Whittaker Chambers | |
|---|---|
 Chambers in 1948 | |
| Born | Jay Vivian Chambers (1901-04-01)April 1, 1901 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | July 9, 1961(1961-07-09) (aged 60) Westminster, Maryland, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, writer, spy, poet, translator |
| Spouse | Esther Shemitz |
| Children | Ellen Chambers, John Chambers |
| Espionage activity | |
| Allegiance | Soviet Union United States |
| Service branch | "Communist underground" controlled by theGRU |
| Service years | 1932–1938 |
| Codename | Carl (Karl), Bob, David Breen, Lloyd Cantwell, Carl Schroeder |
Whittaker Chambers (bornJay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American author, journalist, and spy. After dropping out ofColumbia University, Chambers joined the openCommunist Party in 1925. He wrote and edited for theNew Masses and theDaily Worker, before being ordered to go underground as a secret agent for theSoviet intelligence services. From 1932 to 1938 he was part of the clandestine "Ware Group", based inWashington, D.C. Disillusioned byJoseph Stalin's rule and byCommunism more broadly, Chambers defected from the Soviet spy ring and eventually found employment atTime magazine, where he rose to become a senior editor.
Chambers testified before theHouse Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. Among those whom he accused of membership in the Communist Party was a prominent Washington, D.C. lawyer and former government official,Alger Hiss. Hiss sued Chambers for slander and, in response, Chambers produced evidence of Hiss's activities as a Soviet spy while he had served in the USState Department in the run-up toWorld War II. Hiss could not be prosecuted forespionage because of thestatute of limitations, but he was convicted ofperjury in 1950 on the strength of the evidence provided by Chambers. The Hiss case contributed greatly to theRed Scare of the 1940s and 1950s and continued to attract attention and controversy for decades.
In 1952, Chambers published a memoir titledWitness, which covered his early life, his conversions first to Communism and then toChristianity, and his involvement in the Hiss case.[1] That book went on to exert a major influence uponanti-communist andconservative political thought in the US during the second half of the 20th century. From 1957 to 1959, Chambers was a senior editor atNational Review magazine. After years of suffering from poor health, Chambers died in 1961 on his farm inWestminster, Maryland.Ronald Reagan, a great admirer ofWitness, posthumously awarded Chambers thePresidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.[2]
Chambers was born inPhiladelphia,Pennsylvania,[3] and spent his infancy inBrooklyn. His family moved toLynbrook,Long Island,New York State, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school.[2][4] He was the elder of the two sons of Jay Chambers, an artist and member of theDecorative Designers, and Lahanée Whittaker, a social worker. Early on, the young Chambers chose to go by "Whittaker", his mother's maiden name, instead of his given name "Jay Vivian". He would later describe his childhood as troubled by the distant relation between his parents, which led to a temporary separation, and by the presence in their household of his mentally ill grandmother. After withdrawing from college, Chambers's younger brother Richard descended intoalcoholism and committed suicide at age 22.[5] Chambers would later describe his brother's death as one of the circumstances that attracted him tocommunism, a doctrine that "offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity, faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die."[1]
After graduating fromSouth Side High School in neighboringRockville Centre in 1919, Chambers worked itinerantly in Washington and New Orleans, briefly attendedWilliams College, and then enrolled as a day student atColumbia College.[1] At Columbia, his undergraduate peers includedMeyer Schapiro,Frank S. Hogan,Herbert Solow,Louis Zukofsky,Arthur F. Burns,Clifton Fadiman,Elliott V. Bell,John Gassner,Lionel Trilling (who later fictionalized him as a main character in his novelThe Middle of the Journey),[6]Guy Endore, andCity College student poetHenry Zolinsky.[2] Chambers's early writing attracted attention and praise from his fellow students and from faculty members, including the poet and criticMark Van Doren.[7]
In his sophomore year, Chambers joined theBoar's Head Society[8] and wrote a play calledA Play for Puppets for Columbia's literary magazineThe Morningside, which he edited. The work was deemedblasphemous by many students and administrators, and the controversy spread to New York City newspapers. Later, the play would be used against Chambers during his testimony against Hiss. Disheartened over the controversy, Chambers left Columbia in 1925.[1] From Columbia, Chambers also knewIsaiah Oggins, who had gone into the Soviet underground a few years earlier; Chambers's wife,Esther Shemitz Chambers, knew Oggins's wife, Nerma Berman Oggins, from theRand School of Social Science, theInternational Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, andThe World Tomorrow.[9]
In 1924, Chambers readVladimir Lenin'sSoviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class", a malaise from which communism promised liberation. Chambers's biographerSam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin's authoritarianism was "precisely what attracts Chambers. ... He had at last found his church."[citation needed] Chambers became aMarxist and, in 1925, joined theCommunist Party of the United States (CPUSA), then known as theWorkers Party of America.
