Witness: Cold War Classics

“A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind’s. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.”

Chambers understood Communism as the pure expression of human reason. By extension, he was convinced that appeals to logic would fail to dissuade its adherents to abandon Communism. The only force capable of overcoming Communism, he decided, was conscience, a sense of morality that did not depend upon reason or calculation. According to Hiss, Communism worked hard to suppress Party members’ sense of conscience because it knew this would undermine its totalitarian drive towards full political domination.

“The terrible meaning of the Washington apparatus is that, even in the United States, that stage of the revolution of our times has been reached, ‘that decisive hour,’ which Karl Marx acutely forecast a hundred years before: when ‘the process of dissolution going on within [...] the whole range of the old society’ becomes so violent ‘that a small section of the ruling class [...] joins the revolutionary class.’ This ‘small section,’ says Marx, is ‘in particular,’ the middle-class intellectuals.”

Chambers became a hero to the US’s emerging conservative movement because he spoke forthrightly about the threat of Communism. His narrative was especially appealing, as he had the intimate knowledge a former Communist insider. Moreover, his explicit preoccupation with religion and ethics gave him an aura of trustworthiness; many ex-Communists denounced their former comrades, but most of them had far fewer scruples than Chambers. Chambers made his mark by identifying the middle ranks of the liberal establishment—the area of the civil service that people like Hiss occupied—as the biggest threat to American freedom. This was exactly what the burgeoning conservative movement needed to reinvigorate its longstanding assault on New Deal policies and the bureaucracy they produced.

“As we hesitated, tears came into Alger Hiss’ eyes-the only time I ever saw him so moved. He has denied this publicly and derisively. He does himself an injustice-by the tone rather than the denial, which has the practical purpose in the pattern of his whole denial. He should not regret those few tears, for as long as men are human, and remember our story, they will plead for his humanity.”

Although Chambers always swore that his confrontation with Hiss had nothing to do with any personal grievances, Witness reveals how agonizing it was for him to turn on someone he had once deeply admired. He understands Hiss as a representative of the Communist cause, just as Chambers is the representative of American democracy’s cause. Chambers believes that Hiss is honor-bound to defend Communism by denying that he is a Communist. Even so, Chambers regrets denying their friendship and the very real emotions it produced. If he is doomed to lose a friend, he wishes that at least they could share the memory of that friendship together.

“I scarcely knew Les Misérables was teaching me Christianity, and never thought of it that way, for it showed it to me, not as a doctrine of the mind, but in action in the world, in prisons, in slums, among the poor, the sick and the dying, thieves, murderers, harlots and outcasts, lonely children, in the sewers of Paris and on the barricades of revolution. Its operation did not correspond to anything I knew as Christian in the world about me. But it corresponded exactly to a need I felt within myself.”

Chambers opens the book with a profession of Christian faith as the only proper corrective to Communist indoctrination. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that Chambers has little interest in the formal trappings of religious observance. He often ties the experience of the divine to natural phenomena rather than doctrine or ritual. He also finds Christianity in the squalor and desperation of the world, hence his attraction to Les Misérables. Following his break from Communism, Chambers sees religion as best when it is interwoven with people’s daily lives.

“‘Look around you,’ he said, ‘look at people. Every one of them is a hypocrite. Look at the world. It is hopeless. Look at religion. Nobody really believes in that stuff, even the people who pretend to. Look at marriage. Look at Mother and Jay. What a fraud! Look at the family. And children! It’s a crime to have children. […] We can’t cope with the world. We’re too gentle. We’re too gentle to face the world.’”

Chambers’s brother, Richard, undergoes a rapid mental health descent. This decline is all the more eerie in Richard’s self-consciousness of it. In Chambers’s telling, Richard’s addictions seem like a consequence of his nihilistic attitude rather than their cause. Even when Richard is feeling the effects of alcohol, he is painfully articulate in his condemnation of modern society. The fact that Richard came to his nihilism through genuine philosophic inquiry—as opposed to despair or bad habits—vaults Chambers into his own personal quest to find new, better ideas, ones that might give the “other Richards” of the world a dash of hope.

“Under pressure of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilization which nothing less drastic can save—a civilization foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it.”

Despite the acrimony of Chambers’s break with the Communist Party, Witness affirms a charitable view of the motivations that led most Communists to join the pro-Soviet effort. While every movement has its fools and rogues, Chambers regards a majority of workaday Communists as individuals who likely came by this political faith through true conviction and a desire to serve humanity. Their moral sincerity makes them vulnerable to a Party apparatus that has come to regard its human assets as nothing more than mere means to an end.

