Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 3

For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I will use as my starting-point something that Black says on page 126.  The subject is President Harry Truman's run for re-election in 1948.

"Truman was 'giving 'em hell' and making tremendous inroads, warning that the Republicans were reactionary enemies of the working families of America."

The reason that this passage stood out to me was that I had recently listened to a speech by Pat Buchanan, which was delivered in 2013 for the centennial of Richard Nixon's birth.  (To watch the speech, see here.)  Buchanan was saying that the same people who praised Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" campaign in 1948 were quite critical of Richard Nixon's hard-hitting campaign against liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950.

I was not sure how to react to that.  I had read Greg Mitchell's book about Nixon's 1950 Senate race, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, and what Mitchell said that Nixon and Nixon's supporters did in that campaign disturbed me.  And yet, I'm not always disturbed when one candidate attacks another candidate.  I actually enjoyed watching Barack Obama's attacks on his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in 2012.  And, although I don't know a great deal about Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" campaign for re-election in 1948, I don't exactly flinch when I read that Truman warned that the Republicans were "reactionary enemies of the working families of America" (Black's summary).

So why do I like it when Obama and Truman attack their opponents, while I am disturbed when I read about Richard Nixon's hard-hitting campaign against Douglas?  Is it because Obama and Truman were Democrats, whereas Nixon was a Republican, and I tend to agree with Democrats more than Republicans?  I hope that it's not just that.

There are a variety of things that disturbed me when I was reading Mitchell's book.  Probably what disturbed me most was that the 1950 race destroyed Douglas politically.  Douglas made political blunders in her campaign, but Nixon's campaign was calling her pink, in a time when there was widespread fear of Communism.  Moreover, the way that much of the press sided with Nixon and did not allow Douglas to adequately get her message out struck me as unfair, and the mob-like, disruptive approach of some of Nixon's supporters also bothered me.  On these sorts of issues, I try to be fair and to apply the same standard to both sides.  Granted, I enjoyed watching the news media point out Romney's mishaps on a daily basis, because I thought that would lead to Romney losing the election, but I believe that Romney should have been able to get his message out.  And I'm not overly keen on supporters of one candidate bullying supporters of the other candidate, or going to the other candidate's events and being disruptive.  I want for people to be able to say what they want to say, without having to put up with a mob, or with disruptive people.  I'd say this also about the liberals who disrupted the 2004 Republican National Convention when George W. Bush was giving his speech: they should have allowed Bush to give his speech, without disruption.

On the 1950 race, to tell you the truth, I don't think that everything that Nixon said about Douglas was unfair.  Nixon was saying that Douglas' ideas would hinder the United States' attempts to protect itself from Communism, and I believe that he was entitled to that opinion, and that he was right to make that an issue in 1950 (though he was not the first to make it an issue, for some of Douglas' opponents in the Democratic primary harped on it, as well).  Douglas was to the left of even a number of Democrats, and I can understand why many would believe that her ideas would not be useful in the face of the Communist threat.  Had Nixon simply said that he questioned her judgment, not her patriotism, I wouldn't have had a problem with his campaign.  But, while that was his message (on some level), he and his campaign went beyond that.  They called Douglas pink.  And there were Nixon supporters who went so far as to call her red.  That damaged her significantly, considering the fear of Communism at the time, whereas I doubt that Truman's attacks on the Republicans or Obama's attacks on Romney did as much damage.

Jerry Voorhis: The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon 1

I started Jerry Voorhis' 1972-1973 book, The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon.  Jerry Voorhis was the Democratic incumbent whom Richard Nixon beat in his 1946 race for U.S. Congress.

I got this book because I wanted to read Voorhis' account of the 1946 campaign.  I wondered if Voorhis provided evidence for some of the charges that Irwin Gellman attempts to refute in The Contender, such as the contention that Nixon was financed by wealthy financiers.  Moreover, I was interested in learning more about Voorhis, for he made a good impression on me when I was reading about him in Gellman's The Contender.  Voorhis struck me as a statesman who wasn't afraid to take on the special interests, and who had a genuine heart for the poor.

When I received the book, I was initially disappointed, but then the book attracted me.  The book actually does not talk much about the 1946 campaign.  Rather, by and large, the book is a sustained critique of President Richard Nixon's policies from a leftist perspective (though, like a number of liberals, Voorhis prefers the term "moderate").  I think that it's important for me to read this book for my Year (or More) of Nixon because my impression is that you don't see too many critiques of Nixon's domestic policies from a progressive standpoint.  There are leftists who praise Nixon's domestic policies as rather progressive, especially when they are compared with the ideology of today's tea party and other right-wingers.  And I have a John Bircher book that criticizes Nixon's domestic policies from the right.  But, other than Voorhis' book, I don't think that I have too many books that offer a leftist critique of Nixon's domestic policies.  But, come to think of it, I have not read all of my books on Nixon (such as Rick Perlstein's Nixonland).   

As I started my reading of Voorhis, I realized that I would have to shift gears a bit, especially after reading the two volumes of Richard Nixon's memoirs.  In Nixon's memoirs, Nixon portrays himself as a President who was trying to do the right and reasonable thing against an obstructionist and hypocritical Democratic Congress, which did not pass a number of his bright (and necessary) ideas, overrode his justifiable vetoes, and criticized him for doing things that Democratic Presidents had done, such as impounding funds.  Voorhis, not surprisingly, offers a different perspective.  Voorhis presents Nixon as the obstructionist one, who vetoed, watered down, and probably unconstitutionally (in Voorhis' eyes) impounded necessary help for the poor and the vulnerable.  Voorhis, as Gellman essentially depicted him in The Contender, is somewhat of a policy wonk, who really gets into the nitty-gritty of public policy.  And yet, I'm impressed that Voorhis is still able to explain clearly how policies concretely impact people, especially the poor and the struggling.

Voorhis emphasizes that he is not writing this book out of bitterness against Nixon.  Actually, Voorhis says that Nixon did him a favor, for, after leaving Congress, Voorhis did work that he loved: he became the Executive Director of the Cooperative League of the U.S.A., which worked at "building 'grass roots' economic and social organizations and enterprises" (page 9).  One can tell just by reading Voorhis' critiques of President Nixon's domestic policies that Voorhis believes that coops and grass roots programs are important.  Voorhis argues that co-ops of small farmers are institutions that can help small farmers to survive against the huge farming corporations, which are able to purchase more capital and to release cheaper crops onto the market.  Voorhis also speaks highly of programs that are administered with input or direction by the poor themselves.  This sounds similar to the conservative view that problems are best solved by people who are closest to them, such as state and local governments and private charities.

And yet, Voorhis is not particularly a fan of President Nixon's revenue-sharing proposals.  Voorhis also mentions a Democrat's proposal to centralize welfare, such that the federal government would run it and establish a standard set of guidelines, rather than having states come up with their own guidelines.  (I'm not sure if Voorhis supported that proposal, but he did not criticize it.)  For Voorhis, the federal government should be doing certain things, and yet there should be input by the people directly affected by the federal programs.

