He looked as unprepossessing as a bakera calm, pudgy little man who kept an old pipe in the pocket of his untidy blue serge suit. But his looks were deceiving. Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor of TIME, a Quaker, was a brilliant intellectual. Before 1938, he had been a Communist courier for the Soviet "apparatus" in Washington, D.C.
Sitting in the jammed, floodlighted congressional committee room last summer, he made his enormous, softly worded accusationthat Alger Hiss, a former high State Department official, had also been a Communist. The nation was shocked. Hiss shocked it again. He...