I began to break with Communism in 1937. I deserted from the Communist Party about the middle of April, 1938.
The first thing a reader has to understand is that for Whitaker Chambers everything has to do with the threat of communism. His name may not be as familiar now as Joseph McCarthy (although McCarthy apparently is not at all familiar either), but he was just a big a player in the overhyped, overzealous, overdone Red Scare that characterizes the 1950’s every bit as much as Eisenhower and Elvis.
…there I again heard the name that was to be fateful for the world and for me—the name of Alger Hiss. I learned that he was an American, a lawyer, an exceptional Communist for whom Peters had an unusual regard, and that he was a member of the Ware Group. He was about to leave, or had just left, the A.A.A., where he had been assistant general counsel, for the Senate munitions investigating committee.
The truth is that the name Whitaker Chambers will forever be mentioned in the same breath as Alger Hiss. The two men long since lost the simple pleasure of an identity independent from another; where one name is spoken the other will be surely follow. The title of the book is a reference to his relationship as it was Chamber who acted a witness providing evidence (questionable now as much as it was then) that Hiss had infiltrated the U.S. Government as a spy in the service of Soviet communism. These two are not the only names that are inextricably linked to this dark passage of American history.
“There is one man on the Committee who asks shrewd questions. Richard Nixon of California.”
Richard Nixon was just a newly-elected freshman congressman of no distinction when Chambers began making his accusations against Alger Hiss. As a member of the unconscionably powerful House committee charged with investigating the pathetically ambiguous “Un-American Activities” Nixon became the prime mover and shaker on the House supporting Chambers. The case would serve to make Nixon perhaps second only to Sen. Joseph McCarthy as the most flagrant and aggressive anti-communist on the Hill. Nixon was far more shrewd a politician than McCarthy, however, and managed to outlast the inevitable pushback. While McCarthy’s fall was as rapid and dramatic as his rise, Nixon was politicking himself into the Vice Presidency and, eventually of course, the Presidency. He is the third member of the triumvirate associated with the Hiss case whose name will always be mentioned alongside that if Chambers.
A hollow pumpkin was the perfect hiding place for the microfilm. Investigators might tear the house apart. They would never think to look for anything in a pumpkin lying in a pumpkin patch.
The most famous photograph associated with Whitaker Chambers or the Alger Hiss case is one in which Chambers does not even appear. It is, instead, a photo of a hollowed-out pumpkin. The most damning evidence that Chambers had against were two strips of developed microfilm comprised of photos taken of official State Department documents which Hiss had allegedly passed onto Chambers as a fellow member of a communist cell. The pumpkin almost naturally became an object of satirical humor in media reports, but also called the validity of the evidence into question as well as the reliability of Chambers. Chambers was clearly quite bothered by the ridicule but nevertheless staunchly defends the pumpkin incident as “my decisive act in the Case. For when the second part of the divided evidence, the microfilm, fell into the hands of the Committee, it became impossible ever again to suppress the Hiss Case.”
