The committee took a five-minute recess, and when the session resumed Hiss said he would reveal the name that he had earlier written on the pad.
He said, “The name of the man I brought in—and he may have no relation to this whole nightmare—is a man named George Crosley.”
Thus George Crosley, the man who never was, the real red herring of the Hiss case, made his first appearance.
Hiss spent the better part of an hour and a quarter answering questions about George Crosley. Crosley was, he said, a free-loading freelance journalist who had approached Hiss when he was counsel for the Senate’s Nye Committee on Munitions and Armaments and asked for information for magazine articles he purported to be writing on the committee’s activities. Hiss added that he frequently dealt with such requests from writers.
They had lunch a couple of times, he said, and Crosley asked for his help in finding a place to live because he wanted to bring his wife and baby down from New York for the rest of the summer while he wrote his articles. It happened that Hiss was about to move into a new house in Georgetown, with three months remaining in the lease of his old apartment. So he sublet the apartment to Crosley. When the Crosleys’ furniture was late arriving from New York, Hiss said, he even let them stay in his new house for a few days. He added that in the end Crosley had welshed on the rent, and they had parted on less than friendly terms. Since 1935, Hiss said, he had never seen or heard from Crosley.
It was hard to believe that Hiss could have forgotten and then suddenly remembered someone like “Crosley,” but we took the story at face value and questioned him about this mysterious journalist.
I asked him what Mrs. Crosley looked like, and he replied that she was “strikingly dark.” I was the only member of the Committee who had ever seen Mrs. Chambers, and I knew that this described her perfectly. Now I felt sure that Hiss had known Chambers. Whether or not he had known him as George Crosley was the only question that remained to be answered. Next, I took him through a catalogue of Crosley’s physical appearance, beginning with his height and weight. Then I asked, “How about his teeth?”
“Very bad teeth. That is one of the things I particularly want to see Chambers about. This man had very bad teeth, did not take care of his teeth.”
“Did he have most of his teeth or just weren’t well cared for?” Stripling asked.
“I don’t think he had gapped teeth, but they were badly taken care of. They were stained and I would say obviously not attended to,” Hiss replied.
Then, using Chambers’s testimony as a guide, we took Hiss back over the ground of his life in the 1930s. We asked him the same questions that we had asked Chambers, and in almost every instance we got the same answers.
For most members of the committee, the exchange that clinched the case arose late in the day over the least likely subject. I asked Hiss if he had any hobbies, and he replied that he was interested in tennis and amateur ornithology. “Did you ever see a prothonotary warbler?” McDowell asked casually.
Hiss virtually lit up with excitement. “I have, right here on the Potomac.”
“I saw one in Arlington,” McDowell said.
“They come back and nest in those swamps,” Hiss continued. “Beautiful yellow head, a gorgeous bird . . .”
There was a moment of telling silence as the significance of this exchange hit the committee.
We had promised Hiss a public confrontation with Chambers for August 25, which was still a week away. Now, however, there might be a third man in the mix—George Crosley—and with him a strange new twist had been added to the possibilities of mistaken identity. I felt that we had to have the meeting between Hiss and Chambers right away. If the whole thing were a mistake, it should be put right before any more damage was done. On the other hand, if Hiss had manufactured Crosley out of whole cloth to explain Chambers’s damning testimony, I thought that it was equally important to flush him out before he had time to fill in more details of his deception.
I stayed very late at the office trying to decide the best thing to do. At 2 A.M. I phoned Stripling and said we could not wait a week and that I wanted a session arranged for that very afternoon. He said that he had reached the same conclusion and agreed to make the necessary arrangements.
The first Hiss–Chambers confrontation took place on August 17 at 5:35 P.M. in suite 1400 of the Commodore Hotel in New York.
The suite consisted of a living room and bedroom. The living room walls were decorated, ironically, with Audubon prints of birds. We put three chairs behind a table near the window for the committee members, and placed a single chair about eight feet away facing the table. There was a sofa against the wall, to the right of the chair.
When Hiss arrived, along with a friend from the Carnegie Endowment, he was pettish and irritable. When he was finally seated in the chair facing us, I told him that instead of waiting until August 25 we had decided that the cause of truth would be better served if he and Chambers could meet right away. We had therefore brought Chambers to this suite.
I asked that Chambers be brought in. The bedroom door behind Hiss opened, and Chambers walked through.
Hiss did not so much as look around while Chambers walked up behind him and then sat down on the sofa. He stared straight ahead at the window.
I began, “Mr. Chambers, will you please stand? And will you please stand, Mr. Hiss?”
The two men now stood and Hiss turned to face Chambers; they could not have been more than four or five feet apart.
“Mr. Hiss,” I said, “the man standing here is Mr. Whittaker Chambers. I ask you now if you have ever known that man before?”
I do not think that I have ever seen one man look at another with more hatred in his eyes than did Alger Hiss when he looked at Whittaker Chambers. We opened the blinds so that there could later be no suggestion that bad light had hampered the identification.
