Supporting Testimony

1 Pr )_-.4.—. 114 k € I -4-- 3 ho BOOKS enough espionage, although the U.S. au- thorities were fairly heedless of it at the time. One of Chambers' Soviet accom- plices remembered, "If you wore a sign Supporting Testimony saying,') am a spy,' you might still not get arrested." A biography goes beyond the Pumpkin Papers to Chambers broke with the party in assess the troubled life of Whittaker Chambers 1937-38, during the height of the Moscow trials. In September 1939, just as By LANCE MORROW sympathetic, is patient, admirably bal- Hitler smashed into Poland, Chambers anced and fascinating in its rich detail. told Adolph Berle, an assistant Secretary AS A BOY. HE WAS On the great litmus question of postwar of State, about the so-called Ware Group, called by the middle politics—which of them was telling the the cadre of Washington bureaucrats, in- name that he hated, truth?—Tanenhaus is clear, Walking cluding Hiss, with whom Chambers had Vivian, or else by nick- again through all the familiar elements of collaborated as a secret agent. But noth- names that he hated the case (the Woodstock typewriter, the ing came of his revelation then. It was even more—"Girlie," Bokhara rug, the prothonotary warbler, yesterday's news. A war was on, and the or "Stinky," or "Mr. the famous Pumpkin Papers), Tanen- enemy was Germany, not Russia. Chamber Pot." haus shows. if anyone still doubts it, that By 1942, Tanenhaus writes, Cham- His favorite book Alger Hiss was lying. bers had become a Quaker and "had was Les Miserables, But Chambers' story is larger and completely evolved a new religious- and in the family's tdoomed house on more interesting than just that event. political philosophy. Its crux was the 'ir- Earle Avenue in Lynbrook, New York, his For a brief, hilarious season early on, at reconcilable issue' that underlay modern mother kept an ax under the bed to even Columbia University, he campaigned for man's spiritual crisis and also defined the the odds against the murderers she imag- the 1920 Republican vice-presidential struggle against communism: 'Belief in ined. His father, a sardonically unhappy nominee, Calvin Coolidge; but in the God or Belief in Man.'" bisexual, was much given to Chambers became a long absences; his younger book reviewer for TIME, brother became an alco- then rose to become the holic suicide. Young Vivian magazine's controversial Chambers never went to a senior editor for foreign dentist, and by the time he news, eloquently and, some grew up and began calling = thought, obsessively press- himself by his mother's fam- ing his anti-communist ily name of Whittaker, his views. It was in 1948 that teeth had gone to memo- the House Committee on rable ruin. In his mouth, as Un-American Activities and in his early life's story, he an ambitious young Califor- came to believe that he har- nia Congressman, Richard bored a tiny, secret civiliza- Nixon, interviewed Cham- tion in a state of advanced bers and then zeroed in on decay. the impressive, elegant So the themes were Hiss, who had been an ad- there from childhood, and viser to President Roosevelt when Whittaker Chambers at Yalta, and helped orga- went out into the history of nize the founding of the the 20th century, he found a U.N. By 1948 he was head of huge historical correlative, a the Carnegie Endowment COMRADES: Chambers, left, found an ally in the young Nixon, center macrocosm, to match—and for International Peace. to explain—his own biography and, he mid-'20s he pinhalled left-ward and Hiss eventually served 314years for per- thought, to enlarge it with the prestige of joined the Communist Party, animated jury; he denied, up to his death at 92 last destiny. Chambers' high school class- by an anguished convert's zeal. A melo- November, that he had ever been a com- mates voted him "Class Prophet." Many dramatically ernste Mensch (serious munist or had conspired with Chambers. years later, in the '50s, after Alger Hiss man), as he liked to say, Chambers began Tanenhaus does not altogether vin- had been convicted of perjury and the as a useful party literate," hacking away dicate Chambers. He writes, "The awful cold war had hardened into a nuclear as a foreign-news reporter for the dreary fact, which Chambers could not admit— stalemate, Chambers wrote his summum, Daily Worker, contributing to the New and never did—was that his own world which he called Witness, meaning histo- Masses, view, stripped of its lyrical refinements ry's witness, a prophet looking backward. In 1932, just before the start of the and humanist vibrato, had helped bring That strange and sometimes brilliant New Deal, he went underground for the McCarthyism into existence." This is testament aside, Sam Tanenhaus has party. Based in New York City or Balti- true, although Chambers' music was now written the best biography that more, Maryland, Chambers—code- darker than the lyricism Tanenhaus sug- Chambers is likely to receive, Whittaker named "Bob" and later "Karl"—made gests. It was grandiloquent and tragic, Chambers (Random House; 638 pages; his furtive way in the world of disap- and, as Joseph R. McCarthy proved, sub- $35). Tanenhaus' account, essentially pearing ink and microfilm. It was serious ject to ugly distortions. • TIM E. MABC.I I I4 1997 .

Load more