The congressional investigation of
Communists turned last week from a story of espionage to a story of
Communists in high places in Government. The course was changed by the
testimony of a soft-voiced ex-Communist, who sat down before the House
Un-American Activities Committee and calmly told a tale of high powered
plotting in New Deal days.He was Whittaker Chambers, 47, for 13 years a member and “paid
functionary” of the Communist Party, a strong anti-Communist since
1937. In 1939, two years after his break from Communism, Chambers
joined the editorial staff of TIME, is now a senior editor.As a member of the party, he told the committee, he was a courier
between headquarters in New York City and the party's Washington
“apparatus,” a group of Communists who occupied key observation posts
in the U.S. Government. The apparatus was organized, said Chambers, by
Harold Ware, a son of the Communist Party's 86-year-old veteran, Ella
Reeve Bloor, and took its orders from “the head of the whole
underground U.S. Communist Party”—J. Peters.*The Shocker. Chambers gave a list of men he described as members of the
apparatus. Three of them—John Abt , Victor Perlo , and Charles Kramer —were among
those previously named by Courier Elizabeth Bentley TIME, Aug. 9>.
Chambers had other names: Lee Pressman, onetime New Deal legal eagle,
later C.I.O. counsel and currently one of Henry Wallace's left-hand men;
Nathan Witt, onetime secretary for the National Labor Relations Board;
Henry Collins ; Donald Hiss, who left the
State Department in 1945. Chambers had one more name, and it was a
shocker: Alger Hiss. Harvard-trained Alger Hiss went to Washington as secretary to the late Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, became one of the brightest of the New Deal's
young men. He was an assistant counsel with the famed Nye Committee,
which investigated the munitions industry and was largely responsible for
the Neutrality Acts. For ten years, until 1946, he had been one of the
State Department's most trusted men.He was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. He had been secretary
of the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences at which the United
Nations ras brought to being. Then he had quit to become president of the $10 million Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in New York .On the Rise. About 1936, Chambers related, Peters and others decided that
some members of the apparatus were “going places in the Government,” and
they were divorced from other Communist contacts. Said Chambers: “I
should perhaps make the point that these people were specifically not
wanted as sources of information. These people were an elite group, an
outstanding group, which, it was believed, would rise to positions—as
indeed some of them did—in the Government, and their position . . .
would be of very much more service to the Communist Party.” Alger Hiss
and Lee Pressman, said Chambers, were among the elite.