“The Communist lives in permanent revolt and anger against the injustice of the world around him. But he will suffer almost any degree of injustice, stupidity and personal outrage from the party that he serves. He may fuss, whimper, harangue, and even intrigue. But he will not act openly against the authority of the party. For to do so would be to breach discipline. And discipline is not only, to this great secular faith, what discipline is to an army. It is also what piety is to a church. To a Communist, a deliberate breach of discipline is an act of blasphemy. Only an intolerable situation can make it possible or even imaginable.”

Chambers was highly attuned to the paradoxical character of Communism. Common sense would hold that there was no value in taking orders from fools and crooks, especially under circumstances where any false move could lead to one’s personal arrest or death. Yet people do so because they have accepted the idea of the Party as the vanguard of revolution, just as a devout Catholic might accept the Roman Catholic Church as God’s representative on earth. For all of its professed rationalism, Communism thrived on the blind faith of its adherents.

“I think now that anyone who has the patience to read those four stories will agree that I was wrong, and that Comrade Peters is right. For in retrospect, it is easy to see that the stories are scarcely about Communism at all. Communism is the context in which they are told. What they are really about is the spirit of man in four basic commitments-in suffering, under discipline, in defeat, in death. In each, it is not the political situation, but the spirit of man which is triumphant. The success of the stories was not due to the fact that for the first time that spirit spoke to American Communists in a context and a language which it was permissible for them to hear. For the same reason, Peters feared the stories. For he rightly sensed that Communism may never make truce with the spirit of man. If it does, sooner or later, it is the spirit of man that will always triumph, for it draws its strength from a deeper fountain.”

Chambers achieved some fame within radical socialist circles for his article—later turned into a play—titled “Can You Hear Their Voices?” These pieces dramatized a rural Midwestern uprising against oppressive employers. Despite its popular success and Communist message, certain Party elements rejected it: They disliked how it showed people acting spontaneously, without the explicit guidance of the Communist Party. As the Party itself became more bureaucratic and inhumane under Stalin, Chambers concludes that the Communist appeal to the human spirit is nothing but a lure, and that it must crush the human spirit in order to succeed.

“I did not care whether or not Ulrich was a Communist (it was some time before I discovered the fact that he was not). In him I felt the continuity of the revolutionary generations. In him, the wretched of the earth were no longer wretched. They had climbed to their feet in the dignity of effort and purpose to proclaim that they were the future. That feeling did not at all blind me to the fact that Ulrich himself was a rather careless underground worker.”

Chambers often comments that his attraction to Communism had much less to do with the specific doctrines of Marx and Lenin than with the spirit of revolution that the Party initially seemed to epitomize. When he meets Old Bolsheviks like Ulrich, who had been present for the Russian Revolution, Chambers is admiring of their daring and sacrifice (if not their orthodoxy). Chambers sought in Communism not only a blueprint for a better world but also a pathway towards an adventurous and meaningful life.

“A wild joy swept me. Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theorists, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, crumbled at the touch of the child. Both of us simply wanted a child. If the points on the long course of my break with Communism could be retraced, that is probably one of them—not at the level of the conscious mind, but at the level of unconscious life.”

A classic trope in the Judeo-Christian scriptures is that the greatest threats to human power often come from the least likely sources. In the Gospels, Jesus Christ manifests not as a king or a warrior but as a child born alongside animals in a manger to a young unmarried mother. For Chambers, the sight and touch of a child was enough to dash his plan to live the life of a loyal Communist, despite knowing all the risks that leaving the Party entailed. Chambers often assumes a pessimistic tone regarding the battle between freedom and Communism. Yet all it took was the power of one baby—his baby—to thwart the Party’s will and control over his own life. This gave him some hope that Communism was not destined to completely succeed.

“People have sometimes asked me: What did you talk about when you were together? I have to stop and think. What did we talk about? We talked about everything. We were never together without talking. But, except for our talk about underground activity, what we said was completely without forethought, particular meaning or importance-the spontaneous surface talk of people among whom there exist, not only fierce convictions taken for granted, but intangible compatibilities of temperament, an instinctive feeling as to what is serious and what is absurd about people, things and life. People are truly friends when they love even one another’s foibles as a necessary part of the pattern of character. We know one another’s weaknesses and could laugh freely at them as something amusing.”

Some of the most touching passages in Witness concern Chambers’s genuine love for his old friend, Alger Hiss. Chambers made constant declarations that there was nothing personal in his denunciations of Hiss. Hiss seems like as someone with whom he shared a profound human bond, one he concludes could never exist within a Communist system. Once Chambers makes his break with the Party, he is profoundly hurt that Hiss chooses Communist ideology over their friendship. This contributed to Chambers’s pessimistic attitude regarding the ability of the human spirit to withstand the ruthless logic of Communism.

