Like any creature that knows it is meant to die, I simply went inert in an animal sense. I deliberately numbed and blacked out the soul so that only the body could be torn; for the body can endure any agony up to death. But the soul cannot endure the violation I have described, which is probably the most terrible in life, without dissolving in a liquefaction of panic.
Thus, when I look back upon my part in the Hiss Case, I see not myself, but someone who is not I, wandering under impersonal pressures in mazes where I am performing acts to which I submit only because they are imposed upon me, like an animal that is loaded on a truck to be carried off to the horror of stockyards, to be run into pens with other resistless animals, goaded into a public ring where shouting voices are heard, but scarcely felt, and staring eyes are felt, but scarcely seen. In the end, in ways it cannot comprehend, the creature may sometimes find itself beyond that horror, not dead, but not wholly alive because life has become little more than a recurring disbelief that it is not death. Something like that was my mood throughout the two years of the Hiss Case. This weakness did not imply an infirmity of wilL
I did not wish to testify before the House Committee. I prayed that, if it were Cod’s will, I might be spared that ordeal. I knew that I could simply keep silent about any names that I was not directly questioned about, with a good chance that I would not be asked about any that Elizabeth Bentley had not already mentioned. I could minimize whatever I had to say, in any case, so that it amounted to little. I knew that I was simply back-stopping Miss Bentley, that hers was the current testimony. The things that I had to tell were ten years old and I had only to let the shadows, dust and cobwebs conspicuously drape them to leave the stand unscathed.
I could not do it. I believed that I was not meant to be spared from testifying. I sensed, with a force greater than any fear or revulsion, that it was for this that my whole life had been lived. For this I had been a Communist, for this I had ceased to be a Communist. For this the tranquil strengthening years had been granted to me. This challenge was the terrible meaning of my whole life, of all that I had done that was evil, of all that I had sought that was good, of my weakness and my strength. Everything that made me peculiarly myself, and different from all others, qualified me to testify. My failure to do so, any attempt to evade that necessity, would be a betrayal that would measure nothing less than the destruction of my own soul I felt this beyond any possibility of avoiding it.
For the moment had arrived when some man must be a witness, and so had the man. They had come together. The danger to the nation from Communism had now grown acute, both within its own house and abroad. Its existence was threatened. And the nation did not know it For the first time, the Committee’s subpoena gave me an opportunity to tell what I knew about that danger, not for the special information and purposes of this or that security agency, however important its work. I knew that the F.B.I., for example, could not initiate action against Communism. By law it could only gather information which the Justice Department might, or might not act on, as it saw fit. I felt at the time that the Amerasia case had been smothered. I believed that the Arthur Adams case had been smothered.31 I knew that the Berle notes were not acted on seven years after I had given the information. I now know a little more about what I was then completely ignorant of—the problems of prosecution, the nature of evidence, the difficulties of proof, the long labors of investigation. Then I only felt, like many others, that the Communist danger was being concealed from the nation. The Committee in effect challenged me to spell out that danger where all men could hear it.
I, unfortunately, was the man who could speak. The necessity seemed clear to me. My intention was clear, too. I did not wish to harm, more than was unavoidable, those whom I must testify against, of whose lives in the years since I had left them I knew next to nothing, many of whom might no longer be Communists. I would not, therefore, testify to espionage against them.
But I must testify that they had been concealed Communists and that an underground had existed in the Government. That was the one indispensable fact. They and I must stand up in face of the nation and confess what we had been that it might take alarm, throw off its apathy and skepticism, see that the enemy really was embedded in its midst, and be given time to act and save itself. That was the least that we could do in atonement. That we must do. That my testimony would force the others to do, but that was all that it would force them to do. Moreover, I believed that most of them would do it, and that when the alarm had been sounded, and people had passed on to more pressing things, most of the witnesses would lapse back into their routine lives.
I did not believe that I would. From the moment when I had heard Sentner’s voice on the telephone, I felt, with a certainty that I could neither explain nor shake off, that I was doomed.
III
The offices and hearing room of the House Committee on Un-American Activities are in the old House Office Building, just south of the Capitol. They are at the end of a long marble hall, rather dark, with many heavy oak official doors shutting out the light. Behind those doors are the hushed offices of congressmen.
About nine o’clock on the morning of August 3, 1948, Frank McNaughton led me into this impressive tunnel. We had come early to avoid the press. But a cluster of newsmen and sightseers had come earlier still, and were already clumped outside the Committee’s door. For the first time, I heard, as a spatter of voices, what was soon to become a familiar cry: “Here comes Chambers.” For the first time in my life, too, I felt, with an inward wince, the stare of a crowd. I winced not so much because the stare was inquisitive, but because it was impersonal. It came from eyes only. It was impossible to tell whether they were the eyes of friends or enemies.
