The Witness and the Spy | Hiss, Chambers, and the Rosenbergs

It is August 3, 1948, and a former Communist Party member named Whittaker Chambers walks into a House committee room in Washington, D.C., and says something that no one in the room ever expected to hear. Alger Hiss is a spy.

The room gasps. Hiss was not some offhand bureaucrat. He had helped organize the United Nations and attended Yalta. He had been, for much of the 1940s, one of the most respected foreign policy figures in the American government: Harvard-educated, polished, and credentialed, exactly the kind of man that postwar Washington was built from. Chambers, who was now a senior editor at Time magazine, was saying that Alger Hiss had spent years passing classified State Department documents to Soviet intelligence.

When Hiss is called to respond, he comes in confidently like a man with nothing to hide. He sits down at the microphone, straightens his jacket, looks directly at the committee,  and states that he has never been a Communist. He has never passed documents. He is not sure he has ever met this man at all. He says it simply. Calmly. Hiss knows he does not have to raise his voice to be believed.

But at the far end of the dais, a first-term congressman from California named Richard Nixon is not satisfied. He has a notepad and is writing. He looks up from his notes, waits to be called, and begins to speak.

The World That Produced Whittaker Chambers

To understand the Hiss case, you have to understand something about the 1930s that still rings true today: the Communist Party of the United States was, for a certain kind of collegiate, rich, and untested American, genuinely attractive. 

The Depression had broken faith with capitalism in ways that are hard to overstate. Banks failed. Factories closed. Breadlines stretched around city blocks. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union appeared, from an impossible distance, to be doing something different: industrializing rapidly, distributing resources, building a society organized around collective purpose rather than individual profit. The fact that this picture was propaganda, almost entirely constructed, and that Stalin's regime was simultaneously starving millions in Ukraine and murdering political opponents by the hundreds of thousands, was either unknown to most American observers, or dismissed as American/capitalist propaganda. To communists then and now, only their opposition is capable of propaganda.

Whittaker Chambers was recruited into the party in the late 1920s and moved, over the following decade, from open party membership into underground work which consisted of networks of couriers and handlers who moved information between sympathetic government employees and Soviet intelligence. He was, by his own later account, a true believer. Like so many useful pawns of the ruling communist class, he thought he was helping build a better world.

By 1938, he had stopped believing. What changed him was the purges: Stalin's systematic elimination of old Bolsheviks, military officers, intellectuals, and party members who had served the revolution faithfully and were now being shot or sent to labor camps on fabricated charges. Chambers broke with the party, went into hiding for a period fearing he would be killed, and eventually rebuilt his life as a journalist. He became, in the 1940s, a committed anti-Communist, convinced that the movement he had served was not a path to human liberation but a totalitarian meat grinder that minced everyone who entered it.

He carried his knowledge of what he had done, and who he had done it with, for a decade before he said any of it publicly.

Alger Hiss

Alger Hiss was different. Where Chambers was rumpled, unstable, and self-dramatizing, Hiss was smooth, composed, and polished. He had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes and had served in the New Deal. He had a wife from a good family and a house in Georgetown and the kind of career trajectory that Washington rewarded without question.

When Chambers named him before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, Hiss did not collapse. He came back and denied everything in his flat, calm, and confident tone He said he had never been a Communist, had never passed any documents to Chambers, and was not even sure he had ever met the man. Hiss even challenged Chambers to repeat the accusation outside the protection of congressional immunity so he could sue him.

Chambers accepted the challenge, and produced something that changed everything.

From inside a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm, retrieved by investigators who had come to treat his story with considerable skepticism, Chambers produced microfilm. Rolls of it. He also produced handwritten summaries, in a handwriting that analysts matched to Alger Hiss.

The statute of limitations on espionage had expired and as a result, Hiss could not be charged with spying. He was charged instead with two counts of perjury, for lying to a grand jury about his relationship with Chambers and his knowledge of the document transfers. The first trial ended in a hung jury and the second, in January 1950, ended in conviction, where he was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

He maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. He died in 1996, still insisting he had been framed and the debate over his guilt became one of the defining ideological fault lines of the American twentieth century that still exist today: a test of whether you trusted the institutions that convicted him or the institutions that had employed him.

The Congressman Who Watched

There is one more figure in the Hiss case who deserves mention, because the case made him, and he would spend the next quarter century making history: Richard Nixon, then a first-term Republican congressman from California, was one of the few members of the House Un-American Activities Committee who refused to drop the Hiss investigation.

Nixon believed Chambers was telling the truth and pushed for the microfilm examination. He pressed the investigation forward when senior members of the Truman administration were publicly dismissing Chambers as a troubled fantasist and Hiss as the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign. When the conviction came, Nixon's instincts were vindicated, and he became nationally known.

The political lesson Nixon took from the case, that Communist infiltration was real, that liberal institutions were complicit in dismissing it, and that those who pressed the issue could be rewarded, shaped everything that came after.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

The Hiss case was still consuming Washington when, in February 1950, the British announced the arrest of Klaus Fuchs.

Fuchs was a German-born physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He had been, the whole time, passing detailed technical information about the atomic bomb to Soviet intelligence. His confession led, through a chain of names and contacts, to a courier named Harry Gold, who led to a machinist named David Greenglass, who led to his brother-in-law: Julius Rosenberg.

Julius Rosenberg was thirty-two years old, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had been a member of the Communist Party and worked as an engineer for the Army Signal Corps until 1945, when he was fired after investigators discovered his party membership. By the time the FBI arrested him in June 1950, he had been running a network of agents passing scientific and military intelligence to the Soviet Union for almost ten years.

