Voorhis had been endorsed by CIO-PAC in 1944. In 1946, however, CIO-PAC decided to withhold its endorsement—ostensibly because he had not supported some measures in Congress considered important by the union leadership. In the spring of 1946, the Los Angeles County chapter of the NCPAC circulated a bulletin indicating that it was going to endorse Voorhis regardless of what CIO-PAC did. The May 31, 1946, issue of Daily People’s World, the West Coast Communist newspaper, ran an article with the headline: Candidates Endorsed by “Big Five.” The “Big Five” labor and progressive coalition was made up of CIO-PAC, NCPAC, the railroad brotherhoods, the Progressive AFL, and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. The Daily People’s World article reported that the Big Five had interviewed the candidates and included the list of endorsements for the June 4 primary. The first name on the list was H. Jerry Voorhis. Following his name was this note: “No CIO endorsement.” In answer, then, to my charge that he was endorsed by PAC, Voorhis had replied that he was not—that year—endorsed by CIO-PAC. To me that was an irrelevancy. The Los Angeles County chapter of NCPAC had a large number of Communists and fellow travelers, and, considering the close ties between the two PACs, I thought that the question of which PAC had endorsed him was a distinction without a difference.
When the question was raised in the South Pasadena debate, I pulled from my pocket a copy of the NCPAC bulletin announcing its endorsement recommendation and walked across the stage to show it to Voorhis. Reading aloud the names of the board members of each organization, many of which were the same, I demonstrated that there was little practical difference between a CIO-PAC endorsement and an NCPAC one.
Voorhis repeated his claim that CIO-PAC and NCPAC were separate organizations, but I could tell from the audience’s reaction that I had made my point. A few days later Voorhis himself underscored it by sending a telegram to NCPAC headquarters in New York requesting that “whatever qualified endorsement the Citizens PAC may have given me be withdrawn.” Had he repudiated the endorsement before he was backed onto the defensive and forced to act, the issue might never have developed. But since he had not, I thought then and still think that the endorsement was a legitimate issue to raise. Communist infiltration of labor and political organizations was a serious threat in those early postwar years, and a candidate’s attitude toward endorsements by heavily infiltrated organizations was a barometer of his attitude toward that threat. Repudiation was also an essential weapon against infiltration.
After this debate, the PAC became a peripheral but heated issue in the campaign. While Voorhis equivocated, my campaign director, Harrison McCall, came up with the idea of passing out plastic thimbles saying: “Nixon for Congress—Put the Needle in the PAC.”
This first “debate” was so successful that many of my supporters urged me to challenge Voorhis to other joint appearances. I had some reservations, because each one would require two or three days of concentrated preparation, and I did not want to take off any more time from campaigning. Murray Chotiner, the brilliant and no-nonsense public relations man who was running Bill Knowland’s senatorial campaign and advising me part-time on mine, went straight to the point. “Dick,” he said, “you’re running behind, and when you’re behind, you don’t play it safe. You must run a high-risk campaign.” He paused for a moment until I nodded my agreement, and then he said, “Good. I’ve already arranged for an announcement challenging Voorhis to more debates.”
Voorhis accepted my challenge, and during the course of the campaign there were four more debates held in various towns in the district. They became very popular and drew overflow crowds. When the last one was held in San Gabriel the week before the election, more than a thousand people were crammed into the hall and loudspeakers had to be set up for the several hundred standing outside.
My research into Voorhis’s record showed that of the more than a hundred bills he had introduced in Congress during the previous four years, only one had actually been passed into law. The effect of this bill was to transfer jurisdiction over rabbit breeders from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture. I began running a newspaper advertisement pointing out this rather insignificant legislative achievement. Voorhis replied with an ad under the headline: Deception of the Voter Has No Place in American Politics. He listed several of his congressional accomplishments, but they were either resolutions or speeches, not bills enacted into law.
At our fourth debate, at the Monrovia high school, Voorhis raised this issue and charged that my statements about his record were lies. I pointed out that none of the examples he cited was an actual bill that had been passed into law. To the delight of my supporters in the overflow audience of 1,200, I suggested that one had to be a rabbit to get effective representation in this congressional district.
Voorhis kept the issue alive, continuing to charge that I had lied about his record. In my opening remarks at our final debate I turned to him and said: “Congressman, I flatly challenge you to name one public bill of your authorship which passed both houses of Congress during the last four years.” In his reply, he referred to a measure he wrote establishing National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week. My research into his record paid off again. In my rebuttal I produced a copy of the measure, handed it to Voorhis, and pointed out that this too was a resolution, not a bill.
Since no polls had been taken, I had no idea on Election Day how close the race might be. There were no voting machines, and the counting of the paper ballots lasted long into the following morning. But before we went to bed at about 4 A.M., it was clear that I had won. By the next afternoon the totals were complete. I had received 65,586 votes, and Voorhis received 49,994.