Chambers wrote and edited for the magazineNew Masses and was an editor for theDaily Worker newspaper from 1927 to 1929.[2]
Combining his literary talents with his devotion to communism, Chambers wrote four short stories forNew Masses in 1931 aboutproletarian hardship and revolt, includingCan You Make Out Their Voices?, which was considered by critics as one of the best pieces of fiction of American communism.[10]Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitledCan You Hear Their Voices? (seeBibliography of Whittaker Chambers), staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator, his works including the English version ofFelix Salten's 1923 novelBambi, a Life in the Woods.[11][12]
Chambers was recruited to join the "communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for aGRU (Main Intelligence Directorate)spy ring headed byAlexander Ulanovsky, also known as Ulrich. Later, his main handler wasJosef Peters, who was replaced by CPUSA General SecretaryEarl Browder withRudy Baker. Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him toHarold Ware (although he later denied Peters had ever been introduced to Ware, and also testified to HUAC that he, Chambers, never knew Ware). Chambers claimed that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included the following:[13]
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Lee Pressman | Assistantgeneral counsel ofAgricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) |
| John Abt | Chief of Litigation forAAA (1933–1935), assistant general counsel of theWPA 1935, chief counsel on SenatorRobert La Follette Jr.'sLa Follette Committee (1936–1937) and special assistant to U.S. Attorney General (1937–1938) |
| Marion Bachrach | Sister of John Abt; office manager to RepresentativeJohn Bernard of theMinnesota Farmer-Labor Party |
| Alger Hiss | Attorney forAgricultural Adjustment Administration andNye Committee; moved to Department of State in 1936, where he became an increasingly prominent figure |
| Donald Hiss | Brother of Alger Hiss; employed at Department of State |
| Nathan Witt | Employed atAgricultural Adjustment Administration; later moved toNational Labor Relations Board |
| Victor Perlo | Chief of Aviation Section ofWar Production Board; later, joined Office of Price Administration atCommerce and Division of Monetary Research atTreasury |
| Charles Kramer | Employed atDepartment of Labor'sNLRB |
| George Silverman | Employed atRRB; later worked with Federal Coordinator of Transport, U.S. Tariff Commission and Labor Advisory Board ofNational Recovery Administration |
| Henry Collins | Employed atNational Recovery Administration and laterAgricultural Adjustment Administration |
| Nathaniel Weyl | Economist atAgricultural Adjustment Administration; later, defected from communism himself and gave evidence against party members |
| John Herrmann | Author; assistant to Harold Ware; employed atAgricultural Adjustment Administration; courier and document photographer for Ware group; introduced Chambers to Hiss |
Apart from Marion Bachrach, these individuals were all members ofFranklin Roosevelt'sNew Deal administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer in communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents, which were delivered toBoris Bykov, theGRUstation chief.[citation needed]
Using the codename "Karl" or "Carl", Chambers served during the mid-1930s as a courier between various covert sources and Soviet intelligence. In addition to the Ware group mentioned above, other sources that Chambers alleged to have dealt with included the following:[14]
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Harry Dexter White | Director of Division of Monetary Research at theUS. Department of the Treasury |
| Harold Glasser | Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research,US. Department of the Treasury |
| Noel Field | Employed atDepartment of State |
| Julian Wadleigh | Economist with theU.S. Department of Agriculture; later, Trade Agreements section of theUS. Department of State |
| Vincent Reno | Mathematician at U.S. ArmyAberdeen Proving Ground |
| Ward Pigman | Employed at National Bureau of Standards, then Labor and Public Welfare Committee |
Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938 even while his faith in communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed byJoseph Stalin'sGreat Purge, which began in 1936. He was also fearful for his own life since he had noted the murder in Switzerland ofIgnace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of Chambers's friend and fellow spyJuliet Stuart Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the communist cause because of the Stalinist Purges.[15]
Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow since he worried that he might be "purged". He also started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use them[how?], along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" to prevent the Soviets from killing him and his family.[1]
In 1938, Chambers broke with communism and took his family into hiding.[2] He stored the "life preserver" at the home of his wife's sister, whose sonNathan Levine was Chambers's lawyer.[1][16][17][18][19][20] Initially, he had no plans to give information on his espionage activities to the U.S. government. His espionage contacts were his friends, and he had no desire to inform on them.[1]