I forced myself to go inert under that staring impact, an effort that I tried to cover with an impassive smile. Thus, at the door of the House Committee, I ceased to be a person; I became the target that I was to continue to be for two years. “The impassive Chambers,” “the smiling Chambers” became catch-phrases which were turned against me by those whose self-interest it was to see in my effort at composure only heartlessness—as if a man had ever found any other refuge than impassivity when roped to a public stake.
We slipped into the Committee’s outer office, where it was light (from many windows) and quiet (from a thick carpet), though many anonymous secretaries were moving about, and men were talking in discreet little groups. All were strangers to me. Frank McNaughton presently guided me into a side office and introduced me to a man who rose rather wearily from behind an impressive desk. This was Robert Stripling, the Committee’s chief investigator. He issued me an indifferent hand to shake. His professionally impervious dark blue eyes made a leisurely trip from my face to my midriff to my shoes and back to Frank McNaughton. They betrayed neither the slight uneasiness nor the surprise that he was feeling—uneasiness at subpoenaing an editor of Time, surprise, which he had just expressed privately to McNaughton, that I had not dodged the subpoena. In a Texas drawl, he said: “McNaughton says you have a statement you want to read.” I did not then know that, after its experiences with hostile witnesses, the Committee viewed any statement with loathing. I gave Stripling my statement which he promptly pocketed, feeling with relief, I sensed, that the witness could not be very bright or he would not have surrendered the document.
At that time, I knew even less about the Committee than it knew about me. I knew personally just one member of its staff—Ben Mandel, its able chief researcher. But I had met the former business manager of the Daily Worker perhaps twice, briefly, in the last ten years.
I knew by name only four of the Committee’s members: Congressmen Mundt, Nixon, Thomas and Rankin. I had no impression at all of the first two and only the vaguest impression of the last two. In fact, I had only the vaguest impression of the Committee as a whole. I never read the reports it issued from time to time, and which occasionally reached my desk at Time. I almost never read a news story about it. I am a selective reader of the
press, and among news I seldom read was crimes, disasters, scandals, the U.N., and news about the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I had had enough Communism in my life.
But, working at Time, it was impossible not to hear some characterization of the Committee, a characterization which I could have summed up in one word: outrageous. In greater detail, the notion was this: The Committee’s members were the least intelligent in Congress because no decent man wanted to serve on it. They were uncouth, undignified and ungrammatical. They were rude and ruthless. They smeared innocent people on insufficient evidence or no evidence at all. They bullied witnesses and made sensational statements unfounded in fact. When, occasionally, they did seem to strike a fresh scent, they promptly lost it by all shouting at once or by making some ridiculous fumble.
I must confess that these charges did not particularly predispose me against the Committee. Uncouthness and rudeness, when unconscious, do not especially disturb me. I have lived at practically all levels of life, and I early observed that, while education and manners vary isothermically, native intelligence is about the same everywhere. One of the acutest political minds I ever knew was a workingman who had mastered political manipulation and motive, but never quite mastered his knife and fork. I was even less impressed by such shrieks of outraged innocence uttered by some of the Committee’s witnesses as sometimes reached my ears. Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: “My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.” That is the tone of innocence. Nor did the Committee’s fumbles cause in me the same boundless mirth that they caused some of my enlightened colleagues. Fumbles can be expected whenever any agency undertakes to investigate a conspiracy which is organized for the precise purpose of causing fumbles. What I had filed away in my mind was that the Committee was a force that was fiercely, albeit clumsily, fighting Communism.
Actually, in my prolonged experience with the Committee, none of those charges proved to be true. There was one Committee member so variable that he seemed consistent only in whirling on the pin of one or two fixed ideas. Even so, I thought that I could understand how a man of his time and place came to be impaled on those ideas. With that exception, the Committee acted, at least in the Hiss Case, with intelligence and shrewd force, despite great pressures not to act at all.
I watched the Committee’s members behave with conspicuous patience and composure in the face of repeated, insolent provocation that no body of men in civil life would have endured. My own treatment by the Committee was uniformly courteous and deeply understanding. One of its members, Congressman (now Senator) Richard M. Nixon, and his family became my valued friends. With two others, Congressman (now Senator) Karl E. Mundt and Congressman John McDowell, a most cordial feeling developed. For Congressman F. Edward Hébert (of Louisiana), the most unsparing of interrogators, I developed a respect based upon what I felt to be his firm grasp of the human factors in the Hiss Case, and his equally firm grasp of reality that made him at last extremely skeptical of the antics of Alger Hiss.
In general, the Committee’s treatment of Alger Hiss, in the face of his blistering sarcasm and repeated charges against it of double-dealing, was so exquisitely correct that I was sometimes moved to wonder with Hamlet: “Why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?”
But, on the morning of August 3rd, that experience was all ahead of me.
