Whittaker Chambers the Counterrevolutionary: An Interview with Richard Reinsch II

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS WILL ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED for his role in the Alger Hiss spy case. But in a newly published book, Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary (ISI Books, 2010), Richard M. Reinsch II makes the case that Chambers was more than just a government informant. He was an important thinker who grappled with fundamental questions about human identity and the foundations of civilization. Senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Reinsch, a program officer at Liberty Fund, Inc., last July.

Donald A. Yerxa:

Who was Whittaker Chambers? And what is the central argument of your new book about him?

Richard Reinsch:

Whittaker Chambers was a tremendously gifted writer who believed that the modern world he inhabited was fundamentally broken. Chambers located the solution to the crisis of modernity in communist ideology. Like many intellectuals of the early years of the 20th century, Chambers sought resolution in the certainty of ideology and its teleological understanding of history. He became a communist in 1925, enjoyed early success as a writer at the Daily Workerand as an editor at the New Masses, both communist-controlled publications, and was asked in 1932 to assume more clandestine duties for the party. Known as "the hottest literary bolshevik" writing on these shores, Chambers left a promising literary career to pursue his political commitments. However, we know the rest of the story. Chambers served in the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence. As one of the more gifted intellectuals in secret service, he was placed with the Ware Group (a collection of communist cells consisting of government officials and journalists) in Washington, DC. This would be where his fateful encounter with Alger Hiss, among other promising New Deal civil servants, would take place. Hiss and Chambers, along with their spouses, became friends, bonded by their common love of communism.

Chambers left the underground service in 1938 after two critical events. One was the monstrous reality of the Stalinist purges. People close to Chambers in the espionage world were called to Moscow and liquidated. There was also his religious conversion. Chambers is quite clear in subsequent writing that his encounter with God opened up for him the possibility of authentic hope and action. Chambers understood that communism, even if it was destined to succeed, as he thought, was soul-crushing. Better to lose on behalf of the truth, he reasoned.

Upon leaving, Chambers decided to divulge his activities as an agent to the federal government. Weeks after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Chambers went to the head of security at the State Department, A.A. Berle, and told most of the truth, withholding the facts of espionage conducted by his cell. The information was not acted upon by the government until 1948 when Chambers was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to corroborate the so-called blonde spyqueen, Elizabeth Bentley, and her recent revelations of Soviet espionage within the government. Chambers substantiated her allegations, added his own, and the confrontation with Hiss literally began on the first day of Chambers's testimony to HUAC. Hiss was convicted in 1950 for perjury after two federal trials. Chambers's heralded journalism career, which had flowered at Timesince roughly 1938, was over. He stood professionally and psychologically ruined.

He would regain his footing in 1952 with the publication of Witness, his exemplary memoir of conversion and defense of the truth about God, country, and man. He would remain largely in exile until his death in 1961, except for a stint at National Reviewwhere he penned several memorable essays. Witness, however, stands as one of the most enduring autobiographies penned by an American. Moreover, it provided intensity, conviction, and moral strength to a postwar American conservative movement.

The central argument in my book is that Chambers must be understood beyond his witness against Alger Hiss. Chambers believed that "the total crisis," as he called it, was the result of the West breaking faith with its central traditions of thought and religion. Chambers argued that communism itself was no aberration but a sincere working through of the dialectic of philosophic rationalism. Communism...