Free Six Crises by Richard Nixon

am relying partly, one of my main recollections of Crosley was the poor condition of his teeth.”
    I thought the comedy had gone far enough and said, “Before we leave the teeth, 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 realized he had overplayed the hand. After a long moment of silence, he changed the subject. “I would like a few more questions asked. . . . I feel very strongly that he is Crosley, but he looks very different in girth and in other appearances—hair, forehead, and so on, particularly the jowls.”
    Any of our last lingering doubts that Hiss had known Chambers were erased by this incredible, and in some ways almost pitiful, performance. All his poise was gone now. He knew that his daring maneuver of trying to deny that he had ever known Chambers had ended in disaster—but he was not finished. With a look of cold hatred in his eyes, he fought like a caged animal as we tried to get him to make a positive identification for the record.
    But with his temper no longer under control, he did not fight as skillfully as he had before. When I asked him about the alleged rental agreement with Crosley, he said that he had not been paid “a single red cent in currency.” He had forgotten that just twenty-four hours earlier he had testified that Crosley had paid him $15 or $20 in cash. He still insisted that he had given the car to Crosley as part of the rental agreement—just thrown it in because he had no use for it—without requiring Crosley, a man he knew so slightly, to pay anything extra.
    He recalled now that Crosley, with his wife and child, had spent two or three days with him and Mrs. Hiss in their P Street house before moving into the Twenty-eighth Street apartment, and that on one occasion Crosley had ridden from Washington to New York with him and Mrs. Hiss in their car. He had made some small loans to Crosley, amounting in all to $35 or $40, some even after Crosley had failed to pay the rent. On several occasions, Crosley had stayed overnight in the Hiss home because “he couldn’t get a hotel reservation.”
    The longer he testified, the more apparent it became that despite his original protestations, his acquaintance with Crosley was far from casual. On the basis of his own testimony, he had known him very well.
    Stripling brought this point home most effectively. He said, “I certainly gathered the impression when Mr. Chambers walked in this room and you walked over and examined him and asked him to open his mouth, that you were basing your identification purely on what his upper teeth might have looked like. Now, here’s a person that you knew for several months at least. You knew him so well that he was a guest in your home, that you gave him an old Ford automobile and permitted him to use, or you leased him, your apartment, and . . . the only thing you have to check on is this denture. . . . There is nothing else about this man’s features which you could definitely say, ‘this is the man I knew as George Crosley’—that you have to rely entirely on this denture. Is that your position?”
    Forced into a corner, Hiss again made a damaging admission. “From the time on Wednesday, August 4, 1948, when I was able to get hold of newspapers containing photographs of one Whittaker Chambers, I was struck by a certain familiarity in features. When I . . . was shown a photograph by you, Mr. Stripling [on August fifth], there was again some familiarity [in] features.”
    Stripling reminded Hiss that in the public session on August 5, he had left the directly contrary impression with the members of the Committee and the press.
    But Hiss still refused to take an oath that Chambers was Crosley. “He may have had his face lifted,” he protested.
    Finally, he requested