Regarding Voorhis' account of the 1946 Congressional election, Voorhis essentially narrates that he was the victim of the Nixon-Chotiner (Murray Chotiner consulted Nixon's political campaigns) smear campaign, which unfairly tried to attach him to disloyalty and Communist subversion, even though he had a sterling record of supporting and even authoring anti-Communist policies.  While Voorhis acknowledges that he was briefly a Socialist during the 1920's, he denies that this was subversive, for the Communists actually opposed the Socialists at that time.  Voorhis says that Nixon-Chotiner used the same strategy against others (i.e., Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson) that they used against him, and yet, when Nixon later became more open to outreach towards Communist countries, Nixon grabbed onto another issue than Communism to attack his political opponents: Nixon accused his opponents of not being sufficiently in favor of law and order, amidst the crime and political unrest of the late 1960's-1970's.  Not only does Voorhis find Nixon's charge to be absurd----for every politician wants law and order----but Voorhis also contends that Nixon cynically exploited unrest for his own political purposes.  According to Voorhis, Nixon welcomed hecklers and anti-war activists, for their disruption of his events gave him the opportunity to look like a champion of law-and-order, as well as a victim of a real problem.

I have two more items, before I end this post.  First, on page 21, Voorhis talks about Communist China, within the context of Nixon's exploitation of the Red Scare in the 1950's.  Voorhis speculates that, had the United States given the Communists in China a hearing way back when they were fighting the corrupt Chiang Kaishek, perhaps it could have developed a fruitful relationship with Red China, which would have widened the "rift in the Communist world", specifically (I presume) that between the Soviet Union and Red China.  Instead, those who supported such a policy were deemed to be subversives, as Nixon exploited the Red Scare.  And yet, was not reaching out to Communist China to take advantage of the rift within the Communist world the strategy that President Richard Nixon employed a couple of decades later?

Second, on page 20, Voorhis paints Nixon as shady and sinister during the 1952 Republican National Convention.  According to Voorhis, "Mr. Nixon had conducted a private poll of California voters at taxpayers' expense using his convenient franking privilege, and had 'reluctantly' let it be known that the poll results favored General Eisenhower over Governor [Earl] Warren."  This, according to Voorhis, influenced a number of California delegates to ditch Warren in favor of Eisenhower, and thus made Nixon the logical choice for Eisenhower's running-mate.  You can read about Nixon and Gellman's response to this sort of narrative here, but what stood out to me was Voorhis' statement that Nixon conducted the poll at taxpayers' expense.  One of Nixon's prominent claims in his 1952 Checkers Speech was that he had a political fund because he did not want to charge political expenses to the taxpayers.  Yet, there are people who seem to have alleged that Nixon did precisely that, at times.  Voorhis states that Nixon used taxpayer money for a private poll, and Greg Mitchell states (according to my vague recollection) in Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady that Nixon sent information about the Alger Hiss trial to California to make himself look good, at taxpayer expense. 

RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Volume 2: 22

I have two items for my write-up today on volume 2 of Richard Nixon's memoirs.

1.  On pages 631-632, we read the following:

"Finally, there were the media.  I felt that, consciously or subconsciously, they had a vested interest in my impeachment.  After all the months of leaks and accusations and innuendo, the media stood to lose if I were vindicated.  The defenses never caught up with the charges.  For example, after all the damaging press and television coverage of alleged abuses of the IRS, when IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander announced the conclusions of a report that found no one had in fact been harassed as a result of White House intervention----a conclusion later supported by the findings of a joint congressional committee investigation----it was run on page thirty-nine of the New York Times and received scant coverage elsewhere.  Most of the reporters and commentators were still filtering everything through their Watergate obsessions.  For example, Douglas Kiker of NBC reported that the White House was seeking to create the 'impression' of a 'busy President, back from an important and exhausting peacekeeping mission, trying to do his job' despite harassment from the House Judiciary Committee.  Months later, House Judiciary Committee impeachment firebrand Jerome Waldie said that he doubted that I would have been forced from office 'if the press had not desired it.'"

The theme of Nixon being a victim of the media is not new, in terms of Nixon's writings.  He portrayed himself as such in his 1962 book, Six Crises, and throughout volumes 1-2 of his memoirs.  I admire Nixon for being tough in the midst of the attacks on him, and yet there is a part of me that does not feel sorry for him that much, especially after reading Greg Mitchell's Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady.  In Mitchell's depiction of the 1950 U.S. Senate race in California between Richard Nixon and Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, Mitchell essentially presents Douglas as a victim of Nixon's slick and well-funded campaign, of Nixon's attacks, and of wealthy special interests and a press who were largely in favor of Nixon.  (Mitchell acknowledges, however, that Douglas herself made mistakes in her campaign, and that there were attacks against her even before she ran against Nixon, for she was seen as too far to the left and as soft on Communism.)  The 1950 Senate race effectively ended Douglas' political career.  Governor Earl Warren himself lamented that Nixon tried to destroy his opponents, not just beat them.  In light of that, I had a slightly hard time feeling sorry for Nixon when he complained about being the victim of John F. Kennedy's slick campaign and media bias.  I saw what he was going through as justice.  But I'm sure that Nixon would see things differently: he'd probably say that his attacks on Douglas were fair in that they simply highlighted her record, whereas many charges against him were not fair.

2.  On page 650, Nixon quotes his daughter Tricia's diary, which said: "Daddy, of course, is always protective of everyone but himself."  That's essentially how Nixon portrays himself in his memoirs: he cares for his family and for those who work for him, and it pains him when he has to take hard yet necessary measures, such as asking H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to resign.  The reason that Tricia's statement stood out to me in my latest reading is that I have been looking at Amazon book reviews of books by those who were within Nixon's inner circle during Watergate----Haldeman, Ehrlichman, etc.----and some of the reviews say that Nixon basically threw others under the bus in order to save his own skin.  I may read those books, or I may not.  I don't know what the truth of the matter is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's somewhere in between the two extremes: Nixon was caring, yet he was also self-protective, on some level.

RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Volume 2: 15

I have three items for my write-up today on volume 2 of Richard Nixon's memoirs.  They'll focus on foreign policy, whereas my post tomorrow will cover Watergate-related topics, as well as the resignation of Nixon's first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew.

1.  On page 435, Nixon says the following about Vietnam:

"Congress denied first to me, and then to President Ford, the means to enforce the Paris agreement at a time when the North Vietnamese were openly violating it.  Even more devastating and inexcusable, in 1974 Congress began cutting back on military aid for Vietnam at a time when the Soviets were increasing their aid to North Vietnam.  As a result, when the North Vietnamese launched their all-out invasion of the South in the spring of 1975, they had an advantage in arms, and the threat of American action to enforce the agreement removed."

This is Nixon's explanation for how South Vietnam was lost to the Communists, and this line of reasoning has been echoed (on some level) by right-wingers, such as Ann Coulter in her book Treason.  I don't know what the rationale of those who supported cutting off aid to South Vietnam and removing the U.S. obligation to enforce the Paris peace agreement was, but that's why I continue to read: to learn about different sides of a given story.