I was thirty-three years old, and the Twelfth District’s new congressman.
In 1950, 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1972 I was again to experience the satisfaction of winning, and most of those campaigns were tough ones. But nothing could equal the excitement and jubilation of winning the first campaign. Pat and I were happier on November 6, 1946, than we were ever to be again in my political career.
By defeating a well-known figure like Voorhis, I briefly became a minor national celebrity. Time reported that I “turned a California grass-roots campaign (dubbed ‘hopeless’ by wheelhorse Republicans) into a triumph over high-powered, high-minded Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis” and added that I had “politely avoided personal attacks” on my opponent. Newsweek said, “In five Lincoln–Douglas debates, [Nixon] bested his opponent, New Dealer Jerry Voorhis, who admitted: ‘This fellow has a silver tongue.’ ”
Despite later—and widespread—misconceptions, communism was not the central issue in the 1946 campaign. The PAC controversy provided emotional and rhetorical excitement, but it was not the issue that stirred or motivated most voters. The central issue in the 1946 campaign was the quality of life in postwar America. The loudest and longest applause given any line in any of the debates came when I said in the first one that “the time has come in this country when no labor leader or no management leader should have the power to deny the American people any of the necessities of life.” Voorhis himself later wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Congressman: “The most important single factor in the campaign of 1946 was the difference in general attitude between the ‘outs’ and ‘ins.’ Anyone seeking to unseat an incumbent needed only to point out all the things that had gone wrong and all the troubles of the war period and its aftermath. Many of these things were intimate experiences in the everyday lives of the people.” I took advantage of a nationwide phenomenon Time called “a cold but nonetheless angry voice raised against many things: price muddles, shortages, black markets, strikes, government bungling and confusion, too much government in too many things.”
It was also true that although Voorhis was a hard-working and generally respected congressman, he was not really in tune with the voters of the district. I have no doubt that the Committee of 100 was right in its belief that any good Republican
candidate would have had a chance of unseating Voorhis in 1946 despite his popularity and his incumbency.
Voorhis, the former Socialist, believed in large-scale government intervention, and I did not. He saw dark conspiracies among “reactionaries” and “monopolies,” and I did not. He was generally an uncritical supporter of the labor unions, while I considered myself their critical friend. He advocated policies that I believed shackled and restricted American industry. His political views were 180 degrees away from mine. Most important, his votes in Congress on a wide range of issues did not represent the wishes of the voters in his district.
Since Voorhis was the front-runner and I a newcomer, I ran an especially vigorous campaign. I challenged his judgment and his voting record, a record that I appeared to know better than he did himself. If some of my rhetoric seems overstated now, it was nonetheless in keeping with the approach that seasoned Republican politicians were using that year. For example, when Henry Wallace campaigned for Democrats in California, Governor Earl Warren called him a spearhead of an attack “by leftist organizations that are attuned to the communist movement.” Earlier in the year, Ohio Senator Robert Taft charged that Democratic congressional proposals “bordered on communism,” while Joe Martin called for Republican victories in order to oust the Communists and fellow travelers from the federal government.
One of the most distorted charges subsequently made about the 1946 campaign involved my supporters. As I moved up the political ladder, my adversaries tried to picture me as the hand-picked stooge of oil magnates, rich bankers, real estate tycoons, and conservative millionaires. But a look at the list of my early supporters shows that they were typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, an insurance salesman, and a furniture dealer. What united them was no special vested interest but the fierce desire of average people to regain control of their own lives. Along with a majority of the voters in the Twelfth District, they had “had enough,” and they decided to do something about it.
My first choice for a committee assignment was the prestigious Judiciary Committee. I was not surprised when I did not receive it, and I was pleased to be assigned to my second choice, the Education and Labor Committee. By one of those curious coincidences of history, another freshman assigned to that committee was a good-looking, good-humored young Democrat from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The newly elected members on the committee drew straws to determine their positions in the all-important seniority ranking. Kennedy drew the shortest straw among the Democrats, and I drew the shortest straw among the Republicans. As a result, he and I shared the dubious distinction of sitting at the opposite ends of the committee table, like a pair of unmatched bookends.
The Education and Labor Committee’s work took up most of my time during 1947, my first year in Congress. We held months of hearings on legislation, which I supported, that passed into law as the Taft–Hartley Act in June 1947.
A public affairs group in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, asked the district’s Democratic congressman, Frank Buchanan, to select the freshman from each party who seemed to have the brightest political future, and to invite them to debate the Taft–Hartley bill at a public meeting. Buchanan chose Kennedy and me, and on April 21, 1947, we had the first Kennedy–Nixon debate. McKeesport is near Pittsburgh, and for this meeting the normally Republican and conservative audience was augmented by a substantial number of anti-Taft–Hartley union men who introduced some acrimonious moments into the question period.
