Whittaker Chambers – 1901-1961

Born Jay Vivian Chambers in Philadelphia, this left-wing journalist took his mother’s maiden name, Whittaker, in the 1920s. In August 1948, he testified to a committee of Congress that State Department official Alger Hiss had been a fellow member of a Communist spy ring in Washington, D.C., during the 1930s. The accusation and the Hiss trial that followed became the focal points of an American “red scare” that persisted through the mid 1950s, brought the anti-Communist “witch hunts” of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and precipitated the rise of then-Congressman Richard M. Nixon.