RN

by Richard Nixon

  At the beginning I often spoke to no more than a handful of bemused passersby. When the campaign began to gather steam, however, the crowds began to grow, and before long the presence of hecklers assured a large and lively audience at every stop. These hecklers were tightly organized bands sent out from local left-wing labor and political organizations. They tried to disrupt my speeches by a continuous counterpoint of critical questions and derisive observations. On one occasion in San Francisco, they even brought their own sound truck, and we engaged in an amplified debate. When a small band of them arrived outside a rally at Long Beach Municipal Auditorium, my driver turned up the loudspeaker and played a recording of one of the popular songs of the day, “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked a Cake.” My supporters roared their approval.

  While I was beginning my campaign treks around the state, sparks were flying in the Democratic primary. Senator Downey had withdrawn from the race, citing health problems, and Mrs. Douglas was now opposed by Manchester Boddy, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News. Boddy was well financed, and he campaigned with the genuine fervor of a lifelong Democrat who despised Mrs. Douglas’s left-wing leanings. He referred to her and her followers as a “small subversive clique of red hots.” His supporters attacked her voting record by comparing it with that of Vito Marcantonio, the only openly procommunist member of Congress.

  Anyone could see that the Douglas and Marcantonio records were strikingly similar and the attacks coming from within her own party were as damaging as anything I could say. The subsequently controversial “pink sheet” that my campaign committee issued was, in fact, inspired by these earlier comparisons of the two voting records. Whatever interpretation was later placed on these facts, no one was ever able to challenge their accuracy. All we added was the mordant comment of the color of the paper.

  The most serious damage to Mrs. Douglas was done by Senator Downey. On May 22, he publicly stated: “It is my opinion that Mrs. Douglas does not have the fundamental ability and qualifications for a United States Senator. . . . She has shown no inclination, in fact no ability, to dig in and do the hard and tedious work required to prepare legislation and push it through Congress.” Referring to her voting record in the House, he said, “Mrs. Douglas gave comfort to the Soviet tyranny by voting against aid to both Greece and Turkey. She voted against the President in a crisis when he most needed her support and most fully deserved her confidence.”

  Mrs. Douglas ended up with less than 50 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Boddy got about 30 percent and, because crossover voting was still allowed, I received 20 percent. On the Republican side, I ran unopposed and received 740,000 votes—a record primary turnout. Thus the lines for the general election were clearly drawn. I had a completely unified Republican Party behind me, while the Democrats were divided and dispirited after a bitter primary.

  Helen Gahagan had been a popular light opera and Broadway musical star during the 1920s. In 1931 she married Melvyn Douglas, one of Hollywood’s most popular leading men. When the Democratic congressman from the Fourteenth District in Los Angeles retired in 1944, Helen Douglas ran for his seat and won. She entered the House of Representatives in January 1945.

  Mrs. Douglas was a handsome woman with a dramatic presence. She had many fans among the public and many admirers in the press and in the entertainment industry, but she was not, to put it mildly, the most popular member of the House of Representatives. Generally when two members of the House run against each other for another office their fellow congressmen maintain a friendly attitude and wish both of them well. But in our case, even many of the House Democrats let me know that they hoped I could defeat Helen Douglas.

  One afternoon in 1950, I was working in my office when Dorothy Cox, my personal secretary, came in and said, “Congressman Kennedy is here and would like to talk to you.”

  Jack Kennedy was ushered in and I motioned him into a chair. He took an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “Dick, I know you’re in for a pretty rough campaign,” he said, “and my father wanted to help out.”

  We talked for a while about the campaign. As he rose to leave, he said, “I obviously can’t endorse you, but it isn’t going to break my heart if you can turn the Senate’s loss into Hollywood’s gain.”

  After he left I opened the envelope and found it contained a $1,000 contribution. Three days after I won in November, Kennedy told an informal gathering of professors and students at Harvard that he was personally very happy that I had defeated Mrs. Douglas.

  The Douglas victory in the primary called for some rethinking of my strategy. My original plans had been geared to running against Downey, a popular moderate as well as an entrenched incumbent.

  Now I found myself running against one of the most left-wing members of Congress—and a woman. I knew that I must not appear ungallant in my criticism of Mrs. Douglas. Consequently, I felt that the best strategy was to let her record do my work for me. She was out of step with the voters of California, and if I could prevent her formidable dramatic skills from clouding the issues, I was almost certain to win.

  Throughout the campaign I kept her pinned to her extremist record. I pointed out that she had voted against Truman on military aid to Greece and Turkey, the key plank of the Truman Doctrine, which I had supported. She had also voted against bills requiring loyalty checks for federal employees and was one of only fourteen members of Congress who had voted against the security bill that allowed the heads of key national defense agencies, such as the Atomic Energy Commission, to discharge government workers found to be poor security risks. In a speech before the Conference on American-Soviet Cultural Cooperation, she had claimed that the obstacles to unity between the two countries were “deliberately created by sinister and dangerous forces in this country who have never given up their allegiance to the ideas of Hitler.”