“There was not a question of direct espionage at that time. But Hiss and I sensed that that was what we were heading for, and we discussed it. But the first result that we foresaw from Alger’s new job was the possibility of widening the apparatus in the State Department. That soon became Alger’s underground activity and took the form of regular campaign. Alger described several liberals in the Department whom he thought might make possible recruits. He began to invite them to the 39th Street house. It was slow work and the approach had to be cautious. In the end nothing came of any of those contacts.”

This passage encapsulates Chambers’s ambivalent attitude toward Hiss. On one hand, he was the tip of the spear in pro-Soviet attacks on America. Hiss enough charm to gain the ear of a president and was blessed with social and political connections so abundant that he easily brought more quiet Communists into the ranks of the federal government. On the other hand, Chambers describes Hiss as a foppish dilettante, lacking the discipline that was the hallmark of Party membership and unwilling to take risks that might threaten his privileged position. Yet if Chambers notices this contradiction, he does not draw it out explicitly.

“I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including our own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence […] faced with the opportunity of espionage, a Communist, though he may sometimes hesitate momentarily, will always, exactly to the degree that he is a Communist, engage in espionage.”

This passage offers a damning explanation of the middle managers and bureaucrats that Chambers regarded as the harbingers of Communist revolution in America. But this quotation cuts two ways. In a more sinister reading, it suggests that all committed Communists are spies bent on destroying the US government, with no pangs of conscience to obstruct their devious path. Yet a more even-handed reading might lead one to conclude that such people are only dangers to the extent they are true Communist. Given Chambers’s belief that true humanity and Communism are at odds, it is reasonable to infer that there are very few true Communists in the world.

“I committed the characteristic crimes of my century, which is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form, so that the characteristic experience of the mind in this age is a political experience. At every point, religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men-those who reject and those who worship God-becomes irrepressible.”

The 20th century was undoubtedly a period of unprecedented horror, from the World Wars to the Holocaust to the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe. One of the major intellectual challenges of the time was to figure out if there was something distinctly wrong with humanity itself. Chambers offers a nuanced version of a conservative answer. By 1952, there was nothing new in blaming social catastrophe on people’s lack of faith in God. Chambers put a new twist on this classic explanation: He blames social catastrophe on the transferal of the religious impulses into secular politics. This would become a popular and much-repeated formulation in American conservative political theory.

“I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what its most forthright protagonists, sometimes unwarily, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far [sic] as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all revolutions of our time.”

Scholars often this passage as the most radical of Chambers’s statements, as he goes further in condemning American progressives than did many of his conservative allies. The latter generally regarded liberals as dupes rather than hostile actors. Yet Chambers’s politics would moderate considerably in the years after he wrote this. For example, he developed a far more moderate view of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953, and openly rejected the excesses of McCarthyism. This begs the question of whether Chambers’s this statement was a true profession of his authentic political beliefs, or a glorified venting of personal frustrations made in the heat of his confrontation with Hiss.

“Under the cry of ‘who’s a liar?’ the nation was beginning to see the Hiss-Chambers Case [sic] as a personal duel between two men. This had the advantage of simplifying and dramatizing the case. But it reduced it to the level of a baseball game and blurred the great issues involved. There were moments when I wondered with despair whether it would ever be possible to make those issues clear to a nation that insisted on seeing in terms of a sporting event a struggle that touched its very survival. Time, a very short time, was to prove that I was wrong.”

To this day, complaints endure that mass media coverage tends to reduce high-stakes issues into “horse races.” In other words, the media is critiqued for presenting genuine political struggles and policy differences as veritable games, whose main figures are jockeying for a tactical advantage without considering the moral consequences of their actions. While Chambers does not believe that the media is conspiring against him for Hiss’s benefit, he deplores its reductive presentation of the case as a personality conflict. The more Chambers tries to prove the seriousness of his case to the media, the more he felt he came off as a dour and self-righteous man who either betrayed a friend or sought to harass a famous stranger.

“If Hiss was a Communist, how could he, constantly meeting and dealing with intelligent people, have managed not to betray his real views from day to day? I was too tired to explain how, in our revolutionary age, Hiss was seldom in danger of betraying his real views. He had only to refrain from pressing extreme views, or drawing ultimate conclusions from views very widespread among enlightened people, to find himself simply saying what all his set was saying, only, perhaps, saying it a little more valiantly, so that he drew a bonus of intense sincerity.”

