A library featuring the personal
papers of anti-communist hero Whittaker Chambers will be opened on the site of
his farm.
Chambers’ son John made the
disclosure in a conversation with this writer during a visit to the Chambers
farm last Wednesday. Chambers, who now owns the property, said that he has
started a process to build a library and catalogue the papers, now in boxes and
stacks in various locations. He said he has turned down offers from universities
interested in acquiring some of the papers because he wants to make sure all of
them are displayed and open to the public. He hopes to open the library by next
Spring.
In a major case that gripped the
nation after the end of World War II, Whittaker Chambers’ charges that top State
Department official Alger Hiss was a communist and Soviet spy were proven in
court. Chambers went on to write Witness, which not only described the
details of the case and his effort to tell the truth about communist penetration
of the highest levels of the U.S. Government, but served as a basis for the
establishment of the modern conservative movement. Chambers maintained that the
nation’s only hope of surviving was in maintaining its spiritual foundation,
belief in God, and commitment to freedom.
Chambers passed away in 1961.
Hiss died in 1996.
Witness was a major influence on
President
Ronald Reagan, who resisted the advance of Soviet communism, especially in
the collapse of the “evil empire.”
Scholars Welcome
Library
“It is of course premature at
this point to speculate about the value of Whittaker Chambers’ personal papers
without an archival review,” said G. Edward White, author of Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars. “But
the possibility of a rich depository of the papers of an individual who was so
intimately involved, in multiple ways, with Soviet espionage in the
States
is an exciting one for historians of those years.”
White, professor of law at the
University of Virginia, added that “For persons interested in the Hiss case, and
in the numerous dimensions of Soviet-American relations from the formation of
the Soviet Union in 1918 to its collapse in 1989 and the aftermath of that
collapse, Whittaker Chambers’ personal papers may prove to be a treasure
trove.”
Herbert Romerstein, former chief
investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (later the House
Internal Security Committee), said that a Whittaker Chambers library will focus
attention on a critical period in American history. “This is a man who warned us
very early of the dangers of the
and Soviet espionage,” he said. “The
for at least 10 more years. Had we listened to him back in 1939, we might have
been a lot safer during the Cold War period. We would have been able to expose
the Soviet espionage rings that functioned during the war and the Cold War.”
Chambers emphasized in Witness that these secret communists not
only served the interests of the Soviet Union but promoted the triumph of
communism in
Chambers, who became a writer for
Time magazine, had served in the Fourth Section of Soviet military intelligence
and provided information about members of the communist apparatus, including
Hiss, to Adolf Berle,
the security officer of the State Department, in 1939. But nothing much was done
with the revelations until the House Committee on Un-American Activities,
especially one of its members, Rep. Richard Nixon, examined them in 1948. Hiss
was eventually prosecuted and convicted of perjury, for denying he was a
communist and Soviet spy. But that came in 1950. By then, the statute of
limitations on espionage had run out. Hiss was given a 5-year prison term but
only served three years and eight months.
He left the State Department
in1946 to become the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
As a senior State Department
official, Hiss had laid the groundwork for the U.N. and became its first acting
secretary-general, causing it to be dubbed “the house that Hiss built.” He also
advised President Franklin Roosevelt at the
II Europe and betrayed Eastern European nations to Soviet control.
“In accusing Hiss of Communism,”
wrote Chambers, “I had attacked an architect of the U.N., and the partisans of
peace fell upon me like combat boots. I had attacked an intellectual and a
‘liberal.’”
The Farm
Today
The Whittaker Chambers farm,
located in
landmark under the Reagan Administration and President Reagan posthumously
bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Chambers.
The farm is the scene of the
famous pumpkin patch where the “pumpkin papers” had been hidden by Chambers
before being turned over to the House Committee on un-American Activities. The
“papers” were actually microfilm copies of secret and stolen State Department
documents given to Chambers by Hiss for transmission to the
proof of Hiss’s guilt. The patch today is part of the lawn.
John Chambers said he considers
himself a farmer, not a political person, but does have to spend some of his
time fighting attempts by the county commissioners to seize part of his farmland
in order to build a dam and a lake for development purposes. He vowed never to
give up that fight.
He recalled being about
13-years-old and joining his father for an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
John Chambers sat in the small studio audience and his father was grilled by
journalists about his charges against Hiss. In Witness, a young John Chambers is quoted
as later saying, “Papa, why did those men hate you so?”
It was on this program that
Chambers declared, “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may still be one.”
The
Evidence
As White observes, “Chambers’
version of the Hiss case has turned out to be correct. Previously classified
intelligence documents in
brief interval in the early 1990s, and those documents definitively resolved
what many close observers of the Hiss case had known since his perjury trials:
Hiss was a spy for the
never to acknowledge that publicly.”
The Venona Secrets, by Herbert
Romerstein and Eric Breindel, and published in 2000, notes that decoded Soviet
messages identified Hiss as working for Soviet military intelligence.
On April 5, however, the
Washington Post published an article
about a
conference. Post reporter Lynne Duke, a veteran correspondent for the paper,
said about the case, “Alger Hiss was a spy, many scholars say. He was not, say
many others.”
A caption to a Post photo of
Hiss stepson Timothy Hobson refers to Hiss “allegedly” passing secrets to the
Soviets.
Duke also claimed that “…it
has to be noted that he was never indicted for espionage.”
However, a correction to this
story has now been included on the Post website. It says, “An April 5 Style article said that Alger
Hiss was never indicted on espionage charges. The reason, it should have added,
was that the statute of limitations had run out.”
Whittaker Chambers wrote in his
book that during the time of the case the Post was “the most implacable of the
pro-Hiss newspapers” and a “staunch friend” of the traitor.
Some things never change.
Kincaid
Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.