The Russians Are Coming

The most significant U.S. Senate contest in modern America occurred in California in 1950, when Republican Rep. Richard Nixon and Democratic Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas squared off in a bitter struggle to win the seat held by a retiring incumbent. Nixon’s earlier role in the 1948 House Un-American Activities Committee phase of the Hiss-Chambers case had brought him national recognition. Defeating Douglas made him a prime candidate for the GOP vice presidential nomination in 1952, and Douglas, an accomplished actress before entering Congress in 1944, had her legislative career ended by a landslide loss.

The Nixon-Douglas contest emerged against the backdrop of the Cold War. Abroad, U.S. troops waged a difficult “police action” to repel North Korea’s invasion of the South that by year’s end had also brought Chinese armies into the conflict. At home, the political battles of an evolving “Red Scare” raged at universities, in the motion picture and television industries, in libraries and community groups and in a series of House and Senate races. The 1950 election decimated the ranks of Democratic officials. The party lost 28 House seats and five in the Senate, with the patently false charge of being “soft on communism” playing a major role in the campaigns’ outcome.

Both domestic and international events in 1950 conspired to reinforce public anxieties over a Communist menace at home, as well as abroad. Alger Hiss was convicted in January on perjury charges related to his involvement in Soviet espionage during the 1930s. Weeks later, Sen. Joseph McCarthy launched his reckless attacks on alleged Communist traitors who had worked for the USSR and infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. That year also witnessed the start of the Korean War, the consolidation of Communist control of China, a continuing European threat posed by the Soviet Union in Stalin’s final years and the arrests in both Britain and the United States of members of a small group accused of World War II atomic espionage for the Soviet Union. A host of conflicts was also ongoing within American society over blacklisting, loyalty oaths and other internal security issues. The result was a heightened popular awareness of communism as a domestic political issue in the fall campaigns. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Nixon-Douglas race, the subject of Greg Mitchell’s exhaustive study, “Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas--Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950.”

Mitchell’s book is an extremely readable primer on a pivotal episode in Nixon’s rise to national prominence and power. Mitchell draws heavily on the existing body of Nixon scholarship, and readers of biographies, such as Roger Morris’ “Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician,” will recognize both the broad outlines and many details of the 1950 Senate race that appear in “Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady.” The title comes from nicknames attached to the candidates in the 1950 race by their political opponents. Nixon’s remains a widely popular designation among his adversaries.

The author confirms that Douglas was victimized during the contest by the Nixon camp’s relentless and untrue allegations of her purported pro-Communist sympathies and voting record. The Republican candidate and his campaign workers distributed a so-called “pink sheet” (on pink paper, no less) that cataloged Douglas’ votes on certain internal security issues, which were identical to those cast by ultra-left New York Rep. Vito Marcantonia; hence the “Pink Lady” tag.

Douglas was not a radical, however; simply one of many New Deal Democrats who were more liberal on domestic issues than the Truman administration and, as a result, subjected to attack by Republicans as well as by conservatives within her own party. Mitchell notes, for example, that it was not Nixon but Douglas’ unsuccessful Democratic primary opponent Manchester Boddy who first linked her to what Boddy called “a statewide conspiracy on the part of [a] small subversive clique of red-hots to capture, through stealth and cunning, the nerve centers of our Democratic Party.” Nixon and his associates, including chief campaign strategist Murray Chotiner, adopted Boddy’s “red-hot” theme and gave it statewide distribution through hundreds of thousands of “Pink Lady” fliers, radio and television spots and numerous campaign speeches.

“Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady” provides a lively overview of the candidates, their political associates and the often unsavory tactics used during the 1950 campaign. Several aspects of the book plow useful, occasionally unfamiliar, ground. Thus, the author argues that Douglas was victimized not only by Nixon’s exploitation of anti-Communist fervor but also by a strong undercurrent of “sexual politics”--condemning his opponent, in other words, both as “pink” and as a “lady.”

But Mitchell’s evidence does not fully sustain his argument that the Nixon campaign, which Red-baited Douglas persistently, also made a major effort to manipulate the gender issue. A portion of California’s electorate already had returned Douglas three times to Congress, making her a known personality in the state, and as Mitchell correctly notes, it was “her gender, her liberalism, her flamboyance”--not gender alone--that raised questions in some voters’ minds about her. That Nixon’s wife, Pat, had chosen a homemaker’s career undoubtedly helped with other voters, but only on occasion and in private audiences did Nixon or his cohorts (as Mitchell quotes them) succumb to vulgar sexism.

As for Douglas, Mitchell notes that she was “in love with her own voice,” “long-winded even by congressional standards,” and “her speaking style [involved] orating for 40 minutes when 10 minutes would have done.” Nor could Douglas point to any legislative accomplishments during her years in Washington; her own campaign manager stated that she “could not have gotten a bill passed making Dec. 25 a holiday.” Douglas’ deficiencies as a Senate candidate, in short, were not produced entirely by her opponents’ dirty tricks.

