In April 1939, ex-communist underground courier Whittaker Chambers was hired by Time magazine to review books for Henry Luce’s flagship publication. Chambers began his journey into communism in the mid-1920s. In the early 1930s, he joined the underground, accepting and passing secret U.S. government documents from traitorous New Dealers to his Soviet handlers in Washington, D.C. He broke with communism in 1937-38, then joined the staff at Time, where for the next decade he fought a one-man literary Cold War against communism at home and abroad, including an effort to warn the country about the Chinese communists during World War II and after.

Chambers in his literary masterpiece Witness described his colleagues at Time as “basically kind and intensely well-meaning people,” but “as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl.” The writers at Time with a few exceptions, he wrote, knew “little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time.” Chambers was determined to write about foreign news, and when given that opportunity wrote stories “with a tone clearly unfriendly to Communism,” he recalled.
Many of his colleagues at Time were not pleased. He was soon switched from foreign news to art and cinema stories, but even there Chambers’ anti-communism manifested itself. Henry Luce took a liking to Chambers and his work. Luce would standby Chambers when, as an editor, Chambers rewrote stories from Time’s foreign news writers that he believed were pro-communist or insufficiently anti-communist.
His first editorial position at Time was in the Books section. Shortly before his promotion, Chambers had been interviewed by FBI agents regarding his knowledge (which he previously disclosed to Adolph Berle of the State Department) of communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration. Chambers identified several communists and communist sympathizers in the government, including Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, but neither the State Department nor the FBI succeede...