One thing that interested me was that Nixon said that the Soviet Union was increasing its aid to North Vietnam, whereas, on page 427, Nixon relates that Soviet premier Brezhnev denied to him that the U.S.S.R. was sending "any new Soviet military equipment" to Indochina (Nixon's words).  So Brezhnev was lying during the friendly chats that he and Nixon had?

2.  On page 457, Nixon says the following about military defense:

"In terms of constant dollars, defense spending in 1973 was actually $10 billion less than it had been in 1964 before the Vietnam war began.  The draft had been ended and our defense forces were numerically lower than at any time since before the Korean war.  Yet the Senate was moving to cut overseas troop strength by nearly 25 percent----without demanding any corresponding cuts by the Soviets.  We were winning only narrowly in the congressional appropriations battle for the Trident nuclear submarine and the other important weaponry we needed to give us leverage in SALT."

Again, I don't know what the other side's rationale was.  But this passage is a good example of the frustration of more than one President who has had to deal with a Congress that is dominated by the opposite political party.  I can understand why there are people who would prefer for one person to have power (at least in certain areas), without having to get the permission of so many conflicting interests, for that at least could produce a coherent strategy.

But, according to Greg Mitchell in Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, Nixon as Senator "introduced a measure to override [President] Truman's authority and restore [General Douglas] MacArthur to power" (pages 252-253).  Whereas Nixon as President was critical of particular times when the Congress tried to limit his foreign policy power, Nixon as Senator (if what Mitchell says is correct) had no problem with limiting President Truman's foreign policy jurisdiction, when Truman did something (namely, fire MacArthur) that Nixon deemed to be unfair, and perhaps even deleterious to America's defeat of Communism.

3.  In my post on Nixon's memoirs yesterday, I talked about Nixon's stance on Israel.  In my latest reading, Nixon discusses this some more.  In October 1973, Syria and Egypt were about to attack Israel.  Nixon realized that the U.S. was in a delicate situation.  Nixon wanted (on some level) to support Israel because she was the victim of aggression and had a special relationship with the United States.  But Nixon also had no desire to alienate Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, with whom he was trying to cultivate a relationship, and he feared that the Arabs might "try to bring economic pressure to bear on us by declaring an oil embargo" (page 477).  Moreover, Nixon did not want for the situation in the Middle East to become worse.  Nixon suspected that the Soviets were encouraging Egypt and Syria to attack Israel, and he did not want for the Soviets to intervene further into the situation "in any way that would require [the U.S.] to confront them" (page 477).  When Jordan sent a small contingent to assist Syria, General Brent Scowcroft tried to persuade Israel not to expand the war through an attack on Jordan.  And, when Nixon met with Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, even the pro-Israel people there were apprehensive about the possibility that the U.S. could become involved in another Vietnam.

In my latest reading, Nixon said that his strategy was to let Egypt, Syria, and Israel fight it out until they arrived at a stalemate and were ready for a cease-fire.  That, in his opinion, was preferable to trying to enforce on them a cease-fire that they did not want.  But, as the Soviets sent military supplies to Egypt and Syria, so did the U.S. (with Nixon's support) send military supplies to Israel.

I may include an item on the outcome of this conflict in tomorrow's post.  We'll see.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 9

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.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 8

In 1950, Richard Nixon ran against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate.  In this post, I'll compare and contrast two authors' portrayals of two public appearances that Nixon and Douglas made together.  The first author is Irwin Gellman, who wrote The Contender: Richard Nixon, The Congress Years, 1946-1952.   The second is Greg Mitchell, who wrote Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas----Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950.

1.  Nixon and Douglas appeared together at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  According to Gellman, Nixon showed the audience a one-hundred dollar check that he said he had received from Eleanor Roosevelt, along with a note from Mrs. Roosevelt that stated: "I wish it could be ten times more.  Best wishes for your success & kindness regards to you & your lovely wife."  The audience gasped, then, according to Gellman, Nixon told his listeners that he, too, was surprised, until he learned that the Mrs. Roosevelt who wrote him the check was Eleanor B. Roosevelt, the wife of Theodore Roosevelt II.  Gellman narrates that "The audience roared with laughter while Douglas fumed."

According to Mitchell, however, there are actually two versions of that story, based on different descriptions of what happened.  Mitchell says that this appearance by Nixon and Douglas was before the Press Club in San Francisco in May (presumably in 1950).  In the first version of the story, Nixon told his audience that the check was from the Eleanor Roosevelt who was closely related to Theodore Roosevelt, not from the wife of the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  In the second version, however, Nixon did not clarify to his audience which Eleanor Roosevelt sent him the check, "leaving his opponent and the audience to figure it out afterwards" (page 37).  Douglas was confused and thus did not deliver her speech effectively when it was her turn to speak.

Both Gellman and Mitchell cite many of the same sources, such as Helen Douglas' autobiography.  Gellman even cites Mitchell!

2.  Nixon and Douglas appeared together in Beverly Hills.  Gellman based his story of this event on the testimony of Bill Arnold, who advised Nixon's campaign.  Gellman cites Arnold's book, Back When It All Began.  According to Arnold, Nixon came to the event on time and spoke first.  Douglas was late, and when she went onto the stage, Nixon mocked her by "gesturing to his watch" (Gellman's words on page 305).  The audience laughed, and Douglas did not know why.  When she spoke, Nixon was sitting behind her, and Nixon fidgeted and crossed his knees over and over to show that he was impatient.  When she finished, Nixon got up to address the audience again.  But Douglas left early rather than staying to listen to Nixon.  Gellman states on page 305 that "Arnold realized that if this had been a debate, and if points had been awarded for speechmaking, his candidate would have won."

Mitchell tells the story differently.  According to Mitchell, the League of Women Voters invited Nixon and Douglas to a debate at the Beverly Hills High School one week before Election Day.  Douglas accepted only after Nixon said that he could not attend due to another commitment he had made.  But a Nixonite related that, actually, Nixon and his advisers on the night that the event would take place "left an out-of-town campaign appearance early and rushed back to Los Angeles" (Mitchell's words on page 234).  Roy Day and Nixon hid out at the Beverly Hills Hotel, while their car waited outside, and Nixon's campaign manager Murray Chotiner went to the high school to listen to Douglas.  When they heard from Chotiner, Nixon and Day rushed to their car and went to the event.  At Nixon's arrival, Republicans in the audience clapped and stomped their feet, disrupting Douglas' speech.  Nixon went backstage and sat behind Douglas while she was speaking, continually crossing his legs and looking at his watch.  The audience laughed, and Douglas slumped her shoulders, answered just one question, then left, telling the audience that he had another meeting to get to.  Nixon then "tore her to shreds", according to Roy Day.  Another witness said that Nixon called Helen Douglas "Mrs. Hesselberg", which referred to the name of her husband (a Jew) before he changed it to "Douglas".  Some of the Democrats, some of whom were Jews, booed when Nixon said this, then, "according to Douglas backer Jean Sieroty, Republicans and Democrats nearly came to blows" (Mitchell on page 234).

