Converting Whittaker Chambers

This paper will integrate the sexual, religious, and political histories of one of the Cold War’s most infamous figures, the ex-spy and informant Whittaker Chambers. In 1938, Chambers escaped from the Soviet underground, swore off homosexuality, and found God—or so he told agents from the FBI in a sworn statement in February of 1949. Thenceforth, he claimed, he remained a patriotic American citizen, a man of faith, and a devoted husband and father. The confession occurred while Chambers was immersed in a perjury trial as an expert witness, testifying against former State Department employee Alger Hiss, who, Chambers insisted, had been a fellow spy for the Soviet Union. Chambers disclosed his sexual history to the FBI because he feared that Hiss’s lawyers would use allegations of homosexuality to discredit him as a witness, and he hoped to alert the prosecution to the facts of his sexual past. (Hiss’s lawyers did not introduce the topic at trial, but parsing Chambers’s sexual past preoccupied Hiss’s supporters for decades after Hiss’s conviction.) In his statement to the FBI Chambers offered details about clandestine encounters with dozens of anonymous men during the years that he was an operative in the underground. He insisted that his sexuality had nothing to do with his politics, yet he intimated that Christianity was instrumental to his political journey. When Chambers penned his memoir, Witness (1952), he emphasized the transformative power of faith to redeem an ideologically fallen man. Numerous ex-spies offered similar conversion narratives, interlacing Christian conversion and political transformation, while concurrent sexual adaptations remained visible but undertheorized. How are we to make sense of Chambers’s various conversions and self-transformations? How did Cold War anxieties about subversion, loyalty, and authenticity shape ex-spies’ narratives of sexuality, faith, and politics?