|
127 THE ALGER HISS TRIAL
Who Was Whittaker Chambers?
Chambers attended Columbia University in New York City for three years, where he was the editor of a literary magazine. In his junior year he joined the Communist party. In 1927 he became an editor of the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. He left the Communist party in 1929, but in 1934 he rejoined and began work as an underground agent gathering intelligence. He defected from communism again in 1938 and went to work for Time magazine. Eventually he became a highly respected editor and writer and an anticommu-nist crusader. At the time of the trial, forty-eight-year-old Chambers lived in Westminster, Maryland, on a farm with his wife, Esther, and their two children, sixteen-year-old Ellen and thirteen-year-old John.
|