Whom do I believe, when it comes to these accounts?  Regarding the first appearance, I can see Nixon telling his audience that the Eleanor Roosevelt who wrote him the check was Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt II.  Perhaps those who testified otherwise did not hear Nixon say that, either because their hearing or the acoustics was poor, or they were not paying attention.  On the other hand, maybe Nixon did not tell them the identity of the Eleanor Roosevelt who wrote him the check, they learned which Eleanor Roosevelt she was soon thereafter, and, when they remembered the event at a later point, they conflated the event with learning about which Eleanor Roosevelt it was.  Their memory mixed things up, perhaps.

Regarding the second appearance, both accounts look plausible.  I tend to believe Roy Day, though.  Bill Arnold may have remembered the event through rose-colored glasses, or perhaps he did not want to make Nixon look like an immature prankster, but rather as someone who was punctual.  Roy Day, however, was just reminiscing about the good old days (in his eyes).  On the other hand, could Roy Day have been exaggerating, the way that (say) some fraternity people exaggerate their feats?  I don't know.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 7

I have three items for my write-up today on Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas----Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950, a book about Richard Nixon's 1950 race for the U.S. Senate against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas.

1. On pages 181-183, Mitchell talks about blunders that Douglas was making.  Nixon's campaign had circulated the Pink Sheet, a paper that said that Douglas in the U.S. House voted the same as far left Congressman Vito Marcantonio 354 times.  Douglas received "conflicting advice from advisers" (page 183), as some told her to ignore Nixon's charges, while others said that she should respond to them so that they wouldn't look credible, and also that she should emphasize Americanism and speak before veterans groups.  Douglas spent a lot of time responding to Nixon's charges.  She composed the Blue Book as a detailed response to the Pink Sheet, but Nixon's Pink Sheet was far more effective.  While the "Pink Sheet could be reproduced in the hundreds of thousands, easily distributed and quickly read", Douglas' Blue Book "was so cumbersome and so costly to produce" that only a few saw it, and the press "took little notice of it" (page 182).  

Mitchell says that Douglas may have been waiting for the public and the media to get tired of the smears and to demand a real debate that focused on the issues.  But, as Mitchell narrates, "that moment had not yet come, and it was becoming obvious that it would not come" (page 182).  This is actually a poignant part of the book, in my opinion.  And, aside from the question of whether or not Mitchell's narrative is accurate, it's a sad scenario: you hope for people to be reasonable and to come to bat for you, but they don't do so.  You have to speak up for yourself, because it doesn't look like anyone else is speaking up for you.

Mitchell talks about another candidate, however, who was facing a similar situation as Douglas but had a different approach.  Frank Mankiewicz was running for the assembly, and his opponent Harold Levering was saying that Mankiewicz was socialistic.  Mankiewicz did not expect to win in his Republican district, and he chose to have fun, calling his opponent "an amiable do-badder".  Douglas, by contrast, was not having fun.  Mitchell does say that Levering was "running a low-key campaign" (page 182), and I doubt that the same can be said about Nixon's aggressive and effective operation.  Still, just having fun may be a good way to run for office, even when attacked.

2.  Mitchell talked about a number of famous people: Ronald Reagan, Cecil B. Demille, Frank Capra, Anne Baxter (whom I know as Nefretiri on the Ten Commandments), and Edward G. Robinson (Dathan in the Ten Commandments).

Let's start with Ronald Reagan.  Reagan had a reputation as a far-leftist, according to Mitchell, and Reagan had supported Douglas in her races for the U.S. House.  But, in 1950, when Douglas was running for Senate, Reagan only donated $50 to her campaign.  Moreover, there were indications that Reagan was moving to the right, for Reagan called actor Robert Cummings (who was with Reagan in the movie King's Row) and invited him to a party for Nixon.  Mitchell speculates that Reagan's relationship with Nancy Davis, whom Reagan was dating, played a role in Reagan's shift to the right, for Nancy was a conservative, her family was conservative, and she socialized with conservatives.

Cecil B. Demille wanted for the Screen Directors Guild to have a loyalty oath, but the Guild's president, Joseph Mankiewicz, strongly disagreed.  Demille did not think that he was supporting a blacklist, for producers could still hire whomever they wanted.  John Ford said, "I will not stand for any blacklist, but why shouldn't a man stand up and be counted?"  Mankiewicz responded that "nobody appointed DeMille to do the counting" (Mankiewicz's words, quoted on page 199), then added that Russia is the only place he knew where people weren't "entitled to a secret ballot" (Mankiewicz's words, quoted on page 200).  Demille replied, "Well, maybe we need more of that here".  (It's interesting that Demille in that moment was actually admiring the Soviet system that he opposed!)  Demille had Frank Capra on his side, and Demille sought to remove Mankiewicz from the presidency of the SDG.  At first, people were too intimidated to stand up to Demille, on account of his power within Hollywood, but eventually the tide turned against him, and Frank Capra reversed his support for Demille.  Mankiewicz kept his presidency, then he went on to retain the loyalty oath.  Like, what was this fight all about?

Anne Baxter was a Nixon supporter.  Edward G. Robinson, however, supported Douglas.  Robinson was suspected of having Communist sympathies, but how Robinson handled the accusations became a model for other people who were suspected.  Robinson answered questions from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to its satisfaction, as well as met with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  Robinson said that, as far as he knew, he did not know any Communists, so Robinson was not naming names.  Mitchell on page 222 says that "It was impossible to tell whether he was testifying truthfully or acting dumb."

3.  Two weeks before Election Day, Nixon alleged that Douglas was supporting a strategy that was backed by the Soviet Union.  Because the U.S. failed to aid anti-Communist Formosa (Taiwan), Nixon said, the country was threatened by Communism, and the Communists were encouraged to be aggressive in Korea.  Six U.S. Representatives sponsored what Nixon called a "get out of China" resolution, and Douglas was one of those six.  Nixon said that Congressman Walter Judd "traced the genesis of that resolution directly to Joseph Stalin" (Mitchell on page 209).  Nixon said that "This action by Mrs. Douglas has been established to have come just two weeks after [U.S. Communist Party leader] William Z. Foster transmitted his instructions from the Kremlin to the Communist national committee", and that "this demand found its way into the Congress" (Nixon, quoted on page 209).  According to Mitchell, Nixon did not specify how the demand made its way into the Congress or how specifically Douglas was involved.  I wonder if Nixon was saying here that Douglas was doing the bidding of the Kremlin as part of a plot, or simply that she was unknowingly advancing its agenda.  I think that, ordinarily, Nixon's stance was the latter.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 6

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, I'll feature and comment on five quotes that stood out to me.

1.  On page 151, Mitchell narrates the following about the Korean War:

"Over the past several weeks, General Curtis Le May's SAC bombers, with little fanfare, had dropped more than three thousand tons on bombs on North Korean targets----said to be 'military' or 'industrial' in nature but often the centers of large cities.  As in World War II, 'precision bombing' was a misnomer of profoundly tragic dimensions.  Le May had also introduced a little-known weapon, napalm, a mixture of phosphorus-ignited acids that burned inside wounds for as long as fifteen days.  Thousands of civilians had already perished in this limited war, and a U.S. military dispatch described a 'wilderness of scorched earth' across parts of North Korea."

This passage stood out to me because it was about the tragic aspects of war.  And civilian casualties have occurred in a number of other wars that we have fought: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (if you count this as a war) the drone-strikes.  Like Ron Paul, I have wondered if there are better ways than war for the U.S. to keep herself or her allies safe, such as trade.

