In April 1939, ex-communist underground courier Whittaker Chambers was hired by Time magazine to review books for Henry Luce’s flagship publication. Chambers began his journey into communism in the mid-1920s. In the early 1930s, he joined the underground, accepting and passing secret U.S. government documents from traitorous New Dealers to his Soviet handlers in Washington, D.C. He broke with communism in 1937-38, then joined the staff at Time, where for the next decade he fought a one-man literary Cold War against communism at home and abroad, including an effort to warn the country about the Chinese communists during World War II and after.
Chambers in his literary masterpiece Witness described his colleagues at Time as “basically kind and intensely well-meaning people,” but “as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl.” The writers at Time with a few exceptions, he wrote, knew “little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time.” Chambers was determined to write about foreign news, and when given that opportunity wrote stories “with a tone clearly unfriendly to Communism,” he recalled.
Many of his colleagues at Time were not pleased. He was soon switched from foreign news to art and cinema stories, but even there Chambers’ anti-communism manifested itself. Henry Luce took a liking to Chambers and his work. Luce would standby Chambers when, as an editor, Chambers rewrote stories from Time’s foreign news writers that he believed were pro-communist or insufficiently anti-communist.
His first editorial position at Time was in the Books section. Shortly before his promotion, Chambers had been interviewed by FBI agents regarding his knowledge (which he previously disclosed to Adolph Berle of the State Department) of communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration. Chambers identified several communists and communist sympathizers in the government, including Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, but neither the State Department nor the FBI succeeded in convincing FDR to pay attention to Chambers’ information. (READ MORE: The Roosevelt-Truman Democrats Lost China)
James Burnham, later a colleague of Chambers at National Review, wrote that communists thrived in Washington in the 1930s and 1940s under the “careless scepter of Franklin Roosevelt.” (READ MORE: James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut)
In 1944, Chambers was selected to edit the Foreign News section of Time. In Witness, he recalled that period (it lasted a year) as “one of the most strenuous years of my life.” “My assignment,” he wrote, “sent a shiver through most of Time’s staff, where my views [about communism] were well known and detested with a ferocity that I did not believe possible until I was at grips with it.” It was, Chambers wrote, “a weekly struggle” in which most of Time’s foreign news correspondents protested Chambers’ editorial views and demanded his ouster.
Writers like John Hersey, John Scott, Charles Wertenbaker, Richard Lauterbach, and Theodore White, wrote Chambers, sent in stories that depicted the Soviet Union as a “benevolent democracy of unaggressive intent” and the Chinese communists as “agrarian liberals.” These writers were not communists, they were “self-deluded” liberals — the same self-deluded liberals who later sided with Hiss after Chambers accused him of being a communist and a traitor. Those liberal writers at Time, Sam Tanenhaus explained in his biography of Chambers, “were convinced that Chambers was paranoid, demented, or an outright fascist.” Luce, to his credit, stood by Chambers.
In addition to rewriting pieces submitted by Time’s foreign correspondents, Chambers wrote his own articles and essays (often unsigned) that warned about Soviet and later Chinese communist’s aggressive imperial intentions. Here, writes Tanenhaus, “Chambers was not reporting. He was explaining, reading political developments through the lens of Leninism” which threw a light on events that “was stunning in its clarity” and “grasped better than … any other American of the day that the postwar world would be formed in the crucible of ‘power politics.’”
In late 1944, a debate started in the United States about the best future for China, which had been an important ally of the United States in its war against Japan. Theodore White, among other writers at Time, emphasized Chiang Kai-shek’s corruption as a stumbling block to a postwar democratic China while painting a less demonizing portrait of Mao Zedong’s communists. Other liberal and some pro-communist writers for other U.S. publications lauded the communists as “agrarian reformers” while overlooking communist atrocities and downplaying their imperial ambitions. Chambers would have none of this in the Foreign News section, rewriting White’s copy to present Chiang as the best hope for avoiding a communist takeover of China.
The article in question appeared in Time under the title “Crisis,” in which Chambers predicted that a communist victory in China would result in a Sino–Soviet alliance that would pose a threat to U.S. security. Here, Chambers combined his knowledge of communism with a shrewd appreciation of Eurasian and global geopolitics. Invoking Walter Lippmann’s analysis in U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Chambers wrote that “there are two powers for which the U.S. must always go to war when their existence is threatened. One is Britain. The other is China.” White was so angry that he subsequently resigned from Time.
Then in the March 5, 1945 issue of Time, less than a month after the much-heralded (at the time) Yalta Conference, Chambers wrote “The Ghosts on the Roof,” which was a fable in which the ghosts of Czar Nicholas II and his family (murdered by the communists after the Bolsheviks seized power) descended on the roof of the Livadia Palace to praise Stalin’s great imperial achievement and note the folly of America and Britain to the Muse of History. Many at Time were shocked at Chambers’ treatment of our “gallant Soviet ally,” blaming Chambers’ “irrational zeal,” wrote Tanenhaus.
Chambers’ one-man war against communism reached its zenith with the Hiss case when all of the forces of self-deluded liberalism and more sinister forces were arrayed against him when he accused Alger Hiss (the Ivy League-educated former Supreme Court clerk, former assistant secretary of state, and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) of being a communist agent and spy.
Chambers courageously withstood the slings and arrows of Hiss’s defenders (which included Dean Acheson and for a time Harry Truman) through two trials that ended with Hiss’s conviction for perjury. Chambers retreated to his Maryland farm and wrote Witness, one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century and a still relevant analysis of what is at stake in the West’s battle with communism.
Chambers understood that the struggle between the Judeo–Christian West and communism was really a struggle between faiths — faith in God versus faith in Man. Or as Chambers memorably put it:
The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure in the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals.
Today, that vision is the vision of Xi Jinping and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. It is also the vision of many well-meaning liberals in the West who have lost their faith in God in our increasingly secular age. Our current struggle with China, therefore, is not just about geopolitics. It is also about the deeper conflict that Whittaker Chambers wrote about so eloquently in his one-man war against communism.
READ MORE from Francis Sempa:
The Roosevelt-Truman Democrats Lost China
CNO Lt. Commander: Don’t Ignore China’s Long-Term Threat
Michael Anton: Trump’s ‘George Kennan’ Pick for Cold War II
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