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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 1937-38, during the height of the assess the troubled life of Moscow trials. In September 1939, just as Hitler smashed into Poland, Chambers By LANCE MORROW sympathetic, is patient, admirably bal- 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 was lying. bers had become a Quaker and "had was Les Miserables, But Chambers' story is larger and completely evolved a new religious- political philosophy. Its crux was the 'ir- and in the family's tdoomed house on more interesting than just that event. reconcilable issue' that underlay modern Earle Avenue in Lynbrook, New York, his For a brief, hilarious season early on, at man's spiritual crisis and also defined the mother kept an ax under the bed to even Columbia University, he campaigned for struggle against communism: 'Belief in the odds against the murderers she imag- the 1920 Republican vice-presidential God or Belief in Man.'" ined. His father, a sardonically unhappy nominee, Calvin Coolidge; but in the Chambers became a bisexual, was much given to book reviewer for TIME, long absences; his younger then rose to become the brother became an alco- magazine's controversial holic suicide. Young Vivian senior editor for foreign Chambers never went to a news, eloquently and, some dentist, and by the time he = thought, obsessively press- grew up and began calling ing his anti-communist himself by his mother's fam- views. It was in 1948 that ily name of Whittaker, his the House Committee on teeth had gone to memo- Un-American Activities and rable ruin. In his mouth, as an ambitious young Califor- in his early life's story, he nia Congressman, Richard came to believe that he har- Nixon, interviewed Cham- bored a tiny, secret civiliza- bers and then zeroed in on tion in a state of advanced the impressive, elegant decay. Hiss, who had been an ad- So the themes were viser to President Roosevelt there from childhood, and at Yalta, and helped orga- when Whittaker Chambers nize the founding of the went out into the history of U.N. By 1948 he was head of the 20th century, he found a the Carnegie Endowment huge historical correlative, a COMRADES: Chambers, left, found an ally in the young Nixon, center for International Peace. macrocosm, to match—and Hiss eventually served 314years for per- to explain—his own biography and, he mid-'20s he pinhalled left-ward and thought, to enlarge it with the prestige of joined the Communist Party, animated jury; he denied, up to his death at 92 last November, that he had ever been a com- destiny. Chambers' high school class- by an anguished convert's zeal. A melo- munist or had conspired with Chambers. mates voted him "Class Prophet." Many dramatically ernste Mensch (serious Tanenhaus does not altogether vin- years later, in the '50s, after Alger Hiss man), as he liked to say, Chambers began dicate Chambers. He writes, "The awful had been convicted of perjury and the as a useful party literate," hacking away fact, which Chambers could not admit— cold war had hardened into a nuclear as a foreign-news reporter for the dreary and never did—was that his own world stalemate, Chambers wrote his summum, Daily Worker, contributing to the New view, stripped of its lyrical refinements which he called Witness, meaning histo- Masses, and humanist vibrato, had helped bring ry's witness, a prophet looking backward. In 1932, just before the start of the McCarthyism into existence." This is That strange and sometimes brilliant , he went underground for the true, although Chambers' music was testament aside, Sam Tanenhaus has party. Based in or Balti- darker than the lyricism Tanenhaus sug- now written the best biography that more, Maryland, Chambers—code- gests. It was grandiloquent and tragic, Chambers is likely to receive, Whittaker named "Bob" and later "Karl"—made 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