  Mrs. Douglas had often appeared at meetings and addressed organizations that had been cited by the Attorney General’s office during Truman’s administration as “Communist and subversive.” The Communist Daily Worker had selected Mrs. Douglas as “one of the heroes of the Eightieth Congress.” Although I constantly questioned her wisdom and judgment in light of such a record, I never questioned her patriotism.

  One of the most peculiar ineptitudes of the Douglas campaign was the attempt to charge that my voting record was actually more procommunist than hers. In her speeches she began saying that she was more anti-communist than I, and that I was the one who had voted with Marcantonio against key anticommunist issues. The decision to pursue this particular attack was clearly rooted more in desperation than in logic, because the charge that I was a communist sympathizer had no public credibility whatever. She made the further mistake of careless research on my voting record when she accused me of having voted five times with Marcantonio on key matters. In two of the five votes in question, I had not done so—although she had. In the third there was no vote of record. In the other two cases, she had seized on procedural technicalities to distort the record. She accused me of opposing aid to Korea when I had actually supported it, and of voting to cut a Korean aid program in half when in fact I had voted for a one-year bill rather than a two-year bill.

  I made a statewide radio speech accusing her of glaring misstatements in a flyer that her campaign was circulating. I refuted each charge and repeated my challenge that she cite one instance in which I had misrepresented her record. Her side replied with a newspaper ad headed, Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness!

  Prominently placed in the ad was a desperate, ludicrous attack:

  NIXON–MARCANTONIO ISOLATIONISM

  Nixon’s record of blind stupidity on foreign policy gave aid and comfort to the Communists. On every key vote Nixon stood with party liner Marcantonio against America in its fight to defeat Communism.

  On October 12, four weeks before the election, a California poll was released showing that I had a 12 percent lead over Mrs. Douglas, with 34 percent still undecided. Panic m
ust have swept the Douglas camp when this poll came out, because as the campaign entered its last weeks her attacks became more viciously personal. One of her campaign flyers printed on yellow paper read: “THE BIG LIE! Hitler invented it. Stalin perfected it. Nixon uses it. . . . YOU pick the Congressman the Kremlin loves!” She told one audience, “The temporary success of the Republican Party in 1946, with its backwash of young men in dark shirts, was short lived.” She told an interviewer that she hated “Communist totalitarianism and Nazi totalitarianism and Mundt–Nixon totalitarianism.” She called me a “peewee who is trying to scare people into voting for him” and customarily referred to me as a “pipsqueak.”

  In a campaign dispatch, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “Nixon was dubbed ‘tricky Dick’ by Mrs. Douglas. She warned her listeners that if they want a depression again, elect Nixon. . . . She charged that Nixon had voted along with Congressman Vito Marcantonio on foreign affairs issues and the New Yorker always followed the Communist Party line. She said Nixon was attempting to ‘steal’ Democratic votes by ‘harping’ on her record.” On October 23, she said that I was smearing her and denounced what she termed my “reaction at home and retreat abroad.” She charged that I was “throwing up a smokescreen of smears, innuendos, and half-truths to try to confuse and mislead the voters.” I responded immediately: “If it is a smear, it is by the record, and Mrs. Douglas made that record.”

  The New York Times captured the flavor of the campaign in a report from California that “Mrs. Douglas has been depicting her opponent as a red-baiting, reactionary enemy of labor and the common man. . . . Mr. Nixon has been assailing Mrs. Douglas as a flighty left-winger and an exponent of a regime that failed.”

  In addition to issues of foreign policy and internal security, the 1950 campaign involved several important California-related issues: offshore oil rights, water rights, and federal farm controls. On each, Mrs. Douglas held highly unpopular views. For example, on the question of rights to oil and mineral deposits in the tidelands just off the California coast, she alone of the twenty-three-member California congressional delegation voted to oppose state ownership and favor federal control.

  Near the end of the campaign we scheduled a massive old-fashioned torchlight parade and rally in Los Angeles. I was introduced by movie actor Dick Powell. His wife, June Allyson, then pregnant, made a short and moving speech about the future of her unborn child.

  I won the election by a margin of 680,000 votes, the largest plurality of any Senate winner that year. It was a good night for Republicans throughout the country as we picked up 30 House seats and 5 Senate seats.

  Mrs. Douglas sent no personal message or even the traditional congratulations to me, although she did issue a brief statement: “It now seems certain that Richard Nixon has been elected and that California has two Republican senators.” I did, however, receive a telegram from Senator Downey:

  PLEASE ACCEPT MY CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NOTABLE VICTORY AND MY BEST WISHES AND REGARDS.

  The 1950 campaign became highly controversial because of the “rocking, socking” way in which I was said to have waged and won it. Mrs. Douglas and many of her friends and supporters claimed that I had impugned her loyalty and smeared her character, thus depriving the voters of the opportunity to make an honest choice.

  Anyone who takes the trouble to go back through the newspapers and other sources of the period, however, will find that things happened as I have described them here.