Hiss now seemed genuinely uncertain and confused. He looked at me and said, “Will you ask him to say something?”
I asked Chambers to state his name and business. He said, “My name is Whittaker Chambers.”
With this, Hiss took a step toward him, saying, “Would you mind opening your mouth wider?”
Chambers repeated his name, and Hiss became very impatient. “I said, would you open your mouth”—and he made a gesture with his fingers to show what he wanted him to do. Looking over at me, he said, “You know what I am referring to, Mr. Nixon.” What he meant was that he wanted to look at Chambers’s teeth; Hiss’s hand was not more than six inches from Chambers’s mouth, and at that moment I wondered whether Chambers was tempted to bite his finger.
“May I ask whether his voice, when he testified before, was comparable to this?” Hiss asked. I looked around for something Chambers could read. The only reading matter in the room was a copy of Newsweek. As Chambers read from the magazine, Hiss studied his mouth intently, like a horse trader trying to guess the age of a potential purchase. Chambers paused, and Hiss said that the voice sounded a little different from the way he remembered Crosley’s, and that the teeth were obviously much improved. Therefore, he said, without further checking he could not take an oath that Chambers was Crosley.
I asked Chambers whether he had had any major dental work done, and he mentioned some extractions and a plate made by his dentist, a Dr. Hitchcock. Hiss seemed satisfied with this information and said, “That testimony of Mr. Chambers, if it can be believed, would tend to substantiate my feeling that he represented himself to me in 1934 or 1935 or thereabouts as George Crosley, a free-lance writer of articles for magazines. I would like to find out from Dr. Hitchcock if what he has just said is true, because I am relying partly—one of my main recollections of Crosley was the poor condition of his teeth.”
I said, “Mr. Hiss, do you feel that you would have to have the dentist tell you just what he did to the teeth before you could tell anything about this man?”
Hiss changed the subject and I began questioning Chambers.
�
��Mr. Chairman—” Hiss interrupted.
“Just a moment,” I said, and returned to Chambers.
When Chambers said that he had stayed in Hiss’s apartment for approximately three weeks, Hiss interrupted again and said, “Mr. Chairman, I don’t need to ask Mr. Whittaker Chambers any more questions. I am now perfectly prepared to identify this man as George Crosley.”
I have studied the testimony very closely, but I have never been sure why Hiss suddenly decided at this point to give up the charade. Just a few minutes earlier his “visual memory” had been so bad that he insisted on consulting dental charts before he could be sure of Chambers’s identity. Now, he was so emphatic about his identification that when he was asked if he were absolutely certain, he said, “If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off, I would be sure.” He still, however, claimed that he had not known that Chambers/Crosley was a Communist.
Chambers was asked whether he could make a positive identification of Hiss as the Communist he had known and in whose house he had stayed. He answered, “Positive identification.” Hiss suddenly shot up out of his chair and moved toward him, shaking his fist. His voice quavered with anger as he said, “May I say for the record at this point that I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee, without their being privileged for suit for libel. I challenge you to do it, and I hope you will do it damned quickly.”
Chambers had shown no fear at all when Hiss came toward him, but Hiss now was completely unnerved. I regretted that we had agreed to let him go early so he could keep a dinner appointment. I believe that if we had continued to press him we might have gotten even more contradictions out of him, if not an actual break. But as it was, we had quite enough.
The public confrontation between the two men came the following week on August 25, in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building. The room overflowed with people crowded in to witness the scene, and the heavy air was superheated by television lights.
Hiss used three basic tactics. At first he tried to confuse and belabor the details of the evidence. He once again brought up the importance of the dental work to explain his initial reluctance to identify Chambers as Crosley.
I said, “You have made much of the point of the bad teeth. You even asked the name of his dentist and wanted to consult with the dentist before you made the identification positive. My question may sound facetious, but I am just wondering: didn’t you ever see Crosley with his mouth closed?”
He replied, “The striking thing in my recollection about Crosley was not when he had his mouth shut, but when he had his mouth open.” With this answer the audience, which had started out on Hiss’s side but had become restive because of his constant evasiveness, burst out laughing. Chairman Thomas called for order and said to Hiss, “If you’ve got any very humorous remarks in the way of answers, call me out later on and give them to me. I always like a good laugh, but let’s not have any more laughing in here if we can possibly avoid it.” Hiss was flailing about now, and he replied haughtily, “I understood the laughter to be at the question, not at the answer, Mr. Chairman. Maybe you or Mr. Nixon would like to withdraw to tell your jokes.”
Equally ludicrous was Hiss’s performance when he was shown a photostatic copy of a document bearing his signature and was asked to identify it. He hesitated and hedged, and said that he could not do so without seeing the original.
Mundt was completely exasperated by this reply and asked incredulously, “Could you be sure if you saw the original?”
“I could be surer,” Hiss replied. Again there was laughter from the audience, and even his friends sitting in the front rows shook their heads uncomfortably.
