About me: - http://www.WhittakerChambers.org
In 1925, after reading Lenin at Columbia, I joined the American Communist Party. Seven years later, I accepted to go underground. During the 1930s, I led a Washington espionage ring that sent information to the Soviet GRU. By 1937, I could accept Stalinism no longer.
In 1938, I defected. I hid out, first in Florida and then back in Baltimore a few blocks from my home as a communist -- in plain view. Other defectors turned up murdered or "rendered" back to Moscow for trial and execution. I was one of the lucky ones: I survived.
During these years I translated many books (including Bambi from German). In 1939, I went to the FBI and told what I knew. I entered "normal" life for the first time as an adult. I got a job at TIME Magazine. I worked there for the next nine years. I rose to the post of senior editor. In 1948, I became the first person ever named as author of a TIME article (about Marian Anderson).
A few months later in August 1948, I received a subpoena and testified before the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). I named names. Most people whom I named pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Two died within days of being named (one by suicide).
One man whom I named claimed he had never heard of me and that he had never been a communist. That man had been my only friend in the party. His name was Alger Hiss.
Within days, Hiss backed down from his denial. Hiss and I confronted each other in the first-ever televised congressional hearing. Within the month, when I confirmed my claim in public on Meet the Press, Hiss sued me for libel.
In December of that year, I produced a batch of papers and microfilm, my "life preserver" in case the Party ever came after me. Hiss' case against me was suspended. Various Republican and Democratic factions in various agencies (the Justice Department, HUAC, etc.) fought over whether to indict Hiss or me for perjury. A young congressman on HUAC named Richard Nixon seemed to win out.
The Federal Government brought two charges of perjury against Hiss in 1949. In the second of two trials, a jury convicted him in 1950. Hiss went to jail -- and spent the rest of his life asserting his innocence. Hiss died in 1996.
Both Hiss and I found our lives ruined by the Hiss Case. I had left TIME Magazine. Hiss lost his job as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I managed to publish a best-selling autobiography, Witness, which helped pay off legal debts. I worked briefly as an editor at the new magazine National Review. Effectively, however, I retired to my Maryland farm. Having suffered angina since the age of 37, I succumbed to my seventh heart attack in 1961.
Posthumously, President Reagan awarded me the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. President George H. W. Bush put my farm on the National Historic Trust. My name pops up in the American press every third or fourth day. The Left villifies me; the Right beatifies me. Both use my name for their own ends.
Who I'd like to meet: - My grandchildren and great-granchildren
- Nelson Mandela
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Eugene McCarthy
- Robert Kennedy
- Brian Lamb
- Ronald Reagan
