I finished Greg Mitchell's Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas----Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950.
This book is about Richard Nixon's 1950 race for the U.S. Senate
against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas. I have four items for today.
1. One
reason that I have long admired and identified with Nixon is that I've
seen him as an underdog. My impression from my reading and the movies
and documentaries that I watched about him was that he thought that not
many people liked him, there were many in the Establishment who (quite
frankly) didn't like him, and Nixon continually felt a need to prove his
worth. But that's not really the picture that I got in reading
Mitchell's book. Rather, Nixon struck me as similar to a popular mean
girl in high school, who singles out someone to bully and turns the
campus and the faculty against her victim. The way that
Mitchell tells the story, Nixon had much of the press on his side, so he
could get his message out, whereas Douglas really could not. Nixon's
campaign and his supporters appeared to have had more money than
Douglas' campaign----and, even if one argues that Nixon did not have as
much money as Nixon's detractors claim, one has to account for how there
were so many pro-Nixon billboards in California (which Mitchell says
that Douglas inquired about in a speech in 1950), for how Nixon could
appear on television more than once, for how Nixon's campaign could
widely circulate the Pink Sheet attacking Douglas, and for how a plane
could drops gobs of anti-Douglas leaflets. There were elites that were
supporting Nixon, within business, within Hollywood, and within
politics. There were even Nixon supporters who resorted to violence,
and, in an atmosphere that was already afraid of Communism, Nixon (like
some of Douglas' Democratic opponents in the Democratic primary)
portrayed Douglas as soft on the Communist threat. Even after Douglas
lost the campaign, there were Nixon supporters and even Democrats who
tried to persuade President Harry Truman not to appoint her to any position, and Truman did not do so, as if she were radioactive.
If
I were Douglas, I'd be bitter. I'd wish ill upon Richard Nixon.
Actually, according to Mitchell, one reason that Douglas' friend Lyndon
Johnson decided to become John F. Kennedy's running-mate in the 1960
Presidential election was so that he could be part of a ticket that
would defeat Richard Nixon, who had ended his friend's career. But
Douglas tried not to give into bitterness. After her defeat, she
decided to work on her marriage, plus she did some performing.
It's
not that Douglas was flawless. Stephen Ambrose talks about times when
Douglas attacked her opponents. And even Mitchell goes into strategies
that Douglas pursued that were not particularly effective. But, from
Mitchell's narrative, Nixon was not exactly the underdog in the 1950
Senate race. Douglas was.
2. I learned some things about the
Korean War. The message that I get from right-wing literature is that
President Truman was essentially handcuffing Douglas MacArthur,
inhibiting him from doing what was necessary to win the war. And I
agree that Truman was setting limits on MacArthur, for Truman did not
want for the Korean War to be expanded into China. But, on page 236,
Mitchell says that Truman allowed MacArthur to "bomb the bridges across
the Yalu", across which the Communist Chinese were transmitting
supplies. On page 249, we read that Truman told reporters that he was
actively considering using the atomic bomb in the Korean War. On a side-note, on page 253, Mitchell says that
Democratic Congressman Albert Gore, Sr. suggested that Truman use the
atomic bomb in Korea to create "a deadly neutral zone" (Mitchell's
words), in which Communist soldiers would either die or face "slow
deformity" (Gore's words). Truman may have had different ideas and
policies at different times during the Korean War. But then I think of
what Gregory Peck's Douglas MacArthur said in the movie MacArthur:
MacArthur mocked Truman for allowing him to bomb half of a bridge!
Perhaps Truman did allow MacArthur to bomb bridges on the Yalu, but in a
limited sense.
3. Mitchell's book was largely about the Red
Scare as it existed in 1950. While I was reading Mitchell's book, I
thought some about Ann Coulter's Treason, a book in which
Coulter defends Senator Joseph McCarthy. Coulter says that McCarthy was
hesitant to name names, whereas Mitchell quotes McCarthy from the floor
of the U.S. Senate calling journalist Drew Pearson a "Moscow-directed
character assassin" and the "sugar-coated voice of Russia" (Mitchell's
quotation of McCarthy, though Mitchell in his notes did not cite a
primary source for these remarks). Coulter lauds McCarthy as one who
had a diverse staff that included homosexuals, whereas Mitchell on page 8
quotes McCarthy as saying that his goal was to drive the "Communists
and queers" out of the U.S. State Department. (For this, Mitchell cites
David Oshinsky's A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.)
On page 59 of Treason, Ann Coulter mocks Michael Ybarra's statement in The New Republic
that "Truman and many liberal anti-Communists believed the best answer
[to Communist subversives] was to let the FBI monitor the party and
prosecute its members if they broke laws against subversion or
espionage; conservatives, however, believed that the party needed to be
crippled and exposed before Moscow's minions launched a revolution."
Mitchell's picture overlaps with what Ybarra was saying, while also
differing somewhat. Mitchell, like Ybarra, presents Truman as relying
(at least in part) on FBI surveillance of Communists in the U.S., for
one reason that Truman opposed the McCarran bill that would require
Communists to register with the Attorney General was that he feared that
it would push Communists in the U.S. underground and hamper FBI
investigations of and infiltration into the Communist movement. On
whether conservatives believed that the Communists in America wanted to
overthrow the U.S. Government, perhaps Ybarra is right in that there
were conservatives who believed that, but my impression from Mitchell is
that there's more nuance. J. Edgar Hoover, for example, said that
there were more Communists in the U.S. than there were in Russia during
the Russian Revolution; and yet, Hoover's fear was that the Communists
in the U.S. would join the Russians were a war to break out between
Russia and the U.S.
Coulter says that things like the House
Committee on Un-American Activities, the Smith Act, and the experience
of the Hollywood Ten should not be blamed on Joe McCarthy, who had
nothing to do with them. I agree with her on that, and Mitchell
himself, while he at one point uses the term McCarthyism for the Red
Scare, does not blame the entire Red Scare on McCarthy. The Red Scare
was perpetuated by a variety of people: the House Commitee on
Un-American Activities (HUAC), Senator Pat McCarran, Cecil B. Demille in
the Screen Director's Guild, the University of California, President
Harry Truman, and the mayor of San Francisco, who advised people to tell
the police about people they merely suspected of being "politically
tainted" (Mitchell on page 4). McCarthy primarily expressed concerns
that there were subversives within the State Department. But I do
recall----and this was either from my reading of Irwin Gellman or
Stephen Ambrose (unfortunately, I can't remember right now, nor can I
find the exact reference)----that McCarthy expressed support for HUAC's
work.
In saying all this, I've not provided you with the full
essence of Ann Coulter's book. I think that she raises points that
deserve serious consideration. Were there Communists in the State
Department? What about those Venona cables? Were McCarthy's
accusations right or wrong, or were some (or even many) of them right?
At the same time, Mitchell does well to present details that may
indicate that the Red Scare could be unfair and abusive.
4. I
enjoyed reading this book, but I didn't particularly like blogging
through it. I found blogging through it to be tedious. For one,
Mitchell had a lot of interesting stories, and so I wanted to mention as
many of them as I could in my blog posts. Second, I felt as if I had
to continuously update my posts when Mitchell offered more information
about a topic in his book that I had blogged about, just to be fair to
Mitchell. My posts on the next book about Nixon that I will read will
probably be a little more informal. I won't feel compelled to blog
about everything that interests me, or that I feel might be interesting
to blog about.