Whitaker Chambers Quote

Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American author, journalist, and spy. He joined the open Communist Party in 1925, writing and editing for the New Masses and the Daily Worker, before being ordered to go underground as a secret agent for the Soviet intelligence service. From 1932 to 1938 he was part of the clandestine "Ware Group", based in Washington, D.C. Disillusioned by the actions of Joseph Stalin's regime and by Communism more broadly, Chambers defected from the Soviet spy ring and eventually found employment at Time magazine, where he became a senior editor.
Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 and was sued for libel by Alger Hiss, whom Chambers had publicly accused of membership in the Communist Party. In response to that lawsuit, Chambers produced evidence of Hiss's activities as a spy while he had served as a high-ranking official in the US State Department during the run-up to World War II. On the strength of the evidence provided by Chambers, Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, although the case continued to attract attention and controversy in the following decades.
In 1952, Chambers published a memoir titled Witness which covered his early life, his conversions first to Communism and then to Christianity, and his involvement in the Hiss case. That book went on to exert a major influence upon anti-communist and conservative political thought in the US during the second half of the 20th century. From 1957 to 1959, Chambers was a senior editor at National Review magazine. He died in 1961 in his farm in Westminster, Maryland. Ronald Reagan, a great admirer of Witness, posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.