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If he had known Crosley that well, the committeemen wondered, why had it been so difficult to make an identification? Snapped Hiss: "If this man had said he was George Crosley I would have had no difficulty in identification. He denied it right here." Then he asked permission to fire a few more questions at Chambers.
Again Chambers said he could not remember ever having used the name George Crosley. He denied that he had ever sublet an apartment from Hiss. But he did agree promptly that he had lived in the Hiss apartment. At this apparent contradiction Hiss exploded: "Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?" "Very easily, Alger," Chambers answered quietly. "I was a Communist and you were a Communist."
Chambers continued: "As I have testified before, I came to Washington as a . . . functionary of the American Communist Party. I was connected with the underground group of which Mr. Hiss was a member. Mr. Hiss and I became friends. To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Hiss himself suggested that I go [to his apartment] and I accepted gratefully. I brought no furniture, I might add."
At that point Hiss abruptly broke in. "I don't need to ask Mr. Whittaker Chambers any more questions. I am now perfectly prepared to identify this man as George Crosley ... on the basis of his own statement that he was in my apartment at the time when I saw he was there. If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off I would be sure."
Then he turned angrily on the committeemen: "I would like to say that to come here and discover that the ass under the lion's skin is Crosley—I don't know why your committee didn't pursue this careful method of interrogation at an earlier date before all of this publicity."
Later that night, Alger Hiss called a press conference in his Manhattan apartment at 22 East 8th Street. He insisted that his brief acquaintance with Crosley-Chambers did not in the least affect his complete denial of any dealings with Chambers as a fellow Communist. He was not and never had been a Communist, Hiss repeated. Said he: "I do not believe in Communism. I believe it is a menace to the United States." Thus it appeared that either Alger Hiss never was a Communist or, if he once was, still is.
Greater Responsibility. Up until the confrontation at the Commodore there had been nothing to choose between the accusations of Whittaker Chambers and the indignant denials of Alger Hiss. Now, on one pivotal question, Chambers had turned out to be dead right and Hiss to be dead wrong.
On top of that, there seemed to be no record of any free-lance writer who used the name of George Crosley. Committee investigators, thumbing through old Washington files, could find no evidence that a lease had ever been made out to him. There was no title in his name for the Hiss car. Hiss himself admitted that he had never seen any of Crosley's articles (although Chambers had been writing regularly under his own name for the New Masses, where his picture appeared in 1931).