His wife Ethel, was arrested two months later. She was the daughter of a Manhattan socialite family, trained as a singer, a quiet and composed woman who had been active in labor organizing before her marriage. The government's case against her was considerably thinner than the case against Julius, the key evidence being testimony from her brother David Greenglass and his wife, who said Ethel had typed up notes on atomic bomb specifications.

It was later revealed that David Greenglass had given that testimony to protect his own wife, who had also been present. Decades later, he admitted he had lied.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in March 1951. The judge, Irving Kaufman, sentenced them both to death. He said, from the bench, that their crime had caused the Korean War and was responsible for the deaths of fifty thousand Americans. This was a statement so historically overreaching that even prosecutors found it difficult to defend, but it was said, and it was in the record, and it shaped the public understanding of what the Rosenbergs had done.

The case became an international issue. Even Albert Einstein called for clemency. Pope Pius XII asked President Eisenhower to spare their lives. Protests erupted in Paris, London, and across Latin America. Supporters argued that the evidence against Ethel in particular was insufficient, that the death sentence was disproportionate, and that the entire prosecution was contaminated by anti-Communist hysteria and by antisemitism.

Eisenhower refused clemency, and on June 19, 1953, Julius Rosenberg was executed using the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Ethel was next and died much harder than Julius. The first round of current did not stop her heart, and the procedure had to be repeated. They left behind two sons, Michael and Robert, who were ten and six.

Their sons spent the rest of their lives fighting to restore their parents' reputations. They changed their last name to Meeropol, after the couple who adopted them. They wrote books and gave interviews and pursued every available avenue to establish that their parents, and especially their mother, had been wrongly condemned.

The evidence confirmed that Julius Rosenberg had been an active intelligence agent who passed significant information, including technical data about radar, aircraft, and other military technologies, to the Soviet Union. Whether the atomic bomb information his network provided materially accelerated the Soviet program remains a matter of genuine historical debate.

Regarding Ethel, communications mentioned her once, in passing, in a way that indicated Soviet handlers knew who she was. It did not establish that she was an active participant in espionage. Most historians who have studied the communications believe she knew what her husband was doing and supported it. Most also believe the death sentence was not proportionate to what the evidence showed she had done.

What These Cases Did to the United States

It is tempting to treat the Hiss case and the Rosenberg case as separate stories, seperated by different facts and different politics. However, they were not separate. They occurred during the same years and through the same anxious national consciousness, feeding the same fear that the institutions Americans trusted had been infiltrated, that the people who looked most reliable were not, and that the line between loyalty and treason had become almost impossible to identify.

That fear was rational. Soviet espionage in the United States was real and had been extensive. The party networks that ran through New Deal Washington and wartime defense agencies had, in fact, included people passing information to Moscow. The evidence, which would not be public for decades, confirmed a level of infiltration that, when the full picture finally emerged, was sobering even to skeptics who had spent their careers dismissing anti-Communist investigators as paranoid.

But the response to that fear produced its own damage. The atmosphere generated by the hearings, the Hiss conviction, the Rosenberg execution, and the rise of Joseph McCarthy, swept up not only actual spies but hundreds of people whose only crime was having attended a party meeting in 1936 or signed a petition in favor of Spanish loyalists or read the wrong books. Careers were destroyed and reputations ruined. People were not allowed to hold different opinions. Others were blacklisted from industries and fired from government jobs based on association, rumor, and the willingness of scared colleagues to name names to investigators.

The damage ran in both directions. The genuine espionage that men like Julius Rosenberg had committed gave credibility to accusations that had no credible basis. In short, it turned the masses into mobs. The abuse of the accusers made it easier for people to dismiss evidence that was real to the point that a person could not evaluate any individual claim on its merits because the context had been so thoroughly poisoned by both sides.

Alger Hiss was released from prison in 1954 and spent the next four decades trying to clear his name. He worked as a stationery salesman for a period, lectured at colleges, and wrote a memoir. He gave interviews and never admitted guilt. He died in 1996 at ninety-two, still maintaining that Chambers had fabricated the evidence and that he had been the victim of a political persecution.

Whittaker Chambers wrote a memoir, Witness, published in 1952. It is one of the great American political books of the twentieth century, regardless of what you believe about the man who wrote it. The book stands a vast, dark, brilliantly argued account of what it meant to serve a totalitarian movement, and then turn against it. He died in 1961, exhausted and convinced that the West was losing its confrontation with Communism. Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.

The Rosenberg sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, have never stopped seeking full exoneration for their mother. In 2015, David Greenglass's daughter told a reporter that her father had gone to his grave believing he had done the right thing by testifying against his sister. The Meeropol brothers did not agree.

What makes these cases endure, more than seventy years on, is not primarily the question of guilt or innocence, though that question still has power. The reason these cases remain topics of debate is they bring to the forefront the problem of how a democracy responds to a real threat without becoming, in the process of responding, the thing it is trying to quash.

The Soviet Union was a real adversary. Soviet espionage was real. The atomic bomb information that passed through those networks reached Moscow and directly influenced their creation of atomic weapons. These are not abstractions. Neither is the son who was ten years old whose parents went to the electric chair, or the man who lost his government career because he knew someone who knew someone who had once attended the wrong meeting.

History does not always give us clean verdicts. Instead, it provides blueprints of what to do and what not to do, the reasons for both, and the actual effects of the decisions that were made by people like all of us. The Hiss case and the Rosenberg case shows us two things that can be true at once: the country trying to protect itself from genuine danger, and discovering, in that attempt, how much damage such protection could do.