44 Facts About Whittaker Chambers

1.

Whittaker Chambers's family moved to Lynbrook, Long Island, New York State, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school.

2.

Whittaker Chambers described his childhood as troubled because of his parents' separation and their need to care for their mentally-ill grandmother.

3.

Whittaker Chambers's father was an artist and member of the Decorative Designers; his mother was last a social worker.

4.

Whittaker Chambers cited his brother's fate as one of many reasons that he was then drawn to communism.

5.

In 1924, Whittaker Chambers read Vladimir Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it.

6.

Whittaker Chambers now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class", a malaise from which communism promised liberation.

7.

Whittaker Chambers wrote and edited for the magazine New Masses and was an editor for the Daily Worker newspaper from 1927 to 1929.

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8.

Whittaker Chambers worked as a translator, his works including the English version of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods.

9.

Whittaker Chambers was recruited to join the "communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU spy ring headed by Alexander Ulanovsky, known as Ulrich.

10.

Whittaker Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him to Harold Ware.

11.

Whittaker Chambers claimed that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included the following:.

12.

Whittaker Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer in communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents, which were delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRU station chief.

13.

Whittaker Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938 even while his faith in communism was waning.

14.

Whittaker Chambers became increasingly disturbed by Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, which began in 1936.

15.

Whittaker Chambers was fearful for his own life since he had noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of Chambers's friend and fellow spy Juliet Stuart Poyntz in the United States.

16.

Whittaker Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow since he worried that he might be "purged".

17.

Whittaker Chambers started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources.

18.

Whittaker Chambers planned to use them, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" to prevent the Soviets from killing him and his family.

19.

In 1938, Whittaker Chambers broke with communism and took his family into hiding.

20.

Whittaker Chambers stored the "life preserver" at the home of his wife's sister, whose son Nathan Levine was Chambers's lawyer.

21.

Whittaker Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.

22.

Whittaker Chambers took the information to the White House, but President Franklin Roosevelt dismissed it.

23.

Whittaker Chambers kept his notes which were later used as evidence during Hiss's perjury trials.

24.

Whittaker Chambers landed a cover story within a month on James Joyce's latest book, Finnegans Wake.

25.

Whittaker Chambers started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee and then Calvin Fixx.

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26.

Whittaker Chambers named Hiss as a member of the Communist Party but did not yet make any accusations of espionage.

27.

Since Whittaker Chambers still presented no evidence, the committee initially been inclined to take the word of Hiss on the matter.

28.

Under pressure from Hiss's lawyers, Whittaker Chambers finally retrieved his envelope of evidence and presented it to the HUAC after it had subpoenaed them.

29.

The press came to call these the "Pumpkin Papers" since Whittaker Chambers had briefly hidden the microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

30.

Whittaker Chambers explained his delay in producing the evidence as an effort to spare an old friend from more trouble than necessary.

31.

Until October 1948, Whittaker Chambers had repeatedly stated that Hiss had not engaged in espionage, even when Whittaker Chambers testified under oath.

32.

Whittaker Chambers was forced to testify at the Hiss trials that he had committed perjury several times, which reduced his credibility in the eyes of his critics.

33.

Whittaker Chambers had denied giving any documents to Chambers and testified that he had not seen Chambers after mid-1936.

34.

In 1959, after resigning from National Review, Whittaker Chambers and his wife embarked on a visit to Europe, the highlight of which was a meeting with Arthur Koestler and Margarete Buber-Neumann at Koestler's home in Austria.

35.

In 1930 or 1931, Whittaker Chambers married the artist Esther Shemitz.

36.

In 1978, Allen Weinstein's Perjury revealed that the FBI has a copy of a letter in which Whittaker Chambers described homosexual liaisons during the 1930s.

37.

The letter copy states that Whittaker Chambers gave up the practices in 1938 when he left the underground, which he attributed to his newfound Christianity.

38.

Whittaker Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9,1961, at his 300-acre farm in Westminster, Maryland.

39.

Whittaker Chambers had had angina since the age of 38 and had several heart attacks.

40.

Whittaker Chambers's son said that the two awardees "are way, way off the target of the man whose name goes along with the award".

41.

Two members of the Whittaker Chambers family wrote the Carroll County Times to say thank you but no to the senators intention:.

42.

Whittaker Chambers sought a simple life of farming the Pipe Creek Farm.

43.

In 1928, Whittaker Chambers translated Bambi, a Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten, into English.

44.

Whittaker Chambers is regularly cited by conservative writers such as Heritage's president Edwin Feulner and George H Nash.