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In 1939 Chambers also joined TIME as a book reviewer, rose steadily to the post of senior editor, directed the foreign news and books sections, and wrote numerous cover stories on divergent personalities ranging from Marian Anderson to Reinhold Niebuhr to Albert Einstein. A man who loved self-dramatization, Chambers attracted a group of fiercely loyal friends with his nonconformist personality, his brilliant—though often high-flown—writing style, the surprising spread of his scholarship, and, more important, his apocalyptic view of the world, which saw all mankind as threatened by moral decay.
In particular, ex-Communist Chambers saw the threat of Communism clearly at a time when it was fashionable to talk of the Russians as nothing more than earnest Socialists. As early as March 5, 1945, hard on the heels of the Yalta Conference, TIME published a prophetic "political fairy tale" by Chambers that was called "The Ghosts on the Roof," in which he accurately predicted a ruthless, imperialistic Russia about to launch an offensive to conquer the world. Chambers' concern with evil could also take other forms. In a fanciful and humorous article for LIFE, Chambers pictured the Devil as a sort of cosmic underground agent—an embodiment of evil in disguise.
Howling Whirlwind. At that time, confessed, contrite ex-Communists were no rarity in the U.S. But Chambers was something else—a former Communist spy —and his inside knowledge of the party's machinations drove him on. Public revelation of Chambers' past broke almost by chance: in 1948 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after investigators kept stumbling across his name in the statements of other wit nesses. Chambers testified freely that Alger Hiss had been a Communist, but said nothing at first about his past involvement in espionage. As the whirlwind began to howl over the Hiss Case, Chambers resigned from TIME in December 1948.
Hiss's flat denial that he had ever known Chambers began the long series of dramatic hearings and trials that could hardly have been better cast by Hollywood. Chambers, the emotional brooder, who claimed among his friends a New Orleans whore named One-Eyed Annie, v. Hiss, the cool, well-bred Harvard Law School graduate who had been secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the famed "confrontation scene" in Room 1400 of Manhattan's Commodore Hotel, Hiss peered at Chambers' teeth as though examining a horse, listened to his accuser's low-pitched voice, and admitted recognizing the man—but only as a freelance writer named George Crosley whom he had briefly befriended in the '30's.