His second tactic was to remind us of all the well-known and unquestionably patriotic people with whom he had worked and who thought highly of him. He named thirty-four, from John Foster Dulles and Harold Stassen to Cordell Hull and James Byrnes, and suggested that we consult them about his loyalty. This line of “innocence by association” did not get him anywhere with the committee, and did not seem to impress many people in the audience either.
His third tactic involved a renewed attempt to insist that the details of his and Chambers’s conflicting stories made no difference because the only real issue was whether he had been a Communist. Once again I tried to expose the false logic behind this premise and to keep the hearings firmly on the ground of establishing whether he had committed perjury when he said he had not known Chambers.
“Mr. Hiss,” I said, “you yourself have made an issue of the fact as to (1) whether you knew Chambers at all—that issue has now been resolved; and (2) how well you knew Chambers and whether you knew him as a Communist. That is the purpose of this questioning now.”
The part of Hiss’s testimony that seriously discredited him in the eyes of many was his story about his car. Chambers had testified that Hiss was such a dedicated Communist that when he bought a new Plymouth in 1936 he wanted to give his old car, a 1929 Ford roadster, to the Communist Party. It was strictly against party rules for a member of the underground to do anything that might publicly link him with the party, but Chambers said that Hiss had been so insistent that an exception was made, and an arrangement was worked out whereby the car was transferred through an intermediary.
Hiss’s version was completely different. At one point in his testimony about George Crosley, he had said, “I sold him an automobile”; at another, “I gave him the use of the car”; at another, “I let him have it along with the rent.” I pointed out these discrepancies to him, and said that it was hard to believe that he could not remember more precisely what he had done about the ownership of something as substantial as a car.
Thanks to some superb investigative work and a great stroke of luck, we accomplished the one thing Hiss had clearly never imagined possible: we found the papers he had signed transferring ownership of the car more than ten years before. The transaction turned out to have been highly unusual. Hiss had signed the car over to an automobile dealership for $25, and it had then immediately been signed over in the name of the dealership, for the same amount, to a man who turned out to have a record as a Communist organizer and who used a false address on the transfer papers. Nowhere did the name George Crosley appear; and we established that the transfer had not taken place in June 1935, when Hiss testified he had last seen Crosley, but almost a year later, in July 1936—exactly when Chambers had testified it happened.
The car transaction was incontrovertible evidence that Hiss had not been telling the truth and that he had known Chambers (or “Crosley”) far better, far longer, and far later than he had testified. After his first appearance before the committee, Hiss had been besieged by well-wishers. At the end of this testimony, however, he and his attorney made their solitary way out of the hearing room. James Reston, who knew Hiss personally and was among those who had recommended him for his job at the Carnegie Endowment, reported in the New York Times, “Throughout these questions Mr. Hiss was calm, elaborately polite, but always he answered with a caution which angered members of the committee and, in the opinion even of his friends, hurt his case.”
Chambers followed Hiss to the witness chair. When asked for his reaction to Hiss’s testimony, he said simply, “Mr. Hiss is lying.” His straightforward answers made Hiss’s appear even more evasive and misleading.
I asked Chambers whether he might not have some kind of grudge against Hiss which would explain his apparent determination to tear him down and destroy him. To me, this exchange was the high point of the hearings, both as history and as drama.
I said, “Mr. Chambers, can you search your memory now to see what motive you can have for accusing Mr. Hiss of being a Communist at the present time?”
“What motive I can have?” he asked.
“Yes, do you, I mean, is there any grudge you have against Mr. Hiss over anything he has done to you?”
“The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am worki
ng out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred,” he said. “I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.”
As soon as I had a chance to study all the testimony, I sent a four-page letter to John Foster Dulles summarizing my opinions and conclusions. I wrote: “Whether [Hiss] was guilty of technical perjury or whether it has been established definitely that he was a member of the Communist Party are issues which still may be open for debate, but there is no longer any doubt in my mind that for reasons only he can give, he was trying to keep the committee from learning the truth in regard to his relationship with Chambers.”
This was the end of the committee’s direct involvement in the Hiss case. The next step would depend on how Chambers reacted to Hiss’s challenge to repeat his statements where they would not be protected by congressional immunity, so that Hiss could sue for libel. Two days after the public session on August 25, Chambers appeared on Meet the Press. The first question was about Hiss’s challenge.
“Are you willing to repeat your charge that Alger Hiss was a Communist?” Chambers was asked.
“Alger Hiss was a Communist and may still be one,” Chambers replied.
Hiss’s friends assumed that he would sue Chambers immediately. Much to their consternation, he took no action for a month. Finally the Washington Post, one of his staunchest supporters, bluntly called his bluff in an impatient editorial declaring that Hiss himself had “created a situation in which he is obliged to put up or shut up.”
Three weeks later, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. Legally Hiss’s position seemed strong, because without corroborative evidence to back up his allegations Chambers could never prove them to any court’s satisfaction. Hiss probably assumed that if Chambers had any such proof, it would have been produced during the committee hearings.
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