In his examination of Chambers's conversion from the left to the right, author Daniel Oppenheimer noted that Chambers substituted his passion for communism with a passion for God and saw the world in black-and-white terms both before and after his defection.[citation needed] In his autobiography, Chambers presented his devotion to communism as a reason for living, but after his defection, he saw his actions as being part of an "absolute evil".[21]
The August 1939Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact drove Chambers to take action against the Soviet Union.[22] In September 1939, at the urging of the anticommunist Russian-born journalistIsaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of StateAdolf A. Berle. Levine had introduced Chambers toWalter Krivitsky, who was already informing American and British authorities about Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Krivitsky told Chambers that it was their duty to inform. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.[23]
During the meeting at Berle's home,Woodley Mansion, in Washington, Chambers named several current and former government employees as spies or communist sympathizers. Many names mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already under suspicion. Some names were more significant and surprising: Alger Hiss, his brother Donald Hiss, and Laurence Duggan, who were all respected, mid-level officials in the State Department, andLauchlin Currie, a special assistant toFranklin Roosevelt. Another person named Vincent Reno had worked on a top-secret bombsight project at theAberdeen Proving Grounds.[2][24]
Berle found Chambers's information tentative, unclear, and uncorroborated. He took the information to the White House, but President Franklin Roosevelt dismissed it. Berle made little if any objection, but he kept his notes, which were later used as evidence during Hiss's perjury trials.[25]
Berle notified theFederal Bureau of Investigation of Chambers's information in March 1940. In February 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. Police ruled the death a suicide, but it was widely speculated that Krivitsky had been killed by Soviet intelligence. Worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers too, Berle again told the FBI about his interview with Chambers. The FBI interviewed Chambers in May 1942 and June 1945 but took no immediate action in line with the political orientation of the United States, which viewed the potential threat from the Soviet Union as minor compared to that ofNazi Germany.[citation needed] Only in November 1945, whenElizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, would the FBI begin to take Chambers seriously.[26]
During the Berle meeting, Chambers had come out of hiding after a year and joined the staff ofTime (April 1939). He landed a cover story within a month onJames Joyce's latest book,Finnegans Wake.[27] He started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film withJames Agee and thenCalvin Fixx. When Fixx suffered a heart attack in October 1942,Wilder Hobson succeeded him as Chambers's assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment. Other writers working for Chambers in that section included novelistNigel Dennis, futureNew York Times Book Review editorHarvey Breit, and poetsHoward Moss andWeldon Kees.[28][29]
A struggle had arisen between those, likeTheodore H. White andRichard Lauterbach, who raised criticism of what they saw as the elitism, corruption and ineptitude ofChiang Kai-shek's regime in China and advocated greater co-operation with Mao's Red Army in the struggle against Japanese imperialism, and Chambers and others likeWilli Schlamm who adhered to a perspective that was staunchly pro-Chiang, anticommunist, and both later joined the founding editorial board ofWilliam F. Buckley, Jr.'sNational Review.Time founderHenry Luce, who grew up in China and was a personal friend of Chiang and his wife,Soong Mei-ling, came down squarely on the side of Chambers to the point that White complained that his stories were being censored and even suppressed in their entirety, and he leftTime shortly after the war as a result.[30]
In 1940,William Saroyan lists Fixx among "contributing editors" atTime in Saroyan's play,Love's Old Sweet Song.[31] Luce promoted him senior editor in either summer 1942 (Weinstein[32]) or September 1943 (Tanenhaus[33]) and became a member ofTime's "Senior Group", which determined editorial policy, in December 1943.[33]
Chambers, close colleagues, and many staff members in the 1930s helped elevateTime and have been called "interstitial intellectuals" by the historian Robert Vanderlan.[34] His colleagueJohn Hersey described them as follows:
Time was in an interesting phase; an editor namedTom Matthews had gathered a brilliant group of writers, includingJames Agee,Robert Fitzgerald, Whittaker Chambers,Robert Cantwell,Louis Kronenberger, andCalvin Fixx. ... They were dazzling.Time's style was still very hokey—"backward ran sentences till reeled the mind"—but I could tell, even as a neophyte, who had written each of the pieces in the magazine, because each of these writers had such a distinctive voice.[35]
By early 1948, Chambers had become one of the best known writer-editors atTime. First had come his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on theYalta Conference in which Hiss partook. Subsequent cover-story essays profiledMarian Anderson,Arnold J. Toynbee,Rebecca West andReinhold Niebuhr. The cover story onMarian Anderson ("Religion: In Egypt Land", December 30, 1946) proved so popular that the magazine broke its rule of non-attribution in response to readers' letters:
Most Time cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear. Certain cover stories, that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill, are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers.[36]
In a 1945 letter toTime colleagueCharles Wertenbaker,Time-Life deputy editorial directorJohn Shaw Billings said of Chambers, "Whit puts on the best show in words of any writer we've ever had ... a superb technician, particularly skilled in the mosaic art of putting aTime section together."[37] Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss case broke later that year.[38]
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On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before theHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he gave the names of individuals he said were part of the underground "Ware group" in the late 1930s, includingAlger Hiss. He once again named Hiss as a member of the Communist Party but did not yet make any accusations of espionage. In subsequent sessions, Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew anyone by the name of Chambers, but on seeing him in person and after it became clear that Chambers knew details about Hiss's life, Hiss said that he had known Chambers under the name "George Crosley".
Hiss denied that he had ever been a communist. Since Chambers still presented no evidence, the committee had initially been inclined to take the word of Hiss on the matter. However, a committee member,Richard Nixon, received secret information from the FBI that had led him to pursue the issue. When it issued its report, HUAC described Hiss's testimony as "vague and evasive".[2]
BiographerTimothy Naftali describes the trial as "a battle between two queers", an allusion to the fact that both parties were supposedly homosexual. Additionally, Hiss's stepson, Timothy Hobson, alleged that Chambers's accusation was borne out of unrequited romantic feelings for Hiss.[39]
The country quickly became divided over Hiss and Chambers. PresidentHarry S. Truman, initially responded dismissively, labeling the case a "red herring".[40]In the atmosphere of increasinganticommunism, the Alger Hiss case contributed to paranoia among Republicans and movement conservatives, who would increasingly speculate as to much more widespread Communist infiltration (later culminating inMcCarthyism). Truman also issuedExecutive Order 9835, which initiated a program of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947.[41]
Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers on October 8, 1948.[2] Under pressure from Hiss's lawyers, Chambers finally retrieved his envelope of evidence and presented it to the HUAC after it had subpoenaed them. It contained four notes in Hiss's handwriting, 65 typewritten copies of State Department documents and five strips of microfilm, some of which contained photographs of State Department documents. The press came to call these the "Pumpkin Papers" since Chambers had briefly hidden the microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin. The documents indicated that Hiss knew Chambers long after mid-1936, when Hiss said he had last seen "Crosley", and also that Hiss had engaged in espionage with Chambers. Chambers explained his delay in producing the evidence as an effort to spare an old friend from more trouble than necessary. Until October 1948, Chambers had repeatedly stated that Hiss had not engaged in espionage, even when Chambers testified under oath. Chambers was forced to testify at the Hiss trials that he had committed perjury several times, which reduced his credibility in the eyes of his critics.
The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files. The independent researcher Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, sued the U.S. Justice Department in 1975 when his request for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act was denied. On July 31, 1975, as a result of this lawsuit and follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and William Reuben, the Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film turned out to be totally blank because of overexposure, two others are faintly-legible copies of nonclassified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of the State Department documents introduced by the prosecution at the two Hiss trials, relating to US-German relations in the late 1930s.[42]
That story, however, as reported byThe New York Times in the 1970s, contains only a partial truth. The blank roll had been mentioned by Chambers in his autobiography,Witness. However, in addition to innocuous farm reports, the documents on the other pumpkin patch microfilms also included "confidential memos sent from overseas embassies to diplomatic staff in Washington, D.C."[43] Worse, those memos had originally been transmitted in code, which, thanks to their presumable possession of both coded originals and the translations (claimed by Chambers, to be forwarded by Hiss), the Soviets now could easily understand.[43]
In taped recordings of President Nixon on July 1, 1971, he admitted that he had not checked the Pumpkin Papers prior to their use and he felt that the Justice Department was out to exonerate Hiss and a federal grand jury would indict Nixon's ally Chambers for perjury. The FBI continued investigating Hiss's innocence into 1953.[44][45][46][47]
Hiss was indicted for two counts ofperjury relating to testimony he had given before a federalgrand jury the previous December. He had denied giving any documents to Chambers and testified that he had not seen Chambers after mid-1936.
Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June 1949, ended with the jury deadlocked 8–4 for conviction. In addition to Chambers's testimony, a government expert testified that other papers typed on a typewriter belonging to the Hiss family matched the secret papers produced by Chambers. An impressive array ofcharacter witnesses appeared on behalf of Hiss: two Supreme Court justices,Felix Frankfurter andStanley Reed, the former Democratic presidential nomineeJohn W. Davis, and the future Democratic presidential nomineeAdlai Stevenson. Chambers, on the other hand, was attacked by Hiss's attorneys as "an enemy of the Republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect for matrimony or motherhood".[40] In the second trial, Hiss's defense produced a psychiatrist who characterized Chambers as a "psychopathic personality" and "apathological liar".[48]
The second trial ended in January 1950 with Hiss being found guilty on both counts of perjury. He was sentenced tofive years in prison.[2]
Chambers had resigned fromTime in December 1948. After the Hiss case, he wrote a few articles forFortune,Life, andLook magazines.[1]
In 1951, during the HUAC hearings, William Spiegel of Baltimore identified a photo of "Carl Schroeder" as Chambers while Spiegel was describing his involvement with David Zimmerman, a spy in Chambers's network.[49][50]
In 1952, Chambers's bookWitness was published to widespread acclaim.[2][51][52][53][54] It was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of communism.Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it "a powerful book".[55]Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.[40]Witness was a bestseller for more than a year[55] and helped to pay off Chambers's legal debts, but bills lingered ("as Odysseus was beset by a ghost").[56]
According to the commentatorGeorge Will in 2017:
Witness became a canonical text of conservatism. Unfortunately, it injected conservatism with a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism. It is the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing [William F.] Buckley's legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture. Chambers wallowed in cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment about "the plain men and women"—"my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness"—enduring the "musk of snobbism" emanating from the "socially formidable circles" of the "nicest people" produced by "certain collegiate eyries".[57]
In 1955,William F. Buckley Jr. started the magazineNational Review, and Chambers worked there as senior editor, publishing articles there for a little over a year and a half (October 1957 – June 1959).[2][58] The most widely cited article to date[59][60][61][62][63] is a scathing review, "Big Sister is Watching You", ofAyn Rand'sAtlas Shrugged.[64][65]
In 1959, Chambers resigned fromNational Review, although he continued correspondence with Buckley despite having suffered a series of heart attacks. In one letter, he noted, "I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative."[66]
In that same year, Chambers and his wife embarked on a visit to Europe, the highlight of which was a meeting withArthur Koestler andMargarete Buber-Neumann at Koestler's home in Austria.[56] That fall, he recommenced studies at Western Maryland College (nowMcDaniel College) in Westminster, Maryland.[67]
In 1930 or 1931,[68] Chambers married the artistEsther Shemitz (1900–1986).[1][69] Shemitz, who had studied at theArt Students League and integrated herself into New York City's intellectual circles, met Chambers at the1926 textile strike atPassaic, New Jersey. They then underwent a courtship that faced resistance from her mentor comrade[clarification needed]Grace Hutchins.[1] In the 1920s, she worked forThe World Tomorrow, a pacifist magazine.[1]
The couple had two children, Ellen and John, during the 1930s. While some Communist leadership expected professional revolutionists to go childless, the couple refused, a choice Chambers cited as part of his gradual disillusionment with communism.[1] His daughter Ellen died in 2017.[70][71][72][73]
In 1978,Allen Weinstein'sPerjury revealed that the FBI has a copy of a letter in which Chambers described homosexual liaisons during the 1930s.[74] The letter copy states that Chambers gave up the practices in 1938 when he left the underground, which he attributed to his newfound Christianity.[75] The letter has remained controversial from many perspectives.[76]
Chambers's conversion to Christianity was expressed by his baptism and confirmation in the Episcopal Church, but more permanently in his and his family's request for membership in thePipe Creek Friends Meetinghouse of theReligious Society of Friends (Quakers) near their farm in Maryland on August 17, 1943.[77] They remained a part of this meeting until long after his death. In 1952, Chambers wrote a memoir,Witness, that was serialized inThe Saturday Evening Post. Historian H. Larry Ingle argues thatWitness is a "twentieth-century addition to the classic Quaker journals", and that "it is impossible to understand him without taking his religious convictions into consideration".[78]
Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at his 300-acre (1.2 km2) farm inWestminster, Maryland.[79][80] He had hadangina since the age of 38 and had had several heart attacks previously.[1]
In 2011, authorElena Maria Vidal interviewed David Chambers about his grandfather's legacy. Versions of the interview were published in theNational Observer andThe American Conservative.[84][85]
In 1984, PresidentRonald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers thePresidential Medal of Freedom, for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism". In 1988, Interior SecretaryDonald P. Hodel granted national landmark status to thePipe Creek Farm.[2][86] In 2001, members of theGeorge W. Bush administration held a private ceremony to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Chambers's birth. Speakers included William F. Buckley, Jr.[87]
In January 2017, theNational Review Institute (NRI) inaugurated a "Whittaker Chambers Award"[88] for its 2017 Ideas Summit.[89]
Recipients:
In March 2019,The Wall Street Journal reported strong opposition from the family of Whittaker Chambers.[95][96] It quoted from a family statement: "All of us agree: the efforts of the two awardees run counter to the instincts and experience of Whittaker Chambers. All of us agree: their efforts have not matched his."[95] Chambers's son said that the two awardees "are way, way off the target of the man whose name goes along with the award".[95] One grandchild said, "I almost thought, well, 'Gosh, did theNational Review guys read his book?'"[95] Regarding the award to Daniel Hannan, another grandchild said, "My grandfather would have been horrified" by aBrexiteer who sought to divide the West (the European Union), as if it were a favor to the "veryStalin-like"Vladimir Putin.[95] Regarding the anti-union Mark Janus, the family noted that Chambers's wife,Esther Shemitz, had been a member of theInternational Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and that other family members were active in unions, including Chambers himself in theNewspaper Guild.[95]
In response,National Review conceded, "We don't own the Chambers name".[95] While it refused the family's request to withdraw the two awards, it did agree to discontinue it.[95] It also agreed to publish the Chambers family's statement on its website the weekend after the award.[95] AfterNational Review did not publish on time as promised, the family published themselves ("Withdraw Whittaker").[97]Christopher Buckley, author and son of William F. Buckley Jr., supported the Chambers family with a similar story about the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence: when Media Research Center awardedSean Hannity, Buckley objected, the center rescinded the award, and stopped making the award altogether.[95]
In September 2020, two senators from Carroll County to theMaryland General Assembly,Justin Ready andMichael Hough, announced their intention, reported in theCarroll County Times[98] to recommend a "Whittaker Chambers Memorial"[99] for a "National Garden of American Heroes, following anexecutive order byDonald J. Trump to create an Interagency Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes to establish that garden.[100] Two members of the Whittaker Chambers family also wrote theCarroll County Times to oppose the senators' intention:
Whittaker Chambers sought a simple life of farming the Pipe Creek Farm. He was a Quaker. His beliefs ran toward austerity and self-effacement. Quaker meeting houses stand unadorned, without monuments or statues. He would not have liked such fanfare.
The best way to remember our grandfather is to read his books. They are his memoirWitness (1952) and his later writings inCold Friday (1964). Rather than a monument, he left testimony to read.
As President Ronald Reagan said, when posthumously presenting the Medal of Freedom to him in 1984, "The witness is gone; the testimony will stand."[101][102]
In 1928, Chambers translatedBambi, a Life in the Woods, byFelix Salten, into English.[103]
Chambers's bookWitness is on the reading lists ofThe Heritage Foundation,The Leadership Institute, and theRussell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. He is regularly cited byconservative writers such as Heritage's presidentEdwin Feulner[104][105] andGeorge H. Nash.[106][107][108][109]
Cold Friday, Chambers's second memoir, was published posthumously in 1964 with the help ofDuncan Norton-Taylor, & widow, Esther Shemitz Chambers. The bookpredicted that the fall of communism would start in thesatellite states surrounding the Soviet Union inEastern Europe. A collection of his correspondence with William F. Buckley, Jr.,Odyssey of a Friend, was published in 1968; a collection of his journalism—including several of hisTime andNational Review writings, was published in 1989 asGhosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers.
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