We took the Capital Limited back to Washington after the debate. We drew straws for the lower berth, and—this time—I won. We sat up late, talking far more about foreign policy than domestic issues. Kennedy and I were too different in background, outlook, and temperament to become close friends, but we were thrown together throughout our early careers, and we never had less than an amicable relationship. We were of the same generation—he was only four years younger than I; we were both Navy veterans; we both came to the House the same year; and we were both committed to devoting enormous energy to our work. Our exchanges in committee meetings and our discussions in the cloakrooms were never tinged with the personal acerbity that can make political differences uncomfortable. In those early years we saw ourselves as political opponents but not political rivals. We shared one quality which distinguished us from most of our fellow congressmen: neither of us was a backslapper, and we were both uncomfortable with boisterous displays of superficial camaraderie. He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.
Pat and I saw the inside of the White House for the first time on February 18, 1947, when we attended a reception the Trumans gave for the new members of the Eightieth Congress. On July 2 I was included in a group of four freshmen Republican congressmen for whom Representative Charles Kersten of Wisconsin had arranged a private meeting with the President. In the notes I made later that day, I described the Oval Office as a “big pleasant room,” with “no gadgets” except for a pony express confidential pouch that Truman pointed out to us. Pictures of his family were on the table behind his desk, and also a model airplane that I assumed to be the presidential aircraft—an Air Force Constellation that Truman had named the Sacred Cow.
Truman made us all feel welcome and relaxed as we shook hands with him. We sat around the desk, and he spoke very earnestly about the necessity of rehabilitating Europe and emphasized his concern that peaceful German production should be encouraged. He said he was glad to see us even though we were Republicans, because he always considered it necessary for the two parties to cooperate in foreign affairs. He said, “Some of my best friends never agree with me politically.”
He led us over to a big globe where he pointed to Manchuria and remarked on how rich it was in oil and mineral deposits. He said that the Soviets had devastated the whole region but that Manchuria would recover and become the next great productive area for the world. Then he turned the globe with the palm of his hand and pointed to the great mass of the Soviet Union. He said, “The Russians are like us, they look and act like us. They are fine people. They got along with our soldiers in Berlin very well. As far as I am concerned, they can have whatever they want just so they don’t try to impose their system on others.” He mentioned the accounts of Mrs. Roosevelt attending an international conference where the Soviet delegate was always obstructing action by saying that he had to clear the issue with the Kremlin. “That’s just the way it was at Potsdam where I went with charitable feelings in view of their contributions in the war,” Truman remarked. He said he could not understand what the Russians wanted as far as their policy toward Germany and toward Europe was concerned.
He told us that dropping the atomic bomb was an awful decision for him to make. Speaking of his job, he said, “It’s the greatest show on earth, and it doesn’t cost anything to the weekly newsman who covers the White House.” I observed in my notes that Truman’s strength was “his hominess, his democratic attitude, and his sincerity.”
Twenty-two years later, when I was President, Pat and I flew to Independence to present Truman the piano he had played in the White House, for his presidential library. He was fighting a rough bout with flu, but his flair for pithy plain speaking was undiminished. I knew that he had long since changed his opinion of the Soviets. In 1969 he told me, “The Russians are liars—you can’t trust them. At Potsdam they agreed to everything and broke their word. It’s too bad the second world power is like this, but that’s the way it is, and we must keep our strength.”
Most freshmen received only one committee assignment, but Joe Martin, the new Republican Speaker, asked if I would be also willing to sit on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Now that the Republicans controlled Congress, we would be held accountable for the committee’s frequently irresponsible conduct. “We need a young lawyer on that committee to s
marten it up,” he said, and he added that he would consider my acceptance a personal favor. Put in this way, it was an offer I could not very well refuse. I accepted with considerable reluctance, however, because of the dubious reputation the committee had acquired under its former chairman, Martin Dies, a flamboyant and at times demagogic Texas Democrat.
My own attitude toward communism had recently changed from one of general disinterest to one of extreme concern. I do not recall being particularly disturbed when Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union in 1934. During the Spanish Civil War the concerted press campaign against Franco—who was always described as a fascist rebel—led me to side with the Loyalists, whose communist orientation was seldom mentioned in the newspapers. At the time of the Hitler–Stalin pact I was strongly against Stalin, not because he was a Communist but because he was allied with Hitler, whom I despised; during the war I was pro-Russian, not because the Russians were Communists but because they were helping us fight Hitler. I was elated when both the United States and the Soviet Union supported the founding of the United Nations. As an admirer of Woodrow Wilson I felt that we had made a serious mistake in not joining the League of Nations, and I believed that the UN offered the world’s best chance to build a lasting peace.
It was Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 that profoundly affected my attitude toward communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. He said:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high, and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
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