 He wrote extensively for the Communist press, contributing material to the "Daily Worker" (including a front page denial of the reality of the massive famine in the Ukraine in 1932–33), "Soviet Russia Today" (edited by Jessica Smith, wife first of Harold Ware and then of John Abt), and "The New Masses" (whose editors included Whittaker Chambers.Matthews' participation in organizations closely linked to the Communist Party led Richard Rovere to derisively describe Matthews as "the world's champion fellow traveler, joining Communist fronts as compulsively as a pie-eating champion eats pies," according to Richard Rovere.Although conservative public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. contended that J.