This passage suggests that Hiss had no need to conceal his Communist affiliations among his social circle, since its views so neatly aligned with his own. As long as Hiss avoided certain guardrails, Chambers contended that radical socialist leanings would have won Hiss more praise than condemnation. This passage also suggests a degree of unseriousness in Hiss’s radicalism. The upper-middle class might espouse revolutionary beliefs, but it was undertaking no substantive actions that would threaten its own privileges. In Chambers’s view, this social echelon praised its most radical members (like Hiss) because most were unwilling to go so far themselves.

“But perhaps no item of the tactic was more effective in rallying support to Hiss than that he advanced first—the warning that my charge of Communism against him must lead to re-examination of American foreign policy and, by implication, of those who had made it with Hiss and enabled him to make it—or, as he put it, ‘to discredit recent great achievements of this country in which I was privileged to participate.’”

Chambers exhaustively details Hiss’s many defenses, which often rely on misdirection and obfuscation. Among Hiss’s favored tactics was to cite his own illustrious professional background as evidence of his personal moral respectability. He further pushed the notion that his character was superior to Chambers’s own, as the latter was a confessed ex-Soviet spy. Here, Hiss links himself to the policies of which he was a part, saying that as a product of the New Deal establishment, it was impossible to discredit him without discrediting the entire system he served. As the narrative of Witness unfolds, Chambers takes him up on that challenge.

“I can describe that struggle only as I knew it—one single man, seeking to do what was right to the limit of his understanding and strength, upon whom beat a surf of pressures, rumors, warnings, so that to keep my footing in the inevitable backwash of doubts and fears was a daily feat. It is possible that not all of the forces that I was then led to believe were working against me were working in unison, or to the same degree or from the same motives that I supposed. It is possible that some of those whom I was led to deem enemies were not enemies, even if they were not friends, or that some whom I deemed friends were not mistaken in some part of what they warned me of […] I can only describe that struggle as I experienced it in terms of what I then felt.”

For most of the book, Chambers’s identification of himself with his cause imposes a fierce clarity of purpose and vision. This passage is therefore notable because it shows him breaking character, albeit tacitly. He admits that getting caught up in the maelstrom of history might, in certain respects, have clouded his perception and judgment; maybe he exaggerated the degree of threat he faced, or the motives of those who opposed him. These are startling confessions, given how strongly they contrasts with his typical voice of moral absolutism.

“Not until the end of the first Hiss trial, did any newsman ask me an intelligent question. Then Nicholas Blatchford of the Washington Daily News, disregarding cows, barns, house, or acres, asked me simply: ‘what do you think you’re doing?’ We were sitting in the living room. At his question I turned to look out at the mists that were rising from the bottom below the house, filling the valley. I answered slowly: ‘I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself so that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist.”

Chambers despised the press, not only for trivializing the Hiss trial, but for seeking to probe his inner life, and trying to find secret psychological motivation for his perceived antipathy towards Hiss. The question from Blatchford is apiece with this approach. Even so, the simplicity and sincerity of its framing manages to connects with Chambers’s understanding of himself as a witness, not merely an informant.

“The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

This is not the first time that Chambers equates liberalism with Communism, but here he describes them as acting without a grand design (and perhaps not even being aware of what they were doing). Liberals, in this view, are not wolves in sheep’s clothing. Rather, they do not realize that liberalism must ultimately lead to socialism and then to Communism, that they are paving a road to hell with their good intentions.

“There was always the possibility that the world would only see 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 a 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.”

Chambers closely associated the idea of witnessing with the idea of sacrifice. A witness in the true sense of the word has to align their words and actions with a firm spiritual code, and thereby indicate this code’s power. For Chambers, the world is not designed to accommodate this degree of moral sincerity. Consequently, it is liable to crush the witness who lacks the cunning or ruthlessness to take the world on its own terms. As a result of the suffering that it causes him, Chambers’s believes that testifying against Hiss makes him a Christian witness.

“They [the FBI agents] know who they were and what they did, and why, when I hear someone, like Max Loewenthal, has been shaken by fears that the FBI is a potentially dangerous secret police, I smile, suspecting that, in general, such fears measure the FBI’s effectiveness. For how can those men be dangerous to the nation who, as at present headed and organized are, in fact, the nation itself, performing its self-protective function?”

Like his scathing comments about the New Deal, Chambers’s stridently simplistic defense of the FBI has not aged well. Chambers tends to draw broad conclusions about the government based on his personal interactions with its various agencies. When the State Department fails to immediately act on his warnings about Hiss, he assumes that it is because the entire American diplomatic establishment is in league with Communism. Since the FBI was diligent in investigating Hiss, it must be because the entire organization is comprised of dedicated and politically unbiased public servants. Ironically, it was illegal FBI wiretaps that would eventually prove the truth of Chambers’s accusations.