IV
A little knot of Committee members soon gathered in Stripling’s office. I was introduced, among others, to Congressman Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, who, in the absence of Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, was the Committee’s acting chairman. He informed me that he and I must step into the hall for news photos. I had never before witnessed this ordeal of 20th-century public life. Congressman Mundt and I stood side by side, looking a little uneasily at each other. The photographers scrambled, crouched for angle shots, focused, flashed, thrust burnt-out flash bulbs into their pockets. There were short cries, between a command and a plea: “Let ’em read something!” “Make out he’s showing you something, Congressmanl” “Just one more!” “Just one more!” “Just one morel”
Fully photographed, Congressman Mundt and I joined the rest of the Committee in the Committee’s hearing room. It was a long, narrow, rather bare room. Across the front, and around one comer, ran a raised platform and desk, at which sat the Committee and its staff. I sat below in the first of a number of witness chairs I was to occupy—durable wooden chairs designed to cause whoever sits in them the maximum discomfort.
An executive session began. A Committee member, probably the acting chairman, questioned me about my knowledge of Communists in the United States Government. As nearly as I can remember, I sketched the organization of the Ware Group. Congressman Rankin broke in to ask darkly if there were any other ex-Communists at Time, Inc. I assured him that there were (of the two I had in mind, one has since died and the other has resigned).
Robert Stripling remarked that he had a statement that I wanted to read, that it was a good statement and that he thought I should be permitted to read it. Somebody said: “This witness seems to answer questions in a conservative way. I move that we go into open session.” With the horror of a man whom the sea is closing over, I heard the Committee agree. The executive session had lasted only a few minutes.
There was a buzzing surge toward the Ways and Means Committee room. Congressmen were engulfed in the pushing crowd in the corridor. In tow to Donald T. Appell, a Committee investigator, I was propelled along with the rest. Above the crowd rose the informative cries of scrambling newsmen: “The Ways and Means room. Open session. They’re going into open session.”
I found myself face to face with Congressman Rankin. To me that day, the mutable member from Mississippi was friendly and gracious. To put me at ease, he asked: “Were you born in the state of Maryland, sir?” I said that I was born in Philadelphia. I thought that I heard the Mason and Dixon line drop between us with a clank.
The Ways and Means Committee room seemed to me enormous. I was never to see it except when I was under great tension and so perhaps I exaggerate its size. On either side of a central aisle, there were banks of seats, somewhat like a spacious funeral chapel. The seats were beginning to fill up with a shuffle of spectators. In this vast auditorium, before the company in those seats, I realized, in the dull way a man realizes that it is his turn to be shot next, that I must in a few moments give my testimony. I wondered how I could do it. I wondered how, with my low-pitched voice, I could even make myself heard.
Appell had steered me to an inconspicuous seat at the back of the hall. He was a brisk, pleasant young man who had served with the Navy in the Pacific. He was to play a more important role in my life than either of us could foresee. It was to Appell, late one night several months later, that I was to hand the historic contents of a hollowed pumpkin. Now he tried to raise my spirits by pointing out the technological triumphs of the preparations going on at the front of the room. It was hot. But I was sweating chiefly from nervousness. And what Appell pointed out only made me sweat more. Across the front of the Ways and Means Committee room ran a platform where the Committee members sat. Each member’s name, on a brass plate, stood in front of him. A great public circus was being rigged of which I was clearly to be the speaking center. On the window side of the room, to the left of the witness chair, batteries of newsreel cameras and lights were being installed. Microphones were set up (though there was none for me). More and more people crowded into the seats. The press was filling the sections to the right and left of the witness chair.
Presently, Appell was leading me down the center aisle of the room to that chair—the same witness chair in which Elizabeth Bentley had sat three days before. The crowd’s anonymous stare locked on me. The cameras whirred. I was sworn in. The room and the people in it sank into a blur. A dead man could scarcely have b
een more divided from the living world than I felt. But, unlike a dead man, I must speak. In a voice that barely carried to the straining ears in the room, I began the testimony which must continue in effect until I die.
Robert Stripling put the routine first questions. “Will you state your full name?”
“My name is David Whittaker Chambers.”
“Mr. Chambers, will you raise your voice a little, please?”
“Where and when were you born?”
“I was born, April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.”
“How long have you been associated with Time magazine?”
“Nine years.”
“Prior to that time, what was your occupation?”
“I was a member of the Communist Party and a paid functionary of the party.”
“Mr. Chambers, people at the press table still feel they can’t hear you. Will you please speak a little louder?”
My naturally quiet voice, further constricted by the effort of a public appearance, was soon to become a common point of attack against me. Among people who felt instinctively that I was maligning Alger Hiss, my voice seemed guilty evidence that I could not bear to utter my own falsehoods. I suppose that, if my voice were naturally resonant, the charge would have been bluster. It was not until the second Hiss trial that I overcame that handicap, and received an accolade. I was waiting in the corridor behind the courtroom during the first recess, when the court reporter appeared. “Man,” he said with deep approval, “you should open a school to teach people how to testify.” In time, a man becomes almost anything.
Witness Page 66