  Helen Gahagan Douglas waged a campaign that would not be equaled for stridency, ineptness, or self-righteousness until George McGovern’s presidential campaign twenty-two years later. In the long run, however, even this probably made little difference. Helen Douglas lost the election because the voters of California in 1950 were not prepared to elect as their senator anyone with a left-wing voting record or anyone they perceived as being soft on or naive about communism. She may have been at some political disadvantage because she was a woman. But her fatal disadvantage lay in her record and in her views.

  PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS: 1952

  Although the 1952 presidential election was still two years away, Republicans in Congress and across the country were already beginning to gear up for it. We had come so close to winning with Dewey in 1948 that there was an almost desperate determination not to fail again. After twenty years out of power, Republicans could almost taste the victory we knew must be ours if only we could enter the election as a party united behind a strong candidate. As the new senator from the nation’s second most populous state, I was caught up in this activity from my first days in the Senate.

  Truman at this point was a tremendously unpopular President. After a humiliating defeat in the New Hampshire primary in March 1952, he decided not to run again. Even so, whoever the Democrats selected would still have to counter the weight of Truman’s unpopularity and the public’s disgust with the blatant corruption that even Adlai Stevenson, in reply to a question from the Oregon Journal, referred to as “the mess in Washington.”

  Truman stood in the eye of a hurricane of scandals that swirled around him while he did nothing. His military assistant presided over an influence-peddling scheme of such proportions that the free-lance agents trading in government contracts that grew up as a result came to be known, after their customary fee, as “5 percenters.” Payoffs in the form of deep freezes went to Truman’s Appointments Secretary, his naval aide, and his Treasury Secretary, among others.

  A Senate investigation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation revealed that its directors had been subject to manipulation for personal gain by top Democratic Party officials and by at least one member of the White House staff. But the tax scandals were the worst of all. A congressional inquiry produced a list of charges against officials in the then Bureau of Internal Revenue that included extortion, evading income tax, and preventing the audit of their own returns.

  Of nine district tax collectors removed, one was a personal friend of Truman’s, had figured in the RFC scandal, was sent to jail, and was later pardoned by President Johnson. Truman’s Appointments Secretary was convicted of conspiracy in a tax case, sent to prison, and later pardoned by President Kennedy. The head of the Justice Department’s Tax Division was convicted in the same case and was also pardoned by President Johnson.

  In 1951 alone, 166 Internal Revenue officials were fired or forced to resign. It was no overstatement, then, when I kicked off my Western campaign in Pomona, to charge Truman with heading a “scandal-a-day” administration.

  The two major Republican candidates were General Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft, the son of a President, had been in the Senate since 1939. He was known as “Mr. Republican” and would clearly be the choice of the party organizers and workers. He was generally described as a conservative, but his beliefs were far too complex—and he was far too intelligent and complicated a man—for any simple label. He was, to be sure, a strong anticommunist with an isolationist streak. Domestically, however, he was constantly trying to find creative solutions to America’s social problems without having to resort to big government spending programs. Taft was universally respected in Congress, and perhaps his most ardent supporter was Bill Knowland, my senior colleague from California.

  Eisenhower had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. Immediately after the war he served as Army Chief of Staff. He was named president of Columbia University in 1948, but in 1950 he returned to the military as Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces.

  Throughout his military career, Eisenhower had been determinedly non-political, but after the war his heroic image made him a prize sought after by both political parties. According to Eisenhower, Truman had offered to back him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1948. Eisenhower never told me why he refused Truman’s offer. I feel there may have been several reasons. He probably felt the time wasn’t right for him; he was reluctant to run as Truman’s protégé, and—to the
limited extent that he thought in partisan terms—he considered himself a Republican rather than a Democrat. Unlike Taft, Eisenhower could claim no grass roots base among the party faithful. But his engaging personality, his dazzling smile, and his great military successes had made “Ike” a genuine popular hero who could almost certainly win the election if he could first win the nomination.

  By 1951 several small groups of influential Republicans were trying to persuade Eisenhower to run for the Republican nomination. Many of the more liberal elements of the party coalesced behind him. His leading supporter on Capitol Hill was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

  There were two other candidates, each of whom hoped that if the convention became deadlocked over Eisenhower and Taft it might turn to him: Harold Stassen and Earl Warren. Stassen’s chances of nomination were remote at best. Warren, on the other hand, had been Dewey’s running mate in 1948 and as a result of having won the California presidential primary as a favorite son, he would arrive at the convention in Chicago with a solid bloc of seventy delegates bound to stay with him until he decided to release them.

  The first time I ever saw Dwight Eisenhower was on his triumphant return to the States after V-E Day in 1945. I was doing Navy contract termination work on Church Street in lower Manhattan, and the windows of my twentieth-floor office overlooked the route of his ticker-tape parade up Broadway. I could just make him out through the snowstorm of confetti, sitting in the back of his open car, waving and looking up at the cheering thousands like me who filled every window of the towering buildings. His arms were raised high over his head in the gesture that soon became his trademark.