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 (1924-37) 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 (of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party), Victor Perlo (Wallace leader and onetime key worker for the War Production Board), and Charles Kramer (onetime researcher for Florida's Senator Claude Pepper and West Virginia's Harley Kilgore)—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 (ex-Agriculture Department); 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 (43-year-old brother of 41-year-old Donald) 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 (at $20,000 a year) of the $10 million Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York (he said that John Foster Dulles had urged him to take that job).
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.