Six Crises by Richard Nixon

public session when I was shown another photograph of Mr. Whittaker Chambers, I testified that I could not swear that I had never seen the man whose picture was shown me. Actually the face has a certain familiarity—I cannot recall any person with distinctness and definiteness whose picture this is, but it is not completely unfamiliar.”
    I continued to question him, trying to widen this first tiny crack in his claim that he did not know Chambers. He fought stubbornly and skillfully every inch of the way and his answers became increasingly lengthy and evasive.
    He finally began to argue with the Committee. “I have been angered and hurt,” he said to me, “by the attitude you have been taking today that you have a conflict of testimony between two witnesses—one of whom is a confessed former Communist and the other is me—and that you simply have two witnesses saying contradictory things as between whom you find it most difficult to decide on credibility. I do not wish to make it easier for anyone who, for whatever motive I cannot understand, is apparently endeavoring to destroy me. I should not be asked to give details which somehow he may hear and then may be able to use as if he knew them before.”
    I replied that the questions I had asked him and Chambers had regard to facts that “could be corroborated by third parties” and that under no circumstances would the Committee use his testimony so that Chambers would be able to “build a web” around him.
    Then he attacked on another front. He said: “The issue is not whether this man knew me and I don’t remember him. The issue is whether he had a particular conversation that he said he had with me, and which I have denied, and whether I am a member of the CommunistParty or ever was, which he has said and which I have denied.”
    But it was Hiss himself who in the public session had deliberately raised the issue of whether Chambers knew him. He had taken a calculated risk in raising that issue, and now he had to pay the price for his bold gamble.
    I pressed him on this critical point. “When Mr. Chambers appeared,” I said, “he was instructed that every answer he gave to every question would be material and that answers to a material question would subject him to perjury. Membership in the Communist Party is one thing, because that is a matter which might be and probably would be concealed. But items concerning his alleged relationship with you can be confirmed by third parties, and that is the purpose of these questions.”
    Hiss obviously recognized that he had come to the end of the road of detours. “I have written a name on this pad in front of me of a person I knew in 1933 and 1934 who not only spent some time in my home but sublet my apartment,” he said. “I do not recognize the photographs as possibly being this man. I have given the name to two friends of mine before I came to this hearing. I don’t think in my present frame of mind that it is fair to my position that I be asked to put down here a record of personal facts about myself which, if they came to the ears of someone who had for no reason I can understand a desire to injure me, would assist him in that endeavor.”
    For fifteen minutes he sparred with me and with Stripling. He kept insisting that if he answered our questions—questions to which Chambers had already replied, on the record and under oath, in great detail—Chambers would somehow learn what his answers had been and use this information against him.
    At this point, Ed Hébert burst out with what to Hiss must have felt like a blockbuster. Hébert, a Democrat from Louisiana, was respected by both Republicans and Democrats in the Congress because, while he always fought hard for his party’s positions, he had made it known on several issues in the past that he was no rubber stamp for Democratic administrations. He had been a member of the