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He thought for a minute and his answer was, “I do not know anybody who calls himself Whittaker Chambers.” Well, it was a great, great mistake because Nixon admitted that if he simply had said, “Sure I know Whittaker Chambers. Everybody in Washington knows Whittaker Chambers,” there was no place to go from there. Of course people knew him. He said, “That would have been the end of the investigation. But when somebody that gives me an answer that I think is devious or not right to the point, like a flag on a taxicab, a little red flag goes up in my mind. There was something about that answer that bothered me. I looked around at my committee. They looked as though they were all taking a nap. Nobody was paying any attention so I said, in a much louder voice, “I repeat my question. Mr. Hiss, do you know Whittaker Chambers?" Again there was the pause and again the answer, “I do not know a man who calls himself Whittaker Chambers.”

Now Nixon declared a five-minute recess. He said, “I told my committee, ‘Doesn't it strike you as a funny answer? Why does Hiss say, ‘I don't know a man who calls himself Whittaker Chambers'? Why didn't he simply say, ‘I know him‘or ‘I don't know him'? There's something fishy here. This finally aroused the committee.”

Nixon now proceeded to ask Hiss a few more questions and concluded that Hiss was growing more and more evasive. He excused him, then told the committee, “We better get this fellow Chambers on the stand again and find out a little more about this.” So they recalled Whittaker Chambers. Nixon began,