Mitchell is effective in portraying the Red Scare in California, which fed into the 1950 Senate campaign, specifically over the conflict at the University of California about signing loyalty oaths and over anti-Communist blacklisting in Hollywood (and New York). Fully a quarter of the book is devoted, usefully so, to narrating these matters. The author’s description of the struggle within the Screen Director’s Guild, which pitted Cecil B. DeMille against anti-blacklist Guild President Joseph Mankiewicz, makes especially vivid reading.

The Nixon-Douglas race also foreshadowed a number of emerging trends within modern American politics. California voters in 1950 witnessed the growing importance (though still an infant medium) of television campaigning, the pivotal role of strategists such as Chotiner in developing negative campaign themes and the decline of political machines (“that new breed of kingmaker--the political consultant--first emerged in California in the 1930s to fill the vacuum left by the party boss,” notes Mitchell). Interestingly, Nixon also received more than 300,000 votes in the 1950 Democratic primary (California then allowed candidates to cross file), signaling the emergence of a conservative-moderate “Nixon Democrat” voting bloc, later the Reagan Democrats, returned to Democratic ranks in 1992 by Bill Clinton. Finally, the 1950 campaign foreshadowed later campaign finance abuses by candidates of both parties: Nixon’s many business supporters in California contributed several million dollars to the campaign, virtually all of which was shielded from disclosure. Nixon biographer Morris observed of the 1950 race that Nixon’s Senate “election and further rise had been richly financed, mostly in secret.”

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The author’s distaste for Nixon and his admiration for Douglas emerge throughout the book, although Mitchell recognizes Nixon’s complexity: “[He] was no McCarthy; blacklisting and loyalty oaths made him uncomfortable.” On a few aspects of the period, however, the author has erred. Whittaker Chambers did not, as Mitchell asserts, under Nixon’s “patient guidance” accuse Hiss of “working for the Soviets” (in short, of stealing government documents). That came only after Hiss sued Chambers and at a 1948 slander suit deposition, not in 1949 as Mitchell asserts, nor was Nixon present.

As for Nixon, little that is strikingly new emerges from Mitchell’s analysis. But Mitchell does acknowledge that if it had not been for his involvement in the Hiss-Chambers case--about which he lectured to friendly audiences throughout the 1950 campaign--Richard Nixon would probably never have become a national figure. Throughout his battle with Douglas, Nixon kept the focus of the campaign sharply on the anti-Communist issue, contrasting his presumed “toughness” with his opponent’s purported “softness,” and steering attention away from domestic economic issues on which he held no comparable advantage. Mitchell’s evidence demonstrates again that revisionist accounts by Nixon and friendly writers asserting that his campaign used negative attacks less frequently than did Douglas are blatantly untrue. In this connection, the prize for dubious, indeed slanderous, use of language during the campaign should be awarded to Nixon’s last preelection radio speech when, only days after Chinese Communist armies had entered the Korean War, he questioned Douglas’s patriotism while “the lives of American boys were being snuffed out by ruthless aggressors . . . in North Korea” with these words: “It seems incredible that [my opponent] . . . would ask you for your votes tomorrow while flatly refusing to tell you which side she is on in this conflict.”

The following day, Nixon rode the anti-Communist issue and the anti-Democratic national tide to a landslide victory, with a margin of 59% to 40% and a voter majority of more than 700,000, including hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters, “the largest plurality,” Morris notes, “received by any senatorial candidate in the nation.”

One Democrat in Congress who understood fully the meaning of Nixon’s victory for national politics was his colleague in the House, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who disliked Douglas and expressed to a Harvard audience his delight that Nixon, a fellow war veteran and Cold Warrior, had triumphed. During the campaign, Kennedy hand-delivered to a Nixon staffer a $1,000 campaign contribution from the family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, a gesture that “flabbergasted” Nixon.

Although Mitchell contends that “gender, as much as Cold War politics, played a crucial role in [Douglas’s] defeat in 1950,” that argument remains unproved. Like other victorious Republicans that year, Nixon thrived on attacking a Democratic White House for being “soft on communism” at home while, in fact, it struggled to contain aggressive Communist regimes in both Europe and Asia. Beginning in 1950, a half-decade of hysteria would characterize the worst years of the post-World War II Red Scare. Frequently during these years, unscrupulous politicians would blur the crucial distinction between those Americans who, as Soviet agents, had posed a genuine national security problem and the greater number of citizens attempting to exercise--even as Communists--their constitutional right to peaceful political dissent.

The ethos reminds one of Marianne Moore’s comment that writing poetry involves describing imaginary gardens with real toads in them. In his 1950 Senate campaign, despite the absence of any real toads in his opponent’s past, Nixon’s attacks on Douglas persuaded a majority of California voters that she had dwelt in an “imaginary garden” of pro-Soviet voting. Although the tactic succeeded that year, it also persuaded Nixon’s political adversaries and many other Americans that “Tricky Dick” was a far more justified nickname than “Pink Lady” ever was.