Witness: Cold War Classics

Chambers offers reasons both for joining and leaving the Communist Party. Do you see any evidence in Witness that supplements or even contradicts his stated reasons? Look in particular at his childhood and family life.

Chambers insists that his conflict with Alger Hiss was purely ideological. Based on your reading of the text, does this seem to be accurate? In other words, does their conflict take on a personal element at any point? Does it matter whether conflicts such as the one Hiss and Chambers experience contain a personal element? If so, why? If not, why not?

What is your overall impression of Chambers’s life in the underground? How does it either support or undermine Chambers’s argument about Communism as a monolithic, rapacious force bent on spreading revolution around the world?

Why did Chambers choose to testify against Hiss but refuse to testify against others? Was it because he saw in Hiss a clear representative of the Communist apparatus he was trying to challenge, or does it have more to do with their own personal background?

Describe Chambers’s Christianity, especially his interest in Quakerism. Does his religiosity represent a contrast with his Communist past, or a continuity with it? Does he appear to project his present interest in religion on Communism when he insists that it is its own form of faith?

Chambers frequently describes the federal government as either rife with Communists or incapable of controlling them. Is this characterization borne out by the events he describes? If so, how and why did the US convict Hiss for perjury? If not, what elements in this narrative could explain Chambers’s exaggeration(s)?

Chambers was critical of Senator Joseph McCarthy (D-WI), who used the Alger Hiss case as the pretext for a broad and often reckless hunt for Communists throughout American society. Despite Chambers’s protestations to the contrary, does Witness seem intentionally designed to fuel McCarthyism? Keep in mind that this movement was well underway at the time of Witness’s publication. If Chambers was sincere in his critique of McCarthy, why does he not mention the senator by name in his narrative?

Despite its best efforts, HUAC was never able to establish Hiss’s pro-Communist efforts, which is why Hiss was imprisoned for perjury and not espionage. It was not until 1996 that a single declassified cable established beyond reasonable doubt that Hiss spied (at least briefly) for the Soviets. Within the context of Witness alone, do you think that Chambers successfully establishes Hiss’s guilt? Why or why not?