—WHITTAKER CHAMBERS.

Knowing the nature of the marxist-leninist 'ideology' and the character of is exponents, one expresses the wish that the files be carefully safeguarded. — (WPT)

From The Revolt of the Intellectuals, Whittaker Chambers, 1941

By 1938, U.S. Communists could count among their allies such names as Granville Hicks, Newton Arvin [etc. etc]

With the exception of Granville Hicks, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism. How should they know that Lenin was the first fascist and that they were cooperating with the party from which the Nazis had borrowed all their important methods and ideas?

( Time, 6 January 1941 )
Ghosts on the roof :
selected journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959
Edited and with an introduction by Terry Teachout.
Washington, D.C. : Regnery Gateway, 1989, pp. 60-61.

From Witness, Whittaker Chambers, 1952

. . . I held certain facts to be self-evident on the basis of almost every scrap of significant foreign news: 1) the Soviet Union was not a "great ally"—it was a calculating enemy . . .  2) the Soviet Union was not a democracy ; it was a monstrous dictatorship: 3) the Communist International had been dissolved in name only ; . .  4) the Soviet Union was not a thin-skinned, underprivileged waif that must at any cost be wheedled into the family of free nations, but a toughly realistic world power whose primary purpose at that moment of history was conquest of the free world ; 5) the indispensable first step in that conquest was the control of Central Europe and China ; 6) the Chinese Communists were not "agrarian liberals," but Chinese Communists, after the Russian Communist Party, the Number One section , , ,

History has proved that, in the main, these views were right—at least, I think, no soldier in Korea would seriously question them. But, in 1945, when it was most important to assert them because there was then still time to avert some of the catastrophe . . . those views were anathema. . . .  The files are there for those who have forgotten.

I had scarcely edited [the Foreign News for a month] when most of Time's European correspondents joined in a round-robin protesting my editorial views and demanding my removal. They were seconded by a clap of thunder out of Asia, from the Time bureau in Chungking. Let me list the signers of the round-robin, or those among Time's foreign correspondents who supported it . . .  Foremost among them were: John Hersey, John Scott (son of my old teacher of . . . social revolution, Scott Nearing), Charles C. Wertenbaker, the late Richard Lauterbach, Theodore White. Those are the top names; there were others. . . .

The fight in Foreign News was not a fight for control of a seven-page section of a newsmagazine. It was a struggle to decide whether a million Americans more or less were going to be given the facts about Soviet aggression, or whether those facts were going to be suppressed, distorted, sugared or perverted in the exact opposite of their true meaning. . . .

( pages 407-8 )

New York : Random House, 1952,>

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/321/Ghostsonth.htm
. . . -First came the 1978 publication of Allen Weinstein's authoritative book, Perjury : The Hiss-Chambers Case . . .

-Then, in 1984, Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

-Five years later came this collection of the journalism of Whittaker Chambers, Ghosts on the Roof, which began the process of restoring his literary reputation.

-The fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a flood of government secrets from both US and Russian files which exposed both the extent and success of Soviet efforts to penetrate the US government, media and Hollywood in the 30's & 40's and peace groups in the subsequent decades.

-In 1995, the VENONA intercepts were revealed, with their decoded messages confirming that the Rosenbergs and Hiss, among others, had been Soviet agents.

-Finally, the publication in 1997 of the first serious biography, Whittaker Chambers : A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus, and the truly bizarre moment on Meet the Press when Clinton CIA nominee Tony Lake could not bring himself to declare Alger Hiss guilty, even fifty years after the fact, forced a major re-examination of Chambers, his legacy, and the legacy of those who were simply unable to accept his charges no matter the evidence . . .

 

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040806.html