Witness: Cold War Classics

Chapter 1, “Flight,” begins in 1937 with Chambers’s agonizing decision to abandon Communism and the Communist Party. He reveals the names and organizations that make up the Soviet apparatus in the United States, which he served with dedication for years. Many of the Americans who served beside him are socially prominent and include, but are not limited to, the infamous Alger Hiss.

The year 1937 is one of extreme danger for Communists. Stalin is purging anyone he perceives as disloyal—both inside and outside the Soviet Union—and his worldwide network of assets makes assassinations simple. The slightest hint of disloyalty is subject to brutal punishment, as is defection.

Chambers thus expects that his decision to leave the Party will subject him to the full wrath of the Soviets’ underground network in the US. In the hopes of evading punishment, he plans his break with Communism carefully, securing a new car, hiding place, and weapon in case anyone hunts him down. He also secures a meeting with fellow agent Maxim Lieber, a.k.a. “Paul,” who is sympathetic to Chambers and tells him about the Party’s efforts to find him. In a menacing twist, Paul reveals that Chambers’s Soviet handler has disappeared.

Soviet agents make contact with Chambers’s brother-in-law through a woman who was both a friend to Chambers and his wife as well as a darling of the Boston elite. His brother-in-law is pressured to turn Chambers over to the Party, and suggests that failure to do so will result in Chambers’s vigilante execution.

Chambers’s employer likewise tells him that Soviet allies are looking for him. While Chambers’s manager is also Communist, he nonetheless admires Chambers’s courageous choice to defect. The manager states that while he was an agent in Nazi Germany, other Communists had tricked him into believing that his contacts had suffered a gruesome death. Only later did he learn that the Communists themselves had staged every murder. Chambers finds the whole story odd and wonders about his employer’s motives in telling him this. His discomfort with these episodes plants the seed of his offense against the Party and its underground network.

Chambers heads south with his family, settling near Daytona Beach in Florida. He continues his work as a translator—he had translated the novel Bambi years earlier—but decides that he cannot stay in hiding indefinitely. So long as he is underground, he is a nonentity: His apprehension or death at the hands of Soviet agents will go unnoticed. In contrast, establishing a public-facing life might afford him a measure of protection. If he is murdered, and the crime is traced back to the Soviets, it will be counted as an international incident between the US and the USSR. The Chambers family hence moves to Baltimore, where they live semi-openly and often rely on the kindness of strangers.

Chambers begins a quiet battle against the Communist Party, which he knew would never voluntarily give him peace. His first step is to confront his old comrades, starting with US Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White. Chambers threatens to publicly denunciate them if they do not defect from the Party. Chambers next goes to the home of Alger Hiss and his wife, Priscilla. Chambers urges both of the Hisses to defect, citing the many crimes of Stalin’s regime. Priscilla dismisses these contemptuously. Yet as Chambers prepares to leave what then seems like their final meeting, his old friend Hiss sheds a few tears. This reaction, of course, is in stark contrast to Hiss’s later denial that he ever knew Chambers.

Chambers is able to enjoy a real Christmas with his family. The pleasure he experiences during this sacred season hastens his return to the Christian faith.

Chambers discusses Stalin’s cruelty and tyranny. However, he notes that knowledge alone, even of such great crimes, is insufficient to break the will of most Communists. Indeed, it is the nagging of his conscience, not the revelation of new facts, that leads him back to religious faith and prayer. As he embraces belief in God and the eternal existence of the human soul, he encounters a way of thinking and living utterly opposed to Communism.

With his family short on money, Chambers accepts a position as an editor of Time magazine. He will stay there for nearly a decade. The relative comfort and stability of this position allow him to contemplate the tumult of his previous life.

Chapter 2, “The Story of a Middle-Class Family,” returns to Chambers’s childhood, beginning with his birth in Philadelphia on April 1, 1901. He despises his birth name, Jay Vivien, which he eventually exchanges for “Whittaker” (his mother’s maiden name) instead.

The Chambers family moves to Long Island while he is still a young child. His first memories are of forming a deep connection with the natural world and experiencing a profound love for his younger brother, Richard. His father, Jay, finds success with Decorative Designers, a well-respected group of commercial illustrators. Despite his father’s accomplishments, the family enjoys few middle-class conveniences. Jay fancies himself a “real artist,” which to him means that he and his family should live without any bourgeois comforts. Chambers describes the family home as “arty” but having little actual art (107). It is characterized by cheap reproductions of artistic beauty rather than the real thing.

The family home is also afflicted by emotional turmoil. With an ego fueled by memories of youthful success as an actress, Chambers’s mother, Laha, resents her husband as an intellectual inferior and treats him with contempt. She is nevertheless enormously dedicated to their two boys, whom she raises with a strict code of gentlemanly conduct. Chambers notes that he continues to conform to this etiquette even as an adult.

As a child, Chambers recoils from the cruelties and violence of the schoolyard. Despite participating in various sports, he forms few friendships.

His parents have little use for religion, but Chambers’s love for the natural world later informs his conception of the divine.