2.  Republican Governor Earl Warren of California, who later was the notorious liberal Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, ran for re-election in 1950 against Democrat James Roosevelt, who was Franklin Roosevelt's son.  For a variety of reasons----James Roosevelt's alienation of Harry Truman, James' lack of political experience, James' lack of political talent, etc.----James' candidacy was not going too well.  But I chuckled at what Mitchell said on page 162: "[James] Roosevelt, with his pedigree, could not even charge the governor with shattering the unspoken limit of two gubernatorial terms."  Yup, I guess James couldn't (since his father FDR served more than two terms as President)!

3.  On page 163, Mitchell says that California voters liked the fact that Governor Earl Warren "had balanced seven consecutive state budgets..."  On page 175, Mitchell says that "Somehow Warren managed to reduce taxes while increasing medical, unemployment, and old-age benefits, earning Democratic support despite attacking the New Deal as impractical and bureaucratic."  Remarkable!  What was Warren?  A magician?

4.  The McCarran bill would require Communists to register with the U.S. Government.  Some liberals had a problem with this bill, so (to avoid appearing soft on Communism) they proposed an alternative: to allow the President to declare an "internal security emergency", during which time the Attorney General could "round up persons whom the president had 'reason to believe' might engage in espionage, sabotage, or other acts of subversion" (page 159).  A White House aide called this "a concentration camp bill".  Liberals claimed that this was better than the McCarran bill because it would "focus on acts, not just on agitation" and would "avoid character assassination" (Mitchell on page 159).  Mitchell says on pages 159-160:

"Now it was time for the Republicans (and conservative Democrats) to rail against an 'unconstitutional' measure that would lead to 'dictatorship.'  But that didn't mean they could not live with it...Rather than attempt to vote down the Democrats' substitute measure, the GOP brain trust (which included Congressman Nixon) decided to incorporate the detention-camp aspect into their own bill."

I admire bipartisanship and openness to the other side's ideas, but not in this case!

President Harry Truman vetoed the McCarran bill, noting that federal intelligence agencies said it "would weaken, not strengthen, the fight against communism" (Mitchell on page 167).  He compared the rule that Communists register with "requiring thieves to register with the local police" (Mitchell on page 167), and he said that the concentration camp part of the bill was "probably unconstitutional" (Mitchell on page 167).  Truman said that people should be punished for crimes, not for holding certain opinions.  The House overrode Truman's veto by 286-48 (as Douglas voted against overriding it), and the Senate overrode it 57-10.  The outcome of the McCarran Act, according to Mitchell, was that no one registered with the Attorney General, so "now it was up to the attorney general to find the Reds, go after them, and punish them----if he could" (page 227).

5.  I got a chuckle out of what Mitchell said on page 165:

"Finally, and perhaps most effectively, Nixon resorted to a simple rhetorical trick he would rely on for the rest of the campaign: claiming that unnamed advisers had urged him to avoid certain issues, but he was going to talk about them anyway.  No matter that the 'warning' from his aides might be apocryphal.  Murray Chotiner believed that these avowals demonstrated to the voters that the candidate was 'willing to meet' difficult issues.  Usually, the issue Nixon purportedly was told to ignore concerned the Hiss case or some other aspect of the Communist threat.  But in his kickoff speech, the subject he claimed to have been advised to avoid was the gender of his opponent."

Essentially, Nixon said that he would criticize his opponent, even though his aides advised him that criticizing a woman could cost him the election.  Nixon may not have actually heard this from his aides (I don't know).  But, elsewhere in the book, Mitchell says that Nixon was walking a fine line: he wanted to criticize Douglas, but he also did not want to look like a bully.  Apparently, Nixon got around that by resorting to his strategy of claiming that he was bravely going against the advice of his aides, out of his commitment to telling voters the truth.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 5

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.  As I said in my last post on Mitchell's book, and also in previous posts about Richard Nixon's U.S. Senate race against Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon attacked Douglas by saying that, in the U.S. House, she voted similarly a significant number of times to Representative Vito Marcantonio, a far left congressman who was believed to have pro-Soviet sympathies.  Later, Nixon's campaign manager Murray Chotiner admitted that "you can take any vote and you can find that a man as conservative as Bob Taft voted the same way as Marcantonio for different reasons."  Conservative Republican Senator Robert Taft, after all, was largely an isolationist, so he would overlap with Marcantonio when the two cast isolationist sorts of votes.  That doesn't mean Taft was pro-Communist, though!  What's interesting is that, when Taft was running for re-election in Ohio and was playing the anti-Communist card, his Democratic opponent, Joseph Ferguson, pointed to the number of times that Taft voted the same as Marcantonio (page 128).  Ferguson lost that election.

Mitchell, like others I have read, believes that Douglas' strategy of pointing out the number of times that Nixon voted the same as Marcantonio was not particularly effective.  For one, nobody would believe that Nixon was pro-Communist because he was the one who took down Alger Hiss.  Second, my impression is that Mitchell believes that Douglas should have focused on domestic issues, the concerns that were impacting Californians' lives, while emphasizing that big money was not on her side.  While Douglas indeed did talk about domestic issues and her commitment to the people rather than special interests, she got sidetracked by moving into Richard Nixon's territory, namely, anti-Communism.  I don't know if focusing on domestic concerns would have won her the election, even according to Mitchell, for Mitchell narrates that many Americans were afraid of Communism in 1950.  Regarding her strategy of highlighting where Nixon voted the same as Marcantonio, I can see merit in that sort of approach, even if it ultimately failed for Douglas.  Granted, Douglas probably would not convince anybody that Richard Nixon was pro-Communist, but such an approach could show that voting the same as Vito Marcantonio did not necessarily mean that one was pro-Communist. 

Nixon contemplated other ways to associate Douglas with Communism, such as telling an aide to track down times when the People's World said that Douglas spoke before front groups (though I doubt that People's World called them that), or Communist Mother Bloor's praise for Douglas.  The California chairman of the Communist Party, William Schneiderman, however, was rather critical of Douglas, for she supported the Korean War.  Schneiderman charged that Douglas "had been moving to the right since 1947" (Mitchell's words) and was "one of the chief liberal apologists for the reactionary policies of the Truman Administration" (Schneiderman's words, quoted on page 144).  Schneiderman still regarded Douglas as better than Nixon, though.

2.  Did Nixon exploit anti-Semitism in the 1950 race, since Douglas' husband was Jewish?  On pages 91 and 281, Mitchell refers to letters in which a Nixon secretary and a woman from Iowa discussed the fact that Melvyn Douglas' last name was originally Hesselberg.  On page 139, Mitchell states that Nixon occasionally in speeches referred "to his opponent as Helen Hesselberg, before correcting himself".  Nixon also did not repudiate the support of anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith until Douglas criticized Nixon for having Smith's support, plus Nixon let the anti-Communist legislator Jack Tenney "stand in for him at some campaign rallies when [Nixon] was called back to Washington" (page 139).  Tenney was "very close to Smith" and said that he had a good relationship with Nixon, even though Tenney didn't care for Nixon's campaign manager Murray Chotiner, a Jew.

