In 1948 TIME magazine editor Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) testified that in the 1930s he helped organize a Communist spy ring in the U.S. government. His accusations against State Department official Alger Hiss stunned the nation.

Jay Vivian Chambers was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia. He took his mother's family name Whittaker when he entered Columbia University in 1920. Young Chambers loved literature and had a gift for foreign languages, but severe family crises, his increasingly radical political opinions, and his lonely and brooding personality caused him to drop out of Columbia and to drift without purpose. In 1925 Chambers joined the Communist Party and attended open party meetings in New York City. By 1929 he was an editor of the party's official newspaper The Daily Worker, and in 1931 he was named editor of the New Masses, the party's literary journal.

In 1932 Communist Party officials ordered Chambers to leave his position and to...