As Chambers grows up, his father begins coming home less and less frequently. Eventually, his mother informs him and his brother that their father will not be coming home ever again. Chambers surmises that his father’s hesitancy to receive affection is the root cause of his parents’ marital discord.

In his father’s absence, the family barely scrapes by economically. Chambers also discovers that he has inherited his mother’s acute fear of home invaders. Despite poverty and anxiety, though, the three of them live a happy life. His mother pours affection on her sons, often proposing grand dreams like buying an island or a farm to help the boys imagine a better future. He learns about Quakerism from his paternal grandmother and enjoys the earnest affection of his paternal grandfather, a large and cheerful man whom Chambers compares to Shakespeare’s Falstaff. His grandfather provides Chambers’s first introduction to the world of politics. In addition, he allows Chambers to read his copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The story’s emphasis on small beauties in a world rife with evil and suffering makes a significant impact on Chambers.

Chambers’s father eventually returns home. Yet even after coming home, Jay chooses to live a solitary and mean existence. In an act of pointless cruelty, he  cuts down Laha’s flowers. Chambers escapes this turmoil by going on walks in the woods and feels happiness while studying languages.

After high school, his mother wants him to go to college. However, he first works on a railroad in Washington, DC. This association with workers from many different countries and backgrounds, all of whom are all victims of capitalist exploitation, lays the foundation for his future embrace of Communism. His closest friend on the job touches a third rail and is severely incapacitated.

Chambers moves to New Orleans, which deepens his sympathy for the plight of the poor. To his embarrassment, he runs out of money and has to ask for his father to pay his way back home.

Chambers starts college at Williams but quickly balks at its setting and expense. He relocates back to New York City so that he can live at home while attending Columbia, where he develops a love of poetry. He nearly joins a Quaker mission to provide relief in war-torn Russia, but the Quakers reject him upon learning that he is an atheist.

Chambers drops out of Columbia to join the Party. Shortly thereafter, his family takes in his paternal grandmother, who is suffering from dementia. The violent rages between her and Chambers’s father put added stress on an already difficult home situation. Chambers is glad to see Richard leave it behind to attend Colgate College.

While he and Richard were not especially close as children, Richard begins reaching out to him. Chambers learns that Richard has left his studies at Colgate. Chambers unsuccessfully urges him to return to school. During Christmas vacation, Richard appears in ill health and rants about the emptiness of virtue and the meaninglessness of existence. Chambers offers Communism as an answer to Richard’s existential struggles, but Richard immediately dismisses it.

Richard decides to remain at home indefinitely. Tragically, his psychological spiral continues unabated. He tries to convince Chambers to enter a mutual-suicide pact. When Chambers refuses, Richard calls his brother a coward. Meanwhile, the family realizes that Richard has developed a severe drinking problem. Their mother insists that Chambers intervene to curb Richard’s alcohol consumption. Chambers’s attempts to keep Richard from drinking are not only unsuccessful but also make him the target of Richard’s drunken rages.

Despite Chambers’s best efforts to keep to himself, he regularly finds his brother trying to end his own life and witnesses his father beating Richard. In an attempt to safeguard Richard’s well-being, Chambers begins watching him overnight.

Richard marries, but within months his wife returns to her parents, and he finds his own apartment. One night, he fails to meet Chambers at the local train station. The next morning, his mother receives a call informing them that Richard has killed himself in his apartment. His brother’s death imbues Chambers with a desire to learn how the world could plunge a man as gentle and kind as Richard into absolute despair, especially at such a young age.

Richard’s death softens Chambers’s relationship with Jay, who dies soon thereafter. After visiting his brother’s grave on New Year’s Eve, Chambers writes a poem. Overcome with pain, he vows never to visit the grave again.

In Chapter 3, “The Outrage and the Hope of the World,” Chambers further unpacks his reasons for becoming a Communist. In general, he explains, Communism draws people—especially intellectuals—who are seeking answers to the problems of war and economic crisis. Communism offers them clear solutions, and these are especially satisfying for those who feel personally compelled to save the world from disaster.

Chambers argues that few Communists are seeking personal gain, because the risks of joining the Party far outweigh the benefits. This is especially true for anyone who has a social reputation to uphold.

He further notes that few people join the Party as a result of reading Marx and Lenin. Rather, Chambers says, they turn to Communist texts after having first become distressed over an acute social crisis. It is the apparent decay of existing institutions and belief systems that leads people desperate for solutions to search out radical alternatives.

Chambers himself is troubled by the problem of war. Visiting Germany with a friend in 1923, he saw the lingering impact of the First World War, as well as the looming inevitability of another.

Chambers points out that he first turned to socialism before concluding that its solutions were too modest to address the true scope of the problem. Reading a short pamphlet by Lenin on life in a Soviet workers’ collective offered Chambers the practical vision he was seeking. Despite its discomfort relative to Western life, the practicality of the Communist vision is irresistible to Chambers. He is thrilled by the idea of serving a higher cause and embracing hard discipline. Through an associate at Columbia, who talked often of Communism, Chambers connects with his local chapter of the Communist Party.