Chambers , close colleagues , and many staff members as of the 1930s helped elevate '' TIME '' – " interstitial intellectuals , " as historian Robert Vanderlan has called them . Colleague John Hersey described them as follows : '' Time '' was in an interesting phase ; an editor named Tom Matthews had gathered a brilliant group of writers , including James Agee , Robert Fitzgerald , Whittaker Chambers , Robert Cantwell , Louis Kronenberger , and Calvin Fixx ... They were dazzling . Time 's style was still very hokey — " backward ran sentences till reeled the mind " — but I could tell , even as a neophyte , who had written each of the pieces in the magazine , because each of these writers had such a distinctive voice . By early 1948 , Chambers had become one of the best known writer-editors at '' Time '' . First had come his scathing commentary " The Ghosts on the Roof " ( March 5 , 1945 ) on the Yalta Conference ( in which Hiss partook ) . Subsequent cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson , Arnold J. Toynbee , Rebecca West and Reinhold Niebuhr . The cover story on Marian Anderson ( " Religion : In Egypt Land " , December 30 , 1946 ) proved so popular that the magazine broke its rule of non-attribution in response to readers ' letters : Most Time cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear . Certain cover stories , that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill , are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers . In a 1945 letter to '' Time '' colleague Charles Wertenbaker , Time-Life deputy editorial director John Shaw Billings said of Chambers , " Whit puts on the best show in words of any writer we 've ever had ... a superb technician , particularly skilled in the mosaic art of putting a '' Time '' section together . " Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss case broke later that year
Yalta Conference
Yalta Conference
Whittaker Chambers