I'd like to make an observation about Nixon's stance on African-American issues in his 1950 Senate race, based on what I have read so far in Mitchell's book (which I have not finished).  It seems that Nixon was trying to gain African-American votes.  Nixon was interested when speaker of the California State Assembly Sam Collins told him that he (Collins) asked a committee to investigate a bank that supposedly had never loaned money to African-Americans, a bank that Douglas supposedly directed (page 91).  A Women for Nixon ad featured an African-American woman who (with other women) was trying to persuade a Douglas supporter to vote for Nixon.  And Nixon praised the service of African-American soldiers in Korea.

(UPDATE: On pages 205-206, Mitchell goes into more detail on the topic of race during the 1950 U.S. Senate race in California.  He refers to an African-American newspaper that endorsed Nixon, which said about Douglas: "Of course, she favors civil rights legislation.  At election time...what politician doesn't?"  Mitchell also mentions African-American celebrities who endorsed Nixon, such as actress Louise Beavers and ex-football player Kenny Washington.  But Mitchell also notes the African-American support that Douglas received----from the Sun Reporter newspaper and A. Philip Randolph----and Mitchell says that Nixon's campaigns planned only a "few major events in minority neighborhoods", and that some have testified that Nixon was uncomfortable in urban areas and around African-Americans, though Mitchell says on page 238 that Nixon after his campaign went to Kenny Washington's home, drank beers, and played the piano.  Moreover, on page 230, Mitchell states that "Some voters in all-white Republican strongholds received postcards from a mythical Communist League of Negro Women urging them" to vote for Douglas.  Mitchell does not say that Nixon was responsible for those postcards, however.)

3.  Mitchell talks about the loyalty oath at the University of California, which, according to this site, included "a denial of membership or belief in organizations (including Communist organizations) advocating overthrow of the United States government."  A number of talented faculty people refused to sign it due to their commitment to academic freedom, resulting in some drain of talent from the University of California.  Some protested that the loyalty oath would be ineffective because a Communist could simply lie by signing the oath!  Interestingly, after a bill was passed that codified Governor Earl Warren's suggestion that all public employees be required to sign a loyalty oath, a Communist signed it, saying that he didn't intend to overthrow the U.S. Government, for he didn't need to do so: America, he said, would "collapse from its own rottenness" (the Communist's word, quoted on page 173).

On pages 134-135, Mitchell quotes a statement by the San Francisco Examiner supporting the loyalty oath at the University of California: "While American youth is being conscripted to die fighting Communist barbarism in Korea and elsewhere[,] it is proposed to accord to thirty-nine professors and assistant professors...the privilege of defying a simple regulation to protect the institution which is engaged in research vital to national defense."  That's a valid point, in my opinion: that a subversive should not be in a position in which he or she could negatively impact research that is "vital to national defense".  I don't think that all leftists should have been barred from such research (and whether or not that happened, I don't know), but I can understand the concern.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 4

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?

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 3

I have two items for my write-up today on Greg Mitchell's book about the 1950 U.S. Senate race in California between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas.  The book is entitled Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas----Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950.

1. This first item is about President Harry S Truman's approach to the issue of alleged subversives in the U.S. Government.  Truman sent a letter to an official in the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which Truman complained about the "fuss" about what political groups people belonged to.  Truman said: "I'd be willing to bet my right eye that you yourself and I have joined some organization that we wish we hadn't.  It hasn't hurt me and I don't think it has hurt you any" (Truman's words, quoted on page 7).  Yet, in response to the growing concern among Americans about Communism in the U.S., and perhaps with an eye on the Presidential election in 1948, Truman instituted a loyalty program for federal employees, which removed those who (after a background check) were concluded to be disloyal to the United States Government.

According to Mitchell on page 85, Truman's loyalty program had problems.  Mitchell says that "Dismissal would not take into account whether the employee was engaged in a sensitive national security job or worked as a clerk in the Agriculture Department" (page 85).  Mitchell also states that "Disloyalty was broadly defined", as it covered espionage and sabotage, but also sympathy for groups that the Attorney General considered to be totalitarian, fascist, Communist, or otherwise subversive.  In addition, according to Mitchell, "What constituted suspicious political activity was highly subjective", and "Advocating civil rights for Negroes often set off alarms" (page 85).  Not only did the loyalty program go after federal employees who were concluded to be involved in these sorts of activities, but it also dismissed federal employees with a spouse or a close relative who was "friendly with a Communist front", as well as federal employees who drank too much or had "sexual indiscretions that left them vulnerable to foreign agents" (Mitchell on page 85).  Moreover, "the accused had no right to confront their accusers or even know exactly what the charges were and who made them" (page 85).  When only 201 federal employees were dismissed, half of those cases were under appeal (through what kind of due process, I do not know), and no spies were found, there were conservatives who criticized the Truman Administration's "standards for disloyalty" (page 86).

When Truman no longer had to contend with a Presidential election, however, he opposed certain anti-Communist bills, such as Mundt-Nixon, a bill that I discuss in my post here.  Mundt-Nixon would require people in "suspected Communist Party organizations and front groups" to register with the Attorney General "or face severe penalties" (Mitchell on page 109).  Truman opposed Mundt-Nixon because he felt that it would threaten labor unions and liberal organizations, but also push the Communists "deeper underground, preventing surveillance and FBI infiltration" (Mitchell on page 109).  

2.  This second item is about Hollywood and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), though I'll also talk about an anti-Communist who became a victim of the Red Scare.

Nixon and others on HUAC inquired of Hollywood representatives where the anti-Communist movies were.  The thing is, when anti-Communist movies did appear, they ended up being "shoddy" and received a "tepid public response" (Mitchell on page 62).  Producer Sam Goldwyn asked how he could make a decent picture, when his best writers were in jail (page 112).  The writers were in jail on account of the Red Scare (page 112).  This intrigued me because it made me think about whether one can be a conservative and also write a good story.  There are conservatives or libertarians who have been renowned for their fiction, such as Taylor Caldwell, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, Jr., and others.  I suppose that conservatives could write good fiction, as long as the complexity of their characters is not sacrificed to hyper-moralism (though one could argue that there have been decent moralistic works, such as Ayn Rand's books, episodes of The West Wing, which are liberal, etc.). 

A quick tangent on Hollywood: Many would probably expect for Hollywood and the media to go for Douglas in the 1950 Senate race, for were these not prominent elements of the liberal establishment?  Actually, that wasn't exactly accurate.  As Mitchell states on page 101, there were prominent Nixon-supporters in Hollywood.  Some of these were actors, such as John Wayne, Robert Montgomery, Ginger Rogers, and Adolphe Menjou.  Others were higher-ups, such as Walt Disney and MGM's chief attorney Mendel Silberberg.  And there were plenty of prominent people in the media who supported Nixon against Douglas, such as William Randolph Hearst and a number of California newspapers.

