BY JAMES P. CANNON
The decision to give a "lifetime achievement" Oscar to
director Elia Kazan has reopened debate on those like him who
gave names to the House Un-American Activities Committee
during the McCarthyite witch hunt. In 1952 James P. Cannon,
national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote a
series of articles for the Militant about another star snitch,
Whittaker Chambers. Below we reprint major excerpts of one of
these articles, "False Witness," first published in the June
9, 1952, Militant. It is included in Notebook of an Agitator:
From the Wobblies to the Fight against the Korean War and
McCarthyism by James P. Cannon. The book is copyright (c) 1958
Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
Experience over the ages has taught most people that it is imprudent to trust the unsupported word of a police informer against another person or persons who may have been associated with him. There is always a suspicion that he may be lying to save his own skin, or otherwise to benefit at the expense of others. So far as criminal cases are concerned, this well- grounded skepticism has been crystallized into the legal maxim that the testimony of an accomplice is inadmissible as evidence without independent corroboration. This principle of law should be extended to impose a double caution with regard to the testimony of an informer who switches sides in a social conflict and stands to benefit from his apostasy.
The many perjuries admitted by Whittaker Chambers under cross-examination in the [Alger] Hiss case1 raised an uneasy doubt in the public mind over the value of any of his testimony. Is his evidence against communism any more trustworthy? There seem to be widespread doubts about this too; and Chambers has now offered a book of 800 pages in an effort to dispel them. This book, Witness, is being highly touted by the beneficiaries of privilege and their literary apologists who badly need a believable witness against communism. The unprecedented advertising and publicity campaign behind it is designed to make an impression by sheer volume. Chambers is recommended as a "sincere" witness whose numerous admitted lies in the past should not he held against him, and as an authentic ex-Communist who has finally seen the light and now recognizes that the present social system, being designed by God, shouldn't be tampered with.
Chambers' record, however, does not justify such a recommendation. He does not tell the truth about his time in the Communist Party, nor about the reasons for his long delay in breaking with it, nor about the motivation for the break when it occurred in 1938. Witness is an attempt to rewrite the actual record in terms more suitable to his role of convert touched, as he claims, by the finger of God and, by special dispensation, getting his reward without waiting for the next world.
I wrote last week that Chambers "was never a Communist as he pretends, but merely a Stalinist who consciously practiced the Stalinist methods of double-dealing and betrayal". Formally speaking, the first half of that sentence was a slight exaggeration. The second half, however, needs no amendment. Chambers joined the Communist Party in 1925 when the process of Stalinization was far from completed, and a party member had a right to think he was a Communist, or wanted to become one. But American communism was then already in the grip of an internal crisis which had its source in the creeping degeneration of the Soviet Union. As in all political organizations, the principal issues at stake, first latent but eventually clearly defined, could not be resolved otherwise than by factional struggle.
Every party member worth his salt took a position and took part in these factional conflicts. Chambers piously explains that he stood aloof from all the factions and stayed away from unit meetings in order to avoid involvement. That says a lot about the seriousness of his membership in the Party, but somewhat discredits his present claim to give an accurate report of what happened there. He took no risks and accepted no consequences. When American communism was fighting for its life in the factional struggle of those years, he was a bystander. Chambers does not write about the experiences of those times with the authority of a participant.
He took no part; but as the factional struggles came to climax and split, he had an interest and sympathy which he lacked the moral courage to act upon. Even worse, he befouled his sympathy with a petty betrayal. Shortly after we were expelled from the Party in 1928 because of our support of Trotsky and the Russian Opposition, Chambers furtively expressed interest and sympathy with our cause. We had an important document in German - Trotsky's appeal to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern -which we wanted to publish. [Max] Shachtman showed Chambers the document. He read it, expressed interest and offered to translate it for us so that we could publish it in The Militant.
Shachtman gave him the copy, the only copy we had, and that's the last we ever saw of it. We waited impatiently for the translation to be completed, but heard nothing from Chambers. Finally Shachtman called him up and asked when the translation would be ready. Chambers answered that he had turned it over to the Central Committee of the CP. A small incident, perhaps, but more revealing for the judgment of a man's character than 800 pages of self-serving apologia.
In the fateful years 1936-1937, the years of the Moscow Trials and Purges, when the old guard Bolsheviks, who had really borne witness for communism, were being framed and slaughtered because they were Communists, Chambers held his peace and continued to serve the dominant power - the Stalinist murderers and their GPU. Now that he has gone whole hog in his "conversion" to another power, he tries to wash out the truth about that awful time and to exculpate himself in the process. He dumps the Stalinists and the Trotskyists, the traitors and the revolutionists, the murderers and the victims, into one sack. The issues between them, drawn by a great river of blood, were "merely quarrels over a road map". Going beyond the boundaries of shame, this "witness" for God's justice even excuses the slaughter of the irreproachable Old Bolsheviks. "Acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly." That's what Chambers says now.
But that's not the way I heard it the first time. Chambers knew the truth about the Moscow Trials. And that is what bothered him, as it was bound to bother anyone with a glimmer of communist conscience. This is clear even from his own back- written, doctored-up account of his first reaction to the trials. Listing the names of the most prominent victims, he inadvertently remarks: "The charge on which they were one and all destroyed, the charge that they had betrayed their handiwork, was incredible. They were the Communist Party." The Moscow Trials, not the afterthoughts about God and the FBI, are what moved Chambers finally, after two years of intellectualistic mulling and moping, to break with the Stalinist apparatus in 1938.
We knew about it first for the simple reason that, after his break with the GPU, he came to us first - to us and to others who had cooperated to expose and discredit the Moscow Trials, those who had spoken out against that infamy when he had remained silent in the service of its monstrous authors. He didn't go to the Church, or the Quaker Meeting House, or the FBI; he came to us. He expressed, and no doubt felt, a great admiration for Trotsky as the incorruptible representative of the communist faith which Chambers imagined that he also professed. The question was: What to do about it?
We did not represent a power of the present - only a program by means of which a future power can and will be created through struggle against any odds whatever. We didn't have much to offer him but a part in the struggle for ideas as a member of an isolated and persecuted minority. Chambers didn't have what it takes for that....
There, in a nutshell, is the life story of Whittaker Chambers. All that is left out of his autobiography which purports to be a full and true confession. That is why the whole book is a lie. It is not a "witness" against communism, but against Chambers and all his ilk, and against a social system in decay which can find no better heroes.