For my blog post today about Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician,
I'd like to highlight something that Morris says on page 335. The
topic is Richard Nixon's defeat of Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis in
his 1946 race for Congress, and how narratives would come to portray
that race.
"'Nixon 'turned a California grass-roots campaign
(dubbed 'hopeless' by wheelhorse Republicans) into a triumph over
high-powered, high-minded Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis,' reported Time
magazine after the election, adding in utter seriousness that the young
winner had 'politely avoided personal attacks.' The legends
multiplied, source fed on source. In myriad newspapers, magazines, and
books the Committee of 100 became typical small businessmen and civic
leaders chafing at the New Deal, even in some accounts Independents and
Democrats, rather than the people, and interests, they were. The Nixon
campaign came down in those postwar months in the soft tint of a citizen
crusade, a candidacy from the 'grass-roots' as Time put the
half-truth, evoking images of the small contributions and volunteers,
which were there, but missing altogether the other reality----the
University Club, Elk Hills, the corporate levies, the vastly larger
forces arrayed against Voorhis. So, too, the controversial Murray
Chotiner was now in, now out of the picture, his genuine and decisive
role obscured along with the events and trends he determined,
reinforcing the fiction that it had been indeed a campaign of gifted
amateurs."
The reason that this passage stood out to me is that
the narrative that Morris is criticizing reminded me so much of what
Irwin Gellman would later argue in his book, The Contender: Richard Nixon, the Congress Years, 1946-1952.
Morris' narrative is that Nixon's campaign in 1946 received lots of
money from wealthy special interests, that the newspapers were largely
on Nixon's side, and that Murray Chotiner, even though he was primarily
working on Bill Knowland's Senate campaign in 1946, still played a
significant role within Nixon's campaign, influencing Nixon to use a
Red-baiting strategy against Voorhis. Gellman disputes salient elements
of Morris' narrative, arguing that there is no evidence that Nixon's
campaign had tons of money from wealthy special interests, and also
contending that Murray Chotiner played a marginal role in Nixon's 1946
campaign.
What's interesting is that both sides believe that they
are challenging prominent narratives about the 1946 race. Morris
believes that many narrators of those events downplayed the wealth and
influence of Nixon's powerful backers, as well as the role of Murray
Chotiner in Nixon's campaign. Gellman, by contrast, argues that many
narrators exaggerated the wealth and influence of Nixon's
backers (Gellman says that a local bank branch manager was made out to
be a financier), along with Chotiner's role in Nixon's campaign. I get
the sense from Morris and Gellman that both believe that they are
underdogs, challenging popular myths about Nixon. What is probably
going on is that each is responding to popular narratives about Nixon
that were out there: Morris was responding to the storytelling of people
who were sympathetic to Nixon, whereas Gellman was addressing the
narratives told by anti-Nixon people.
Both Gellman and Morris
appeal to the testimonies of eyewitnesses, newspapers, and documents
from the time in question. In terms of which narrative I accept about
the 1946 race, I tend to side with Morris. Even if Gellman is right
that the wealth and prominence of certain Nixon supporters got
exaggerated, I think that Morris did well to talk about the well-off
special interests in California, and why they would prefer Nixon to
Voorhis. Moreover, while Gellman argued that Nixon's campaign did not
have as much money as critics allege, Morris on page 337 states:
"Official
reports filed at the time with Congress recorded only $370 in
contributions to Nixon. In the more detailed affidavits and statements
filed in Sacramento, the Nixon campaign listed $17,774 for both the
primary and general elections, against $1,928 for Voorhis. Three
decades later, Nixon backers would finally admit that the actual tallied
contributions had been between $24,000 and $32,000. But the records
were long ago burned, they confessed, and even the listed money was only
a small fraction of what actually went into the campaign."
Morris has
his exact references in the notes section. Overall, I think that this
paragraph is a far cry from an unsubstantiated rumor about the Nixon
campaign, for it gets into documentation and eyewitness testimony.
I
should note, however, that Morris' narration of the 1946 campaign was
not entirely what I suspected. First, a charge that Gellman and even
Nixon sought to refute was that Nixon responded to an ad in the paper to
run for Congress. As far as I can remember, Morris did not make that
claim. Rather, the way Morris tells the story, a Republican was looking
for someone who could run against Voorhis, and he thought that Nixon
would make a good candidate, so he sent Nixon a letter when Nixon was in
Maryland. That, as far as I can recall, is essentially the story that
Gellman tells. Second, Gellman is rather skeptical about how Voorhis
would remember the 1946 race. The thing is, Morris too expresses
skepticism, in some areas. For example, Voorhis would later say that he
was not endorsed by NC-PAC, even though he was, according to Morris,
since Chotiner knew of the endorsement before Voorhis even received "the
fateful letter from the National Citizens group in May 1946" (page
336). Voorhis also recollected that Nixon was the one who proposed
having the debates, when it was actually Voorhis' idea. That makes me
wonder how much we should trust eyewitness testimony from years after
the event. I think that it should be consulted, yet one should remember
that it's not fool-proof, for it is filtered through the biases and
limitations of memory of those who are "remembering" the events.
Perhaps a proper course is to compare and contrast what the different
eyewitnesses are saying, to compare their statements with what
newspapers at the time were presenting (although they, too, were
probably biased), to try to identify the bias or agenda that would lead
an eyewitness to tell a story in a particular manner, etc.