Back to Hollywood and HUAC! One of the people in the Hollywood Ten was screenwriter Lester Cole, who went to jail for refusing to answer Congress' questions about whether or not he was ever a member of the Communist Party.  And guess whom Cole encountered in jail?  J. Parnell Thomas, the former chairman of HUAC, who was there for "taking kickbacks from friends and relatives he had placed on his congressional payroll" (Mitchell on page 111; I write about Thomas in my post here).  They taunted each other while Thomas was gathering eggs and cleaning the chicken coop!

I'd like to turn now to the story of Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing journalist.  When Pegler wrote that the U.S. should withdraw from the Korean War, stay out of the Far East, and lock up Communists and fellow travelers in the U.S. in concentration camps, some newspapers did not print his column, and the head of a right-wing group, Friends of Democracy, sent a letter to Truman's Attorney General, asking that Pegler be prosecuted for sedition (I guess because of Pegler's isolationist views).  As far as I can see in the wikipedia article about Pegler, nothing came of that.  It is interesting, though, that even right-wing anti-Communists could fall victim to the Red Scare.  It reminds me of when devout Christians were accused of witchcraft in The Crucible.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 2

I have four 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.  It's about Richard Nixon's 1950 U.S. Senate campaign against liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas.

1.  My first item concerns how Douglas absorbed and communicated information.  A friend of Douglas described Douglas' absorption of knowledge as follows: "She doesn't bother much with logical processes, she just wraps herself around an idea more or less in the way an amoeba wraps itself around a bit of food, a good nourishing way of absorbing information" (page 22).  Douglas described her way of learning this way: "When you dig into a problem you will learn what you need to know, you will learn how to solve it, you'll stumble upon authenticity and the people with the answers."

For some reason, I'd expect for a person who absorbed information and made it a part of her to be able to communicate it in a clear, articulate, compelling, and seemingly authentic manner.  Perhaps this is because I have read of people, such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who were able to absorb information and then go on to communicate that information effectively.  But that wasn't entirely the case with Helen Gahagan Douglas.  She was probably a good speaker on account of her experience in drama, but she tended to drone on and on about policy details.  On page 34, we read about Douglas speaking by the hour in the hot sun about the 160-acre water limit----which referred to a liberal law that "limited state-financed irrigation to farms of no more than 160 acres" and was "meant to give the small farmer a chance to survive in a state dominated by agribusiness" (page 29).  Nixon, too, had a tendency to drone on, but he learned how to be more concise in his public speaking.  Moreover, my impression is that Nixon communicated his views on policy in a clear and compelling manner.  Some people have that talent.  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have it.  Paul Ryan sometimes has it, and sometimes does not.  Newt Gingrich just overwhelms people with facts in his forums, but I don't think that he breaks them down as well for public consumption as Clinton and Obama do.

2.  My second item can be entitled "Mother issues".  Mitchell talks about Nixon's relationship with his mother, Hannah Nixon.  Richard was closer to his mother than the other brothers were, and Hannah speculated that this was because Richard, who was quiet, needed her more than his brothers did.  When Hannah spent a lot of time away from Richard because she was in Arizona caring for Richard's brother, Harold, who had tuberculosis, Richard resented her absence (or so Mitchell says).  Mitchell refers to views that this tended to alienate Richard from women, made him more distrustful of people, and drove his ambition.  (I should note that Nixon's ambition was what attracted Pat Nixon, who initially was not attracted to Richard, but who later concluded that he was going places.)

Mitchell also briefly mentions Lyndon Johnson's Mother issues.  Unlike Nixon, Johnson was quite easy-going with women.  He poured out his soul to them, and he flirted with them.  Johnson's friend George Reedy said that Johnson was vulnerable to women and poured his soul out to them because "They all reminded him of his mother."  Johnson was friends with Helen Gahagan Douglas, even though they differed on civil rights and labor, with Douglas being more liberal than Johnson.  While Johnson flirted with Douglas, she was committed to her husband and her children.  (UPDATE: I've not read Robert Caro's book on LBJ, but, according to here and here, Caro argues that Douglas and LBJ had a romantic relationship.)  Mitchell says on page 71: "Yet Lyndon Johnson, little known in California, could not help Douglas much in her Senate race."  Apparently, Johnson in 1950 was not the nationally-known figure that he would become in later years!

3. On page 53, Mitchell discusses Nixon's finances in the 1950 Senate campaign.  Mitchell says that "the Nixon campaign coffers were flush, but driving for more Democratic votes cost a lot of money."  Irwin Gellman, in The Contender, criticizes Mitchell's claim that Nixon's campaign had vast amounts of money, stating that Mitchell provides no evidence that Nixon had $4.2 million in his campaign coffers (Gellman 340).

I don't know enough about Mitchell's claim, for I haven't yet gotten to that part of the book.  I should note, however, that, on page 56, Mitchell refers to an article by Paul Jacobs in the June 17, 1950 New Leader that predicted that Nixon would have "ample funds, 'a smear machine' at his disposal, and a generally supportive press" (Mitchell on page 56).  This, in my opinion, is significant because it's a source from the time of the 1950 election that posits that Nixon would have lots of funds.  Gellman, on page 458 of The Contender, says that (presumably in 1950) there were no newspaper accounts of a state-wide blitz of pro-Nixon billboards.  That's a valid point, but there was at least one voice in 1950 who envisioned Nixon as having lots of campaign funds.

On page 53, Mitchell says that Nixon tried to get a $5,000 donation from Owen Brewster, the head of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, but the committee could not give money to a Republican primary candidate.  Nixon kept asking, and so Brewster gave the money to lobbyist, gambler, and influence peddler Henry Grunewald, who relayed the money to Nixon.  I checked the notes to see if Mitchell provided primary-source evidence for this story, and all I could see was his reference to Roger Morris and Fawn Brodie.  I wonder if they have primary-source evidence.  I'll be reading Roger Morris' book sometime down the road, so maybe I'll see there.

4.  The role of Murray Chotiner in Nixon's campaigns has been controversial, since Chotiner's campaign strategies were often quite aggressive and ruthless.  Both Irwin Gellman and Stephen Ambrose contend that Chotiner's role in Nixon's 1946 U.S. House campaign was marginal.  Mitchell acknowledges that Chotiner only worked for Nixon part-time in 1946, since Chotiner was also working on Bill Knowland's U.S. Senate re-election campaign.  But, according to Mitchell, Chotiner was the one who came up with the idea that "turned [Nixon's] campaign around", namely, to attack Jerry "Voorhis as a tool of left-wing labor PACs" (page 47).  I could not find Mitchell's documentation for that specific claim, though.  Mitchell has notes, but they're not always attached to specific things that Mitchell says.

Mitchell told a story about Chotiner's relationship with California Governor Earl Warren, whose election Chotiner assisted in 1942.  I was curious about this because I had a hard time envisioning Chotiner helping a liberal Republican like Warren, since my impression was that Chotiner liked candidates who could attack from the right.  Essentially, after helping Warren, Chotiner went to Warren's office to ask for a favor, and Warren threw him out!

Chotiner may have been for attacking from the right, but he was smart about it.  On page 48, Mitchell says that Chotiner preferred using "state socialism" rather than "socialist-labor government" in attacking the Truman Administration because the latter would alienate labor unions unnecessarily.  Chotiner also did not care for denunciations of the "welfare state" because the term "welfare" referred to human well-being, which is a good thing.

Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady 1

I started Greg Mitchell's 1998 book, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas----Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950.  The book is about Richard Nixon's 1950 run for the U.S. Senate against liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas.  Mitchell says in the Preface to this book that he has looked at documents from this campaign that have not been considered in the past, and that these documents shed light on an election that Nixon did not care to discuss that much after his victory.  The inside jacket of Irwin Gellman's The Contender, which was more pro-Nixon than Mitchell's book, made a similar claim: that Gellman was "the first historian to have complete and unfettered access to (among other sources) the 1946, 1948, and 1950 campaign files in the National Archives; papers from the executive sessions of HUAC; and every document dated through July 1952 in the Nixon Library & Birthplace."

Mitchell's portrayal of Nixon in my reading thus far is more negative than what I encountered in Gellman's The Contender, Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician, and (of course) Nixon's own Six Crises.  These three works depict Nixon as cautious about McCarthy, as Nixon thought that McCarthy was on to something when McCarthy attacked the problem of Communists in the U.S. Government, yet did not care for McCarthy's irresponsible claims.  (Actually, Six Crises does not mention McCarthy explicitly, but Nixon in the book does criticize anti-Communists who make irresponsible accusations.)  According to Mitchell, McCarthy actually drew from one of Nixon's speeches against Communism in conducting his own anti-Communist crusade, and, when McCarthy visited California, Nixon appeared with him on stage and prayed that McCarthy might have the strength to carry on.  Ambrose does not mention this particular incident, but Ambrose does say that Nixon did not appear on the same stage with McCarthy when McCarthy spoke in California in 1950 to support Nixon's candidacy for U.S. Senate.  (UPDATE: On page 176, Mitchell says the same thing, asserting that Nixon did not want to be associated too much with McCarthy when Nixon was trying to move to the center to attract Democratic voters.)  The backdrop for Mitchell's narration is the fear that existed in 1950 about Communism, as international Communism made advances, and people in the U.S. were concerned about Communist infiltration in the U.S., even though the number of members in the Communist Party in the United States had declined.  (UPDATE: On page 79, Mitchell says that "Nixon was no McCarthy; blacklisting and loyalty oaths made him uncomfortable."  Yet, on page 208, Mitchell says that Nixon "denounced those who refused to sign loyalty oaths.")

Mitchell makes clear in the Preface, however, that his aim is not to write an anti-Nixon book.  Actually, Mitchell has fond memories of Nixon!  He and his family saw Nixon when they visited the White House during Eisenhower's Presidency, and Nixon waved to them.  And Mitchell was one of the few people in his junior high school class who voted for Nixon in his school's mock 1960 election, and he even took Nixon's side in his school's debate.  Still, the Nixon in Mitchell's book, at least in my reading thus far, appears more ruthless and conniving than the Nixon I have read about in other books for my Year (or More) of Nixon.  And yet, even Mitchell's Nixon had talent!  On page 15, Mitchell tells the story of how Nixon at Berkeley gave a speech and answered questions so skillfully that a number of the indifferent were persuaded to support Nixon, while those who came to heckle him left with doubts about their stance.  Someone from Berkeley's Students for Douglas reported this to Douglas.

Mitchell made some interesting points in my latest reading.  For example, he presented California as a state of paradox.  California had the highest rate of job creation, yet also the highest unemployment rate, plus there were other paradoxes about it!  I'm not surprised that this was the case in such a large and populous state!

Mitchell also provides background information on Helen Gahagan Thomas.  She was raised in a Republican family, in which she as a girl made herself heard among the males.  Helen loved to be in the limelight, and she became an actress.  She was somewhat of a snob at first, especially when it came to riding trains, buses, and subways (she said that the people smelled), but her interest in politics and the plight of the poor originated on account of her husband's political activity.  She became a champion of the marginalized and associated with them, and yet her comments about African-Americans (i.e., "I just love the Negro people!") came across as condescending.  She did practice what she preached, however, for, as a U.S. Representative, she was the first white U.S. representative to hire an African-American secretary.  In the U.S. Congress, Douglas was admired on account of her beauty, yet being an outspoken liberal female did not exactly endear her to her colleagues!  One story that Mitchell told that stood out to me was when she loudly hissed at a Southern congressman's speech that "blamed many U.S. casualties in World War II on the ineptitude of Negro soldiers" (page 25).  It's tragic that there was a time in U.S. history that such a speech would be made and tolerated on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Six Crises 1

I started Six Crises, which is the first book that Richard Nixon wrote.  Nixon wrote it shortly after his loss in the 1960 Presidential election.  I tried to read the book back when I was a kid, when I was in the fifth or the sixth grade, but, if I remember correctly, I only got through Nixon's first four crises.  Now, I will read the entire book, and I'll understand more of it because I am older.

Nixon's first crisis was the Alger Hiss case, in which ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers claimed in the 1940's that Alger Hiss as a State Department official provided him with government documents to give to the Soviet Union.  I wrote about this in some of my write-ups on two other books that I read, Irwin Gellman's The Contender and Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician.  I'm finding that my reading of Six Crises is filling in some of the gaps, so it's worth reading, even though it covers a lot of the same ground.  But I'll go into that a bit more in tomorrow's post.

What struck me in my latest reading was how limited the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) were, at least in Nixon's telling.  The way that Nixon narrates, it was often difficult for HUAC to nail people for espionage, for the accused could simply deny that they were Communists or refuse to answer, and, without evidence, it was simply the accuser's word against word of the person accused.  And J. Edgar Hoover, while he could investigate, "could not follow up with prosecutions or other required action without the approval of his superiors in the Justice Department and in the White House" (page 5).  My hunch (and I'm open to correction on this) is that, while HUAC may have been limited in its capacity to legally punish espionage, it could still ruin people's reputations.  (UPDATE: I should note, though, that there were people who appeared before HUAC who went to jail for contempt.  Nixon does not talk about this, but I read about it in Greg Mitchell's Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady.) Yet, in Nixon's telling, in terms of the Hiss case, HUAC was meticulous about the facts in that it verified elements of Chambers' testimony and even found paperwork for Hiss' sale of a car to a supposed Communist.

What set Alger Hiss apart was that he voluntarily came forward to testify, whereas many others who were accused chose not to do so or waited until they were subpoenaed.  While Hiss' initial testimony was impressive to most of the committee-people, Nixon smelled a rat, for he thought that Hiss was overeager and was choosing his words really carefully, so Nixon concluded that Hiss was hiding something.  Chambers, by contrast, was not overly impressive on account of his monotone and his clothing, but Nixon thought that Chambers did not come across as the type who would make outlandish accusations, for Chambers was low-key, plus Chambers said that Alger's sister-in-law, Mrs. Donald Hiss, was not a Communist.  Some of Nixon's fellow HUAC members were skeptical about Chambers' testimony because Chambers was speaking in precise detail about names, places, and events with which he came into contact ten years before.  But Nixon said that Chambers was a man of great intelligence, and as a Communist agent Chambers had trained himself to remember vast amounts of information, just in case Chambers were "apprehended with documents on his person" (page 16).