, now, they were not there.

  XXXVIII

  My resignation was not released to the press until a day or two after I began to testify before the Grand Jury. But I knew that it would be released, and it was in that mood of human destitution that I returned to the Federal Building, and went up to the witness waiting room next to the grand jury room. It was a bare-floored room with a heavy oaken door. A big window at the back of the room gave on the rookeries along the Third Avenue elevated, twenty or more Boors below. There was a rack for hats and coats, a bare table set at right angles to the wall, a heavy wooden chair and a lighter chair. Above the table, an electric clock clicked loudly whenever a portion of what was soon to be endless, aching time had elapsed.

  Tom Donegan, special assistant to the Attorney General, soon bustled in with an armful of documents. He was businesslike but not unkind, and I was there to take my medicine. “If only you had given me documentary proof in the first place,” said Donegan. “But that’s water over the dam now.” He bustled out.

  I was grateful to Donegan personally. For it was in his power to make our second meeting much uglier, and he chose not to do so.

  XXXIX

  The Grand Jury had been in recess. It had been suddenly and unexpectedly reconvened, and at a most unwelcome time. For Christmas, 1948, was just ahead with all its little personal concerns, cares and loving plans. The image that comes to my mind at once from those days is the street-corner Santa Clauses whom I used to pass on my way to and from the Federal Building, with their faces nipped above their false white whiskers which always seemed to be slipping from place. And the sound that dominates that time for me is the clang of their hand-bells, beating for alms against the ears of those who hurried by, deafened by their own troubles or indifference. In that strange overtone of Christmas, the Grand Jury had to reach its hard decision.

  It had to reach it quickly. The Grand Jury had only about two weeks of official life left. If it was to act in the Hiss Case, it must do so before the midnight of December 15th. when its term of service would automatically expire. Therefore, every hour counted and the grand jurors not only spent unusually long hours in their big room during the day. They had at least one session at night.

  My door was open that first morning. I watched the grand jurors file past, grave men and women, or smiling at some small exchange in a kind of human life that I had withdrawn from. As they passed, most of them glanced at me, where I sat behind my bare table, facing the open door.

  I was the man who had told them that I had no direct knowledge of Communist espionage. Now I had produced evidence that I had such knowledge. I did not even hope that these men and women could grasp or disentangle the conflict of motives or the conflict of forces that had brought these things about. I could not imagine that anything in their experience could give them a clue to these complexities. I took it for granted, as did almost everyone I knew, that it was I, and not Alger Hiss, whom the Government wished to indict. I had given it ground for action against me.

  XL

  The relevant parts of my testimony before that Grand Jury will be found earlier in this book. But my testimony before those earnest and deeply concerned men and women was only the technical necessity of the situation. Beyond that, I was there to begin the new phase of my witness.

  To make that witness, I had left the little woods alive. To make that witness, I had lived my whole life. All that most truly made me Whittaker Chambers, and no one else, made it possible and necessary for me to make that witness—all that was peculiarly myself, good and bad, by special character and experience.

  It was a simple witness. It required only that a man testify to every crime, every sin, every evil, that he had committed or that had beset his life, without reserve. In terms of the political issue implicit in the Hiss Case, the struggle between Communism and this nation, only a witness so unreserved and absolute could counteract the witness made by Hiss for Communism. In terms of the moral issue involved, only a witness of that desperate integrity could counteract the equally desperate witness made by Hiss.

  I must do this because only by first exposing the evil in himself could a man free himself to expose the evil that beset and secretly threatened other men. Only by showing them the evil in himself could a man make other men understand that the evil was real and immediate. Since the political form of that evil was Communism and its practices, testimony would take the form of testimony about Communism—underground apparatuses, pseudonyms, microfilm. But the testimony and the witness must not be confused. They were not the same. The testimony fixed specific, relevant crimes. The witness fixed the effort of the soul to rise above sin and crime, and not for its own sake first, but because of others’ need, that the witness to sin and crime might be turned against both.

  There was always the possibility that the world would see only the shocking facts of the testimony and not the meaning of the witness, that it would see in the testimony only an abhorrent man, making himself more abhorrent by every act that he confessed to. That was not the concern of the man who must make the witness. His concern must be only that out of his patient exposure of crime and sin, first and most mercilessly in himself, might rise the liberating truth for others.

  To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness.

  They still hear in it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.

  That is the witness that I sought to make, however feebly, before the first Grand Jury and the second Grand Jury, and which I continued in my public witness in the Hiss trials. A man can bear such witness only in shame and pain. Therefore, it is always a vivisection. No man who is capable of sin, crime and weakness can find the strength for such a vivisection within himself. That strength must come from elsewhere. That is why such witness completes a greater witness, and why, out of its ugliness and ordeal, rises the truth that fills men’s souls with hope.

  It is a curious fact that it was my effort to make that witness which I felt that both Grand Juries sensed. It was my testimony about the facts of the conspiracy that I despaired of making them understand because it was so alien to anything in their experience.

  XLI

  That failure on my part filled me with the desperation of a man trying to claw open a locked door with his fingernails. For I sensed that that same inability to grasp the character and reality of Communism and its techniques of operation had in part made it possible for the conspiracy to exist in the first place, had made it possible to thrive and reach such heights and power, had made the Hiss Case possible. It was an invincible ignorance, rooted in what was most generous in the American character, which because it was incapable of such conspiracy itself, could not believe that others practiced it. It was rooted, too, in what was most singular in the American experience, which because it had prospered so much apart from the rest of the w
orld, could not really grasp that there was a crisis of history, and, therefore, could not grasp the nature of that crisis or why there were Communists and why they acted as they did.

  If my testimony was incredible, if Americans insisted on seeing in it the reflexes of a grudge fight or a personal scandal, then the nation could not save itself (this was before Korea had taught its inexorable lessons, still not wholly understood), for there was very little time left.

  I used to slip out for lunch at an Automat, in part because the Grand Jury, the press and the personnel of the Federal Building filled the nearby restaurants, but, above all, because in the anonymous Automat crowds, I was anonymous. In that scramble nobody ever glanced at me twice.

  But one day a man in late middle age walked over to my table and asked if I were Whittaker Chambers. He was tall, with an austere dignity and evidently poor. He apologized twice for intruding, but, he said, he felt that he must thank me for what I was trying to do. I was embarrassed and said something to the effect that I hoped that my effort would at least be of some help to the American people. “Nothing,” he said bitterly, “nothing can save the American people.” Then he walked away.

  XLII

  I was exhausted in every way. At that point I suffered something that was less like despair than a spiritual dissolution. My unknown friend echoed the secret fear that I would not admit to my own mind. For if what he said was true, and the very fact that there could be a Hiss Case made it a thought that lurked and would not be dispelled, then any witness was for nothing, everything that I had tried to do, the suffering that I- had brought upon my family, and the suffering that I had caused those against whom I had had to testify, had been for nothing. It was an absolutely pointless agony. It merely sold newspapers.

  And if that was so, then the defiance of the others was actually more sensible and more humane, and their refusal to inform against one another was more honorable. They were Communists, in large part, because they believed that the other side was hopeless, incapable of understanding history, incapable of understanding its own danger, incapable of understanding the nature of the enemy while he smiled at them in contempt, incapable of understanding those who were stupid enough to try to help them. Every public failure to understand my purpose, every official effort to shut off my testimony or to penalize me for testifying, pled that the Communists were right and that I was wrong, pled that I was a fool not to know that it is a law of history that no one can save those who will not save themselves, whose plight is the proof that they have lost the instinct of self-preservation. In their defiance, the Communists were strong and free. I was not. They had not violated themselves by informing against anybody. I had.

  In those days, the heavy door of the Grand Jury room was constantly opening and closing. I could hear it in my adjoining waiting room. Witnesses were constantly going in and out, in and out—Alger Hiss, Priscilla Hiss, Donald Hiss, Julian Wadleigh, and others.

  In order not to see them, I had taken to closing my door all but a crack. Sometimes the F.B.I. would ask me to peer through the crack at passing witnesses to see if I could identify them. Sometimes I was summoned into the Grand Jury room while a witness was on the stand to let him look at me. I would stand just inside the door in silence. The eyes of part of the grand jurors would be fastened on my face. The eyes of the rest would be fastened on the other witness’ face. No word, of course, was spoken. Then I would go out. It was like being wheeled into an operating amphitheater for a quick incision.

  Each time that the door of the jury room swung shut, a single question formed in my mind: “Where is thy brother Abel?”

  XLIII

  All through the time when I was testifying before the Grand Juries, I lived at my mother’s house on Long Island. It seemed to me a proper irony that I should have come back to pass in that tragic house what more and more certainly I felt was the last of my own life. The wonderful goodness of my mother to me through those troubled days, tactful, reticent, and unquestioning, brought us completely together again and healed that simple bond of affection that the disasters of our family had impaired.

  Every night, I left the Federal Building and traveled to Pennsylvania Station by subway, riding the Long Island trains to Lynbrook, jammed in the rush-hour crowds now swollen by the Christmas shoppers. Every morning, I rose between six and seven to reach the Federal Building about half-past nine. I liked to arrive early, for in that way I avoided the press.

  The press was always lurking in wait for me. When I went out to lunch, or when I left at night, the cry would go up: “Here comes Chambers!” At first I tried eluding the newsmen by going up or down staircases in areas of the Federal Building from which the press was banned. The cry changed to: “There goes Chambersl’ while the whole pack would be off to try to find my point of emergence. By dividing their forces, they soon had all exits covered, and I gave up the game. Since, in the nature of the Case, I was not free to talk about my testimony, and I soon discovered that almost anything that I said was twisted in some way by inadvertence or malice, my stock answer became: no comment. Presently, the press also grew rather tired of the game.

  I never knew when I might be called before the Grand Jury. Sometimes hours passed while I waited. Sometimes I testified for only a short time; sometimes for an hour or more—or so it now seems to me. During the long hours of waiting, which the clock quartered with its loud click, I used to read. I reread the Divine Comedy, for the little volumes of the Dent edition, with English and Italian on the facing pages, fitted easily into my pocket, and the subject matter fitted easily into the context of my experience.

  “It’s very good that you’re able to keep your mind on a book,” said Tom Donegan, coming in on me one day. Donegan often said good morning to me, out of a natural decency, but also, I suspect, to make sure that I was really behind my closed door. We never, of course, discussed the Case in any way. But one morning, probably the day that my resignation from Time was announced, he told me that he kept back issues of Time and Life so that some day his son could read certain articles that had impressed him in them-Life’s essays on the Middle Ages and the Venetian Republic and an essay in Time on Arnold Toynbee’s philosophy of history. I smiled. I had written all of them.

  Now and again, the bailiff happened in to say a few words about the weather or to offer me his newspaper. He was a man of about sixty who was more or less attendant on the Grand Jury. He sat on a straight chair in the hall beyond their door, which he locked in their absence. “Have they still got you here?” he would sometimes ask in a pleasant Irish voice that he tried to make sound sincerely incredulous. He would tell me about his wife’s illness and his own rheumatism.

  I wondered sometimes that no friend of the many I claimed ever penetrated to me. I wondered even more that in the whole nation, no priest, no minister, no fellow Quaker, grasped what I was trying to do and came to say: “I do not want to ask or to tell you anything. I simply wish to be with you.” From the outer world, no one came.

  But, from time to time, two F.B.I. agents would drop in, always two together like carabinieri. Sometimes they would ask about some point in the vast investigation by which they were checking my testimony beyond my sight and even beyond my realization. For I paid little attention to what the F.B.I. might be doing. I needed all my strength for what I had to do. Sometimes they wanted me to make a statement, covering some point in the current proceedings. Sometimes they wanted me to identify a photograph. Sometimes I felt that they had dropped in to try to read my morale from my face. Their manner toward me was always correctly neutral. But, now and again, there came from those plain, hard-working men, what no one else in the world had to give—cheering or joking words that are ropes to the soul in such a storm.

  Otherwise, I was always alone. I came and went alone. I ate alone. I sat alone in the waiting room. No counsel sat with me to advise me about my testimony as was the case with other witnesses. I used to glimpse Alger Hiss, chatting, apparently calm and detached, with Edward
McLean, in the waiting room at the far end of the hall. Once I suddenly came upon David Carpenter just outside the locked jury room, accompanied by bearded counsel who looked like a Montenegrin goatherd.78

  The fact that I was always alone no doubt did me harm. It fed the notion, spread by the Hiss forces, that I was a weird, friendless, unknown creature who had seeped up from the lower depths, and whom nobody wanted to be seen with.

  I was alone not only in the simple physical sense. More and more, I was beginning to feel like a man who is separated from the world by the fact that he is really dead although by the action of some odd torment, he still moves and talks.

  A single incident spun all the nerves of that torment together and pushed me toward the brink.

  XLIV

  With my resignation, Time’s concern in the libel suit had naturally ended and so had my connection with Time’s lawyers. In Baltimore, Richard Cleveland and William Macmillan volunteered to continue as my counsel.79 But if I was to be indicted, would need counsel in New York, if only to explain to me my rights under the law and in the end to arrange for bail. Therefore, one day when for some reason I was excused from the Federal Building I went down to Wall Street to ask the advice of Harold Medina, Jr.80

  While we were talking, Medina’s telephone rang. “He’s here now,” I heard him say. Then his voice began to rise in surprise, in an incredulous tone, and he began to make brief answers in a conversation that I could not follow. Then he handed me the telephone. “It’s Nixon,” he said. “The Eastman Kodak experts,” said Congressman Nixon, “have just reported that the film in those undeveloped rolls was manufactured in 1945. If you got them in 1938, how do you explain that?” “It cannot be true,” I said, “but I cannot explain it.” “The sub-committee’s going to New York tonight,” said Nixon, “and we want to see you at the Commodore Hotel at nine o’clock. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.” “I will be there,” I said. “You’d better be there,” said Nixon. His voice was harsh with the just anger of a man who has placed his confidence in another man who turns out to be an impostor.