I have three items for my write-up today on Greg Mitchell's Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas----Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950.
1. When I was blogging through Irwin Gellman's The Contender,
I quoted something that Gellman said on page 289 about the 1950 U.S.
Senate race between Richard Nixon and Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas
(see here):
"The
U.S. Senate contest in California during 1950 has been the stuff where
legend has replaced fact. ‘Tricky Dicky’ smeared Helen Gahagan Douglas,
the ‘Pink Lady,’ thus relying on the anti-Communist hysteria to propel
the dirty trickster into the upper House. The record, however, paints
quite a different scene. Helen Gahagan Douglas was far to the left of
many Democrats, let alone Republicans. Besides her close attachment to
New and Fair Deal policies that the majority of her party was
abandoning, she ran the campaign without the benefit of an effective
statewide staff, clearly defined strategy, or an adequate fund-raising
scheme. Along with these Herculean disadvantages, a large segment of
the Democratic Party had rejected her unswerving advocacy of
liberalism. By the time of the general election, she had been
thoroughly smeared, not by Nixon but by her own party. Faced with
widespread Democratic desertion that she was unable to prevent, Douglas
never united the warring factions of the Democratic Party to battle
against the Republican enemy. Her painfully inept stewardship—-not
Nixon—-guaranteed her demise."
While Greg Mitchell (in
contrast to Gellman) portrays Richard Nixon as someone who ruthlessly
exploited widespread anti-Communist sentiment to defeat Helen Gahagan
Douglas in 1950, Mitchell, like Gellman, believes that there were other
factors that contributed to Douglas' loss, some of which were Douglas'
fault. Like Gellman, Mitchell acknowledges that Douglas
endured a rough primary, as she was attacked by her Democratic opponents
for allegedly being soft on Communism. Like Gellman, Mitchell states
that Douglas had difficulty getting support from a number of Democrats,
since she was deemed to be too far to the Left; Mitchell also discusses
the factor of sexism, something that (as far as I remember) Gellman did
not really address. Gellman and Mitchell both argue that Douglas
pursued a poor strategy when she tried to exploit the anti-Communist
issue herself, as she contended that some of Nixon's votes in the U.S.
House overlapped with those of Vito Marcantonio, a far left Congressman
who was believed to have pro-Soviet sympathies, for anti-Communism was
Nixon's territory: who would believe that Nixon was pro-Communist, when
he was the one who brought down Alger Hiss?
And Mitchell tells
about another decision that Douglas made that did not particularly help
her campaign. Douglas, after she won the Democratic nomination, was in a
capacity in which she could recommend nominees to President Truman for
federal offices in California. She recommended a number of liberals for
a federal judgeship there, to no avail. She then learned that Truman
had nominated William Byrne for the benefit of her campaign, for Byrne
was a Roman Catholic and a "friend of the powerful (and politically
conservative) archbishop of Los Angeles, J. Francis McIntyre" (page
92). If Douglas could call McIntyre and take credit for recommending
Byrne to Truman, she could get more Catholic support in California. But
Douglas had reservations about Byrne, for "She suspected that Byrne was
the candidate of Ed Pauley, the Los Angeles oilman close to Truman
(and, lately, to Nixon)" (page 92). She apparently did not call
McIntyre, "and McIntyre would work miracles for Nixon" (page 92). Douglas appears to have held fast to her principles, but that did not help her politically.
2.
Nixon's strategy was to argue that there was a significant overlap
between the votes of Helen Gahagan Douglas and the far-left Vito
Marcantonio in the U.S. House. I talked in my post here
about Stephen Ambrose's discussion of the claim by reporter Earl Mazo
that Marcantonio did not like Douglas and actually encouraged Nixon to
beat Douglas by appealing to the similarity of her votes with those of
Marcantonio. Mitchell appears to accept the narrative that
Marcantonio did not like Douglas, and Mitchell speculates that this
could have been because "he resented that she had become a national hero
of the left without spending years in the trenches as he had" (page
106). Moreover, according to Mitchell, Marcantonio and Nixon
were actually friendly with each other. On page 105, Mitchell states,
in what I consider to be a beautiful passage: "Nixon and
Marcantonio were friendly foes on the Hill. Each knew where the other
stood on practically every issue, and each granted the other grudging
respect for sticking to his principles. Marcantonio was wrong about
nearly everything, Nixon believed, but sincere and not a political
opportunist."
3. On pages 107-108, Mitchell has a
profound passage about the struggles of political reporter Mary Ellen
Leary to succeed in what at the time was a man's world:
"From the
start, her male peers warned that she could not expect to have the 'same
relationship' they enjoyed with politicians, a cozy one built on
drinking or playing cards. It took her two years to discover that she
was routinely excluded from dinner parties where politicians, lobbyists,
and reporters mingled, and she was furious when Governor [Earl] Warren
kept her off invitation lists. On balance, however, she felt she
benefited from a more 'healthy' relationship with her subjects and
believed that as a woman she 'listened better' and got more out of them
in interviews."
I like how Leary was able to capitalize on her strengths in spite of the barriers that were in her path. This is not
to suggest that discrimination is not a problem and that women should
be able to circumvent it by their talent. That's not what I'm saying.
Rather, I'm expressing admiration for someone who was able to capitalize
on her assets. I am not discriminated against, but I have barriers to
my success on account of my Asperger's Syndrome. But the question that I
need to ask myself is: What are my strengths, and how can I capitalize
on those? How can I use who I am to succeed, the way that Mary
Ellen Leary used who she was----a journalist who listened----to be a
good political reporter?