THE TROUBLE WITH NIXON
Rubin, Morris H.
THE TROUBLE WITH NIXON A Documented Report / by Morris H. Rubin THE biggest problem facing Rich- ard Milhous Nixon, wrote one of his friends among the Washington correspondents, "is to overcome...
...Nixon voted to give the offshore "tidelands," which the Supreme Court had held to be fed: eral lands, to the coastal states...
...In fact, Nixon's use of the big lie, the sly innuendo, and guilt by association to club his opponents with the charge of being disloyal, treasonable, or "soft on communism" antedates the outbreak of the epidemic of McCar-thyism...
...The fact that the PAC had refused to endorse Voorhis precisely because he was so unequivocally anti-communist did not in the slightest deter Nixon from picturing his Democratic opponent as a tool of the PAC and "its communist principles...
...Human Events, for example, insisted that "those who know something about the art of shaping a Presidential campaign strongly rebel against the 'new Nixon' policy, the phase announced at the end of the convention and—so far as can be discerned—still in force...
...In the first place, of the 354 votes which found Mrs...
...If it is difficult to cast Nixon as pro or anti-McCarthy, it is impossible to classify his politics...
...Compare that," he said, "with Harry Truman, Harry Vaughan, RFC Dawson, O'Dwyer, and all the rest of these crooks and these incompetents...
...They were dirty blows...
...It is a record that shows a continuing, unchanging pattern of character and conduct that belies the picture of Nixon as a man "of matchless honesty...
...The Democrats did in fact capture Congress, but of course there was no rehiring of "security risks...
...An analysis of the Nixon speech and the relevant facts of his political career seem hardly to justify the President's delight...
...It turns out there isn't one Nixon, but two Nixons, who have a habit of seeing that both sides on controversial issues are kept happy and everyone has something favorable to quote...
...Here, clearly, is an unchanging pattern of behavior from 1946 through 1954 that embodies most of the worst ingredients of McCarthyism...
...Richard Wilson, chief correspondent of the Cowles papers in the nation's capital and an avowed admirer of the Vice President, was expressing the concern of many a Nixon supporter when he wrote in his Look article: "Those who like Nixon recognize that many people have formed this impression of him, but they cannot understand why...
...Clear-cut answers to many questions on Nixon's record are not easy to come by, no matter how earnestly the researcher digs into the available, materials...
...Nixon appears to be a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work...
...There was literally nothing in his record that disclosed the slightest sympathy for any communist idea or method...
...He seemed to favor the liberalized tariff program of reciprocal trade, but voted for crippling amendments...
...He has seemed to be on both sides of American policy regarding Korea and Indo-China...
...Policies are products to be sold the public—this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market...
...Immediately thereafter, Nixon's followers began soliciting Central Committee members in an effort to defeat Ahmanson...
...Nixon lined up with the conservatives in favor of the anti-trust exemption...
...Truman's repeal measure...
...Instead, Nixon sought repeatedly throughout the campaign to pin the red label on Voorhis by building his campaign around the slogan: "A vote for Nixon is a vote against the PAC [and] its Communist principles...
...It was Nixon's advice that prevailed...
...He was then requested to give a sworn statement, which he did...
...But Knowland, an honorable conservative, refused to be a party to such a scheme...
...His lament is representative of the nervous defense of Nixon that comes hobbling up in talk with Republicans even before anything critical is said of the Vice President...
...On issues of foreign policy, Mrs...
...Nixon's press officer said later—[too late to get into the original news story]—that the Vice President was not referring to any specific documents in using the term 'blueprint,' but was using figurative language to describe the philosophy and proposals of President Truman...
...Then, after exploring some of these votes and shamelessly referring to "the Douglas-Marcantonio Axis," as though its case were proven, the "pink sheet" exhorted its readers: "Remember...
...As for the thirteen occasions on which the Douglas and Marcantonio votes coincided but were not part of the House or Democratic majority, nine dealt with such issues as housing, rent control, price controls, and the like...
...The Wall Street Journal claimed him recently as a "conservative Republican...
...He favored Korean wartime rent and price controls...
...His voice was pitched lower, his language higher in his opening campaign speeches...
...He not only claimed credit for firing non-existent Communists and fellow-travelers in the federal service, but he warned that if a Democratic Congress were elected "the security risks which have been fired by the Eisenhower Administration will be hired back...
...She voted against the Mundt-Nixon Communist Control bill and against overriding President Truman's veto of the Communist Subversive Control bill...
...The "undefined tricky quality" gets itself defined in the process of reading the record...
...Here is a curious line-up for a "liberal internationalist"—McCarthy, Jenner, and Bricker, as Nixon's fellow fighters—in the judgment of the newsletter which speaks for and has a considerable following among the most relentless of the Republican Old Guard...
...It was Nixon who amended the "Resolution of Censure" adopted by the Senate to read simply "Resolution...
...Knowland flew to California from Washington...
...Douglas voted with the majority of the House or the majority of her party 85 per cent of the time, than it was to say that she joined up in a Douglas-Marcantonio Axis on 354 occasions...
...It is clear from the record that Smith knew what he was talking about...
...Douglas and Marcantonio voting the same way, many were on relatively minor, non-controversial matters on which there was substantial agreement among all factions...
...There is a pro-McCarthy Nixon, but the trail also leads to an anti-McCarthy Nixon...
...Responding to these and comparable statements by Nixon, Stevenson characterized the Vice President as one who represented "McCarthyism in a white collar...
...voted to exclude one million workers from minimum wage coverage...
...Again his principal weapon was a calculated campaign to pin the red label on an opponent whose anti-communist credentials were unassailable...
...Only two were concerned with matters of "internal security" and here Mrs...
...In labeling Nixon a conservative, The Wall Street Journal emphasized that "the Taft-Hartley Law was one of the guide posts by which one measures the bent of public officials...
...In 1949, after the GOP lost control of Congress, Mr...
...In a Speech at Butte, Montana, Oct...
...His friend and former political lieutenant, Paul G. Hoffman, chairman of the board of the Studebaker-Packard Corporation, for instance, was urging him to let McCarthy have it with both barrels...
...There is the Nixon who spoke up for foreign economic aid, but there is that inevitable twin who pointed with pride because the Republicans had achieved "economy" in reducing the appropriation for foreign economic aid...
...Knowland, chairman of the delegation, had had similar opportunities to advance his own political fortunes at the convention...
...Some time later, Young revealed that an analysis of the 3,746 employes who were dismissed or who resigned for security reasons from the inauguration of the Eisenhower security program until mid-1955 showed fully 41.2 per cent had been appointed to their posts by the Eisenhower Administration...
...Still, Nixon continued to tell audiences throughout the country that the Republicans had come across this "blueprint"—and there was no further reference to figurative language...
...As Life observed, "Having thus honored his own pledge, his friends say, [Knowland] found Nixon's purely nominal support of Warren, if not downright disloyalty toward him, all the more offensive...
...Louis, Nixon said that in his decision to halt Communist aggression in Korea, former President Truman was right and "deserves the credit for it...
...But this was only a beginning...
...His votes on behalf of entrenched wealth on some measures are balanced in part by votes cast in favor of occasional liberal legislation during his four years in the House of Representatives and his two years in the Senate...
...A startled nation was informed by the press that between November 1950 and August 1952, a powerful group of wealthy California business interests had contributed $18,235—an average of $870 per month—for the direct support of Nixon and his family...
...Voorhis, an earnest, hard-working, dedicated New Dealer, was unas-sailably anti-communist...
...It was the political huckster rather than the man of "deep religious conviction" who was troubled enough to jettison the Senator from Wisconsin...
...This is Nixon's most withering comment on McCarthy and McCarthyism—"inept...
...The "new Nixon" won't do...
...For example: One—Real estate men gave 36 per cent of the fund...
...voted for Taft Hartley...
...In later speeches, he praised the Administration for avoiding hostilities in Indo-China although he had told the newspaper editors that he personally supported intervention with American boys...
...Once he voted for a measure of federal aid for housing...
...It is a record that goes far beyond the 1954 campaign to which Wilson alludes so complacently...
...As Robert Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune reported in his semi-official Eisenhower: The Inside Stoiy, "almost before the echoes of his testimony had died away he [Stassen] was cut off from the rear...
...They cite some strong reasons, born of experience with the grass roots and urban precinct levels, for eliminating the 'new Nixon' and sending the 'old Nixon' all out into the fray...
...McCarthy was still a nationally unknown candidate for a first term in the Senate when Nixon pinned the red label on so dedicated an anti-communist as ferry Voorhis...
...It was in his first venture in politics, as a young man of 33 in 1946, that Nixon developed the technique of campaigning that was to be his badge of identification in every subsequent campaign...
...Truman's opposition and ultimate veto...
...for political reasons covered up [the] Communist conspiracy [in the United States] and attempted to halt its exposure...
...He had known Hiss only slightly...
...Douglas voted the sentiments of countless anti-Communist American liberals...
...Jerry Voorhis, who had served five terms as Democratic Congressman in the district, was Nixon's 1946 opponent...
...It is interesting to observe, I think, that while Wilson is inclined to limit Nixon's critics to "those who think of themselves as intellectuals" and those who are "self-styled liberals," he is a candid enough reporter to concede at one point that "many people have formed this impression"—of a tricky character unsuited for the Presidency...
...No one, it seems to me, can dig deeply into Nixon's record without coming up with at least one answer posed in the questions raised by Wilson and other friends of the Vice President...
...One of the most significant aspects of Nixon's political career is his unpopularity with his fellow Republican leaders in California, many of whom regard him as tricky, unde-pendable, and overly ambitious...
...For, as his admiring biographer tells us, Nixon said: "McCarthy's intentions were right, but his tactics were, frankly, so inept at times that he probably did our cause more harm than good...
...Thus, on August 31, 1953, speaking before the American Legion Convention in St...
...A striking example of modification—for the record but not for the audience—revolved around Nixon's constantly repeated claim throughout the campaign of 1954 that "the Eisenhower Administration has kicked out the Communists and fellow travelers and security risks not by the hundreds but by the thousands...
...Warren and his supporters regarded this as a wholly disloyal performance on Nixon's part...
...Again Mr...
...The Wall Street Journal stopped there, but there is much more to add to a picture of Nixon the conservative...
...At Nixon's suggestion Dulles received McCarthy at the State Department and assured the Senator that he had acted in the national interest...
...In this campaign the principal piece of Nixon campaign literature was the "pink sheet...
...Wilson seems genuinely puzzled...
...Although Nixon had agreed to this approach, he proceeded to send thousands of letters to California Republicans requesting them to indicate whom they would prefer if Warren could not have the nomination...
...Human Events, the Washington newsletter which embraces Herbert Hoover as the greatest living American and Robert A. Taft as the greatest dead American, chided the "new Nixon" in a recent issue and implored him to revert to the "old Nixon...
...He said recently, 'while the American economy has been shrinking, the Soviet economy has been growing fast, which is one of the most important facts in the world situation...
...But a year later, in his 1954 election eve speech, he charged that the Truman Administration's "wrong policy" had "resulted in a war, a war in Korea that cost us 140,000 American boys as casualties...
...It was McCarthy's ineptitude, not his immorality that disturbed the Vice President...
...The simple facts were these: Stevenson, while governor of Illinois, had been requested to testify regarding Hiss' reputation during the latter's trial for perjury...
...On 66 of these Mrs...
...The "old Nixon" is urgently needed, Human Events observes, because the ranks of "fighters" in the Republican Party have thinned out...
...Martin Merson, in his Private Diary of a Public Servant, makes it clear that Nixon not only was telling appointed officials how they should behave with McCarthy, but that it was necessary to get his permission on whether an Administration official should or should not bother McCarthy with the request for an appointment...
...When Democrats replied that Nixon was a liar in charging that Communists had been kicked out by the thousands and that only a few of the thousands were suspected of being subversives, Nixon aides suavely explained he meant to emphasize the words "security risks," which, of course, includes those who talk too much or drink too much without having the slightest association with communists or fellow travelers...
...Warren's great hope at the convention was based on the prospect of a deadlock between the two principal contenders, Eisenhower and Taft...
...This alteration is of more than academic interest, for nowhere but in the title had the word "censure" appeared...
...During his two years in the Senate, Mr...
...He has cultivated Sincerity, developed a smooth-flowing style of speaking, mastered techniques of debate that are effective despite their doubtful morality, and learned the exacting art of serving as go-between for hostile factions...
...It was also during this campaign of 1954 that Nixon took a straightforward statement by Adlai Stevenson and sought by cunning use of language to leave an impression quite opposite from that clearly intended by Stevenson...
...If they had vigor, it was the vigor of a tricky viciousness, not the vigor of an honest, forthright fight for principle...
...Why...
...The record shows that he has voted with liberals on some issues and with conservatives on much the same issues on other occasions...
...But the official records show that Nixon interceded with the Justice Department on behalf of Dana Smith, the businessman who headed the fund, in a tax case involving a possible $500,000 to $600,000 rebate...
...Nixon claimed that the fund was used for "expenses I didn't think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States...
...Nixon lined up with supporters of the Wood bill...
...Knight rushed back from his honeymoon trip...
...In fact, Nixon, too, frequently voted on the same side as did Marcantonio in many of these instances...
...Similarly, on April 16, 1954, speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, Nixon said: "If, to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and Indo-China, we must take the risk now by putting our boys in, I think the executive branch has to take the politically unpopular decision and do it, and I personally support such a position...
...It is comforting to have this assur-rance that Nixon did not indict the 27,000,000 Americans who voted Democratic in the last Presidential election as supporters of a party of treason, but Wilson, like so many of those who are anxious to clear Nixon of the charge of campaign deceit and distortion, runs away from the record when he characterizes the Vice President's political conduct as stemming from "the vigor of his attack" or as constituting "heavy blows...
...Subsequently a Senate investigating committee reported that 53 per cent had been hired by the present Republican Administration...
...Stevenson refused because of the burden of official duties...
...Philip Young, the Eisenhower-appointed chairman of the Civil Service Commission, testified he knew of no government employe who had been fired for being a Communist or fellow-traveler...
...Senator McCarthy has been ill with a really disabling leg ailment which renders his participation in the campaign problematical...
...27, 1952, for example, that "Senator Richard M. Nixon told a Texas-Arkansas crowd that President Truman and Adlai E. Stevenson are 'traitors to the high principles' of the Democratic Party...
...But facts that belied his charges did not deter Nixon from his mission as Republican hatchet-man in the 1954 campaign...
...It was the Vice President's swing back to Nixon the "liberal internationalist" in his San Francisco acceptance speech that annoyed the editors of Human Events...
...Here again the familiar pattern appeared...
...He sided with the conservatives in favor of a proposal prohibiting the Office of Price Administra-ton from limiting the slaughter of livestock...
...Nixon, we are told, is "a man of matchless honesty" and his "voting record is a liberal Republican one...
...I have spent many hours poring over the printed record...
...Sometimes in that campaign Nixon would even indulge in such shoddy language as calling Stevenson "Adlai the appeas-er, who got a Ph.D from Dean Ache-son's College of Cowardly Communist Containment...
...Throughout his record in the House and Senate Nixon voted consistently for the position otr the real estate lobby: he voted against public housing, farm housing, middle income housing, slum clearance, and led the fight to kill public housing in Los Angeles...
...On another occasion Nixon charged that "Mr...
...Stevenson's purpose may be, such statements of praise for the Soviet economy do the cause of the free world great damage...
...Thus, in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1952, Nixon said that President Eisenhower would have only one test: "Is it good for America...
...Is it true, for example, as one writer recently insisted, that the sobriquet "tricky Dicky" was falsely fastened on Nixon by his opponents because they could find nothing more horrendous to criticize than the fact that he often looks as though he could do with a shave...
...Truman a traitor [accusing him of covering up a Communist conspiracy for political reasons] what is...
...22, 1954, Nixon announced to his audience that he had in his possession a "secret memorandum" to California Democrats, directing them to fight out the issues within the ranks of the Democratic Party...
...Later, Nixon boarded the Warren campaign train at Denver to inform delegation leaders that there was just about no chance for a deadlock...
...Douglas and Marcantonio voted the same way but so did a majority of the House itself, Republicans and Democrats alike, in some cases...
...The New York Times reported, but many American dailies failed to include this highly significant bit of intelligence: "Mr...
...He voted for the Tidelands Oil Bill, and for a proposal by Senator Byrd calling on the President to invoke the T-H injunction to block the big steel strike of 1952...
...This dangerous, well-oiled scheme contains plans for adding 40 billion dollars to the national debt by 1956...
...It is possible to identify him as a reactionary and an isolationist, but only by ignoring or doctoring some parts of his record which show a liberal, internationalist bent...
...Asked to say whether Hiss' reputation for "integrity, loyalty, and veracity" was "good or bad," Stevenson replied that it was good...
...It is this man who, if reelected Vice President, would stand one heart beat away from the office held by an aging President with an ailing heart...
...With assurances from all concerned that the election would go as planned, Knight left on a yachting trip honeymoon...
...Douglas and Marcantonio have been members of Congress together since January 1, 1945...
...These actions, followed by Nixon's nomination for the Vice Presidency, convinced them that Nixon had not merely failed to honor his pledge to work for Warren, but had in fact worked against him in hope of political reward from the pro-Eisenhower forces...
...Words have lost their meaning if this can be construed as campaigning based on "matchless honesty" and "deep religious convictions...
...In his San Francisco speech accepting renomination as the Vice Presidential candidate, Nixon had spoken in loftier terms—liberal and internationalist terms—than his old cronies cared for...
...So great was the outcry that the results of the Nixon-conducted ballot were not disclosed to the public...
...The three factions of California Republicanism, headed by Nixon, Knowland, and Gov...
...is a question bothering the [Republican] pros...
...Nixon's nimbleness in political infighting showed up again two years later when California Republican leaders were choosing a vice chairman of the California State Central Committee...
...While it should not be expected that a member of the House of Representatives shall always be in opposition to Marcantonio, it is significant to note, not only the great number of times which Mrs...
...Conversely, it is possible to cull many fragments of his speeches which reflect a progressive outlook in public affairs, but when one turns to his voting record there are many instances when his actions seemed to repudiate his words...
...He supported the Marshall Plan, but ducked the vote on Point Four appropriations...
...A fortnight later, Nixon was quoted by the New York Herald Tribune as saying that the Administration must avoid sending American troops to fight in Indo-China or anywhere else "if we can...
...And then there are the two most irreconcilable of all the Nixon twins—the Nixon who argues earnestly and piously for the "moral values that have made us great" and the Nixon who has made duplicity and distortion the hallmarks of his political campaigning...
...Nixon struck some heavy blows during the campaign, but he didn't indict the whole Democratic Party as the party of treason...
...It seems equally obvious that the "many persons" who had "requested" such a comparison could not have extended beyond Nixon and his campaign aides, notably the notorious Murray Chotiner...
...There is the Nixon who advocated sending American boys to fight in Indo-China, but there is the Nixon who argued, afterward, that the Eisenhower Administration deserved credit for standing against the shedding of American blood in Indo-China...
...voted to outlaw industry-wide bargaining for labor...
...If there is a pro-McCarthy Nixon and an anti-McCarthy Nixon, and a "liberal Nixon" and a "conservative Nixon," there is also an "old Nixon" and a "new Nixon...
...This may have been what Bassett thought Nixon meant to say, but clearly it wasn't what Nixon did say...
...It included plans, he asserted, "for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized agriculture, socialized water and power, and socialized atomic energy...
...Editorial Research Reports, a highly respected reference source, determined that there were 76 "outstanding" roll call votes in the House during the five-year period covered by the "pink sheet...
...They consider him a man of matchless honesty, of deep religious conviction...
...Now, Marcantonio was indeed a follower of the Communist Party line, as Mrs...
...So it turns out there was no blueprint at all...
...Stevenson has been guilty, probably without being aware that he was doing so, of spreading pro-Communist propaganda as he has attacked with violent fury the economic system of the United States and praised the Soviet economy...
...President Eisenhower shared the nation's concern, but after an extraordinarily clever television presentation to the nation—as slick a performance as was ever devised on Madison Avenue for soap or cereals— Nixon earned from the President the exuberant applause: "He's my boy...
...In other words, it would have been far more accurate and meaningful to say that Mrs...
...And indeed it had been, as witness the fact that John Foster Dulles had hired Hiss and parted with him most reluctantly, and that two justices of the U.S...
...This is a harsh judgment, I know, but the record itself confirms it...
...Three—Oil interests gave 19 per cent of the fund...
...Inasmuch as Nixon's voting record is a liberal Republican one, his friends cannot understand why so many self-styled liberals don't like him...
...corporations 500 million dollars by delaying the tax for three months...
...On the first she had the company of 57 other Democrats and Republicans and on the second 47 others of both parties...
...The "old Nixon" is needed, it seems, to "impart" some of the "polemics" that distinguished the 1952 campaign...
...Nixon the conservative has voted against liberalization of social security, against federal grants to medical schools, against public housing, against 90 per cent of parity for agriculture, against TVA expansion, and against the broadening protection of the wage-hour law to an additional million workers...
...Nixon voted to save U.S...
...Truman, Dean Acheson, and other Administration officials for political reasons covered up this Communist conspiracy and attempted to halt its exposure...
...There is a Nixon who criticizes the war in Korea, but there is a Nixon who insists that the war in Korea was the only way to stop communism...
...The official record shows the extent of the deceit involved in this kind of Nixon campaigning...
...During that time Mrs...
...In 1955, Senator William F. Knowland, California's senior Senator, said: "I do not consider a Pepsodent smile, a ready quip, an actor's perfection with lines, nor an ability to avoid issues as qualifications for high office...
...It was Nixon, again, who tendered a helping hand to McCarthy in the hour of his greatest reverse...
...The technique consisted largely of impugning his opponent's integrity and loyalty, not by direct accusation supported by facts, but by a subtle and slippery combination of words and ideas in a single sentence or paragraph that would leave his audience with the impression that he had proved his opponent guilty of dishonesty and disloyalty...
...We couldn't go for Warren, but Dick did just what we wanted him to...
...Two—Manufacturing and distribution interests gave 19 per cent of the fund...
...It began with these words: "Many persons have requested a comparison of the voting records for Congresswoman Helen Douglas and the notorious Communist Party liner, Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York...
...Why do so many Americans distrust Nixon...
...They implored him to reassert his old role as conservative and isolationist...
...Contrary advice came from the Vice President...
...Senator Jenner, often relied upon to fill the role of a battler, is not running for reelection this year, and, confident that his hand-picked candidate for the Indiana governorship stands to win easily over weak Democratic opposition, plans to spend most of October in Hawaii...
...Nixon evenutally broke with McCarthy, but again for curiously Nix-onian reasons...
...In his Look article, Wilson defends Nixon on the two counts on which he has been most frequently criticized—his character and his convictions...
...Nixon continued to confirm his conservative bent...
...As Life reported this year in a debate on Nixon's qualifications, "Warren's friends felt that this was deliberate sabotage...
...And yet in Nixon's campaign strategy this simple act of testifying truthfully as to Hiss' reputation became so monstrous a crime and so complete a process of going "down the line for the arch-traitor of our generation" as forever to disqualify Stevenson [or "public trust...
...The Nixon maneuver was smothered, but again it left a bad taste in the mouths of those who had worked closest with Nixon in his home state...
...When the Eisenhower Administration took over the Democrats, he charged, "we found in the files a blueprint for socializing America...
...Thus, when in November 1953, McCarthy attacked Administration foreign policy, "he [President Eisenhower] was torn by conflicting advice...
...But the fact persists that it was precisely this fund which enabled Nixon to make the down payment on his Washington home...
...Douglas was conclusively not...
...Nixon knew Voorhis' record, but he consistently refused to fight him on the issues and refused to discuss the Voorhis record in behalf of the New Deal...
...Nixon said that "Never . . . have I made a telephone call . . . nor have I gone to a [government] agency" in behalf of a contributor...
...You are assured by dedicated Republicans, as by Wilson, that Nixon is an able, moral, hard-working, unselfish patriot whose integrity and honesty have been maligned by character assassins and hatchet men in the employ of the Democratic Party or even, it is said in some conversations, the Kremlin...
...Since the 1952 campaign," Wilson wrote, "the brunt of the Democratic attack on Nixon has been that he is 'white-collar McCarthy.' This stems from the vigor of his attack on selected Democratic candidates in the 1954 Congressional campaign as too soft on Communism...
...Knowland had seen Nixon in action at close range during the maneuvering which led to General Eisenhower's choice of Nixon for his running mate in 1952...
...Senator Bricker of Ohio will be available, but his position is weakened by the fact that the amendment to harness treaty law, for which he is justly famous and popular, foundered in Congress due to White House opposition...
...In his book, Nixon, Ralph de Toledano, friend and admirer of both Nixon and McCarthy, points out that "Nixon felt a certain responsibility for McCarthy or for any other individual who took up the fight against communism...
...He made his own files available to McCarthy and "McCarthy gratefully accepted," we are told...
...When reporters asked James Bas-sett, Nixon's press secretary, if Nixon had intended to call the President of the United States a crook, Bas-sett's bland response was that there were crooks and incompetents in the Administration, but that Truman was one of the incompetents...
...In the long run it is probably a more important fact than the development of Soviet military power.' Whatever Mr...
...Douglas voted in agreement with him, but also the issues on which almost without exception they always saw eye to eye, to wit: UnAmerican activities and internal security...
...Both are doubtless right...
...To achieve power he has corrupted the truth, smeared his opponents, betrayed his friends, invoked ugly innuendo and the furtive insult as his major instruments of political battle, and relied heavily on a nimble capacity for evading commitment to principle that enables some of his supporters to hail him as a conservative and others to embrace him as a liberal...
...Wilson, in the Look piece quoted at the beginning of this report, refers to his friend as a "liberal Republican...
...Frequently during this and the 1954 campaign Nixon's language was so harsh and sweeping that his campaign aides were obliged to take newsmen aside afterward to modify or clarify what their candidate had intended to say...
...Donovan confirms the fact from official papers that there were bitter quarrels in the White House over McCarthy...
...Nixon, as a member of the House Labor Committee, helped write the T-H Act and actively supported it...
...It is interesting to note what men Human Events, which loves them all, includes with the equally admiring Nixon: "Without Nixon, what fighters have we got...
...Nixon's relationship to McCarthy, much like so many other phases of the Vice President's public career, is hard to define...
...Nixon was largely responsible for the Eisenhower Administration policy—or lack of policy—on McCarthy...
...Both the printed record and personal observation reveal a man of considerable ability and a resourceful strategist who has all the instincts for maneuver and manipulation which are thought to be valuable assets in politics...
...Douglas voted the same as Marcantonio 354 times...
...She voted against the Greek-Turkish aid bill because she felt that the UN ought to decide the issue of aid to Turkey and because she wanted aid to Greece to carry the requirement that the Greek government agree to hold free elections soon...
...He was several times approached by emissaries of the late Senator Taft offering him the Vice Presidential nomination if he would exert his influence to move the California delegation to Taft...
...It was Nixon who persuaded Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to repudiate Stassen with a statement lauding McCarthy's contribution to the American cause...
...or a majority of the Democratic members in other cases...
...Nowhere is there a clear-cut philosophy or pattern of action...
...When McCarthy usurped the functions of the State Department and negotiated an agreement with Greek shipping interests on the China trade, Harold Stassen threatened to kick up a fuss and oppose McCarthy for "undermining the State Department...
...Truman...
...Four years later, when he ran for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon refined his technique...
...The simple fact persists—and Nixon must have known it—that the Eisenhower Administration did not uncover or fire a single Communist...
...It is somewhat startling to observe how official Republican leadership responded to the charge that Nixon had accused former President Truman and the Democratic Party of traitor-lessly permitting Communists to undermine our government...
...Speaking in Beverly Hills, Nixon said: "Mr...
...Adlai Stevenson, he cried, had disqualified himself for public trust by going "down the line for the arch-traitor of our generation"—Alger Hiss...
...Back then, another bill that separated liberals from the conservatives was the proposal to exempt railroads from anti-trust prosecution for certain rate-making agreements approved by the ICC...
...This was a measure drafted by T-H backers as a substitute for Mr...
...The trouble with Nixon is simply that he is indifferent to means and committed to only one end—political power for its own sake...
...The Associated Press reported Oct...
...Nixon did not then, nor on any other occasion when he mentioned this "secret memorandum," unzip his briefcase to show it to his audience or the press...
...Stevenson calls me is unimportant but I resent his typical snide and snobbish innuendo towards the millions of Americans who work for a living in our shops and factories...
...It was in the 1954 campaign that Nixon began to use the venal device of claiming there were secret blueprints and secret memoranda which proved that the Democrats, if returned to control of Congress, would socialize the nation's economy and work with the Communists...
...But Nixon failed to say that the fund was used for things that could not by law be charged to the taxpayers anyway— such as plane trips for Nixon and Chotiner and the printing of Nixon's personal Christmas cards...
...It was in defense of Nixon that Chairman Leonard Hall of the Republican National Committee cited the following Nixon statement made in Utica, N.Y., October 18, 1952: "I charge that the buried record will show that Mr...
...The facts do not support either judgment...
...Lawrence Seaway...
...For example: • Nixon insisted that "not one cent" of the money "ever went for my personal use...
...But the old obscurity ling ered on...
...Goodwin Knight, agreed on the selection of Knight's friend, Howard Ahmanson...
...He has flitted about from one position to another, helping McCarthy on some occasions, criticizing him, mildly, on others...
...Supreme Court, Stanley Reed and Felix Frankfurter, testified, as did Stevenson, that his reputation was good...
...His dislike for our own economic system is his own business, but when he links such criticism with praise of the rapid growth of the Soviet economy he is performing a great disservice to us and the rest of the free world...
...It was Nixon, too, who arranged that chicken dinner in the spring of 1954 at which Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens capitulated to McCarthy's demands—although Nixon, to be sure, could not foresee that the public humiliation of Stevens would boomerang into the Army-McCarthy hearings which engrossed the nation that year...
...He supported the St...
...In his Eisenhower: The Inside Story, Donovan makes it clear that President Eisenhower had no conscious strategy in relation to McCarthy, but that it was Nixon who kept him from taking a decisive stand on the occasions of the greatest McCarthy provocation...
...Let's recognize right now that the decision to go into Korea was right because the Communists had to be stopped...
...Truman and his associates, either through stupidity or political expediency, were primarily responsible for the unimpeded growth of the Communist conspiracy within the United States...
...Nixon's principal mission in the campaign was to plant and spread doubt of the loyalty and patriotism of those who opposed him...
...Two years later Nixon was again campaigning for office—this time for the Vice Presidency as General Eisenhower's running mate...
...Nixon argued that "no contributor to any of my campaigns has ever received any consideration...
...As Chairman Paul Butler of the Democratic National Committee said, "If that's not calling Mr...
...As Dana Smith put it: "[Earl] Warren has too much the social point of view for the people behind Dick...
...Would California send Marcantonio to the United States Senate...
...They cite many instances of his consideration of others...
...His record in foreign affairs is even more difficult to identify...
...His name is not identified with any policy, for he has operated largely as the shrewd strategist and the manipulator, whose job it was to appraise legislation in terms of political expediency rather than its intrinsic worth to the nation...
...In fact, People's World, the West Coast communist paper, complained bitterly that "