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5 unusual facts about Whittaker Chambers


Gustav Regler

He wrote about his Spanish experiences in his novel The Great Crusade (New York, 1940), introduced by Ernest Hemingway, translated by Whittaker Chambers.

Manfred Stern

(These details come from Witness, the 1952 memoir of Whittaker Chambers.

Martin Tytell

Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 based on evidence that extensively relied on claims that documents passed to Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers had been created on a typewriter Hiss and his wife had owned, after the prosecution showed that the typewriter's unique combination of printing pattern and flaws matched those on the documents in question.

Prothonotary Warbler

The Prothonotary Warbler became known in the 1940s as the bird that, in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, established a connection between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

Sherman Adams

Among the heated conflicts within the Eisenhower administration were the best method to handle flamboyant personalities such as U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and anti-Communist crusader Whittaker Chambers.


Arthur Krock

For example, amid the HissChambers and Coplon spy cases and the investigation of David E. Lilienthal's management of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Krock observed: The persons whose names have entered the trials and investigations, fairly and unfairly, include none who was affiliated with the Republican party ...

Boardman Robinson

Some of his students include Bill Tytla, Edmund Duffy, Jacob Burck, Russel Wright, Gerhard Bakker, and Esther Shemitz (who soon after married Whittaker Chambers: both Burck and Shemitz contributed illustrations to The New Masses as their mentor did.)

Carl Binger

In the 1950 Alger Hiss trials prosecuting attorney Thomas Francis Murphy cross-examined Binger who served as a defense witness by analyzing Whittaker Chambers's activities and writings.

Dunked in the Deep

In 1948, Time managing editor Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist spy-turned government informer, accused Alger Hiss of being a member of the Communist Party and a spy for the Soviet Union.

John Herrmann

John Theodore Herrmann was the person who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss.

The God that Failed

Richard Crossman, the British MP who conceived and edited the volume, at one point approached the famous American ex-communist Whittaker Chambers about contributing an essay to the book.


see also

Richard Lauterbach

Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers (New York: Random House, 1997), 182.

The God that Failed

Writers who subsequently picked up the term have included Whittaker Chambers, Clark Kerr, David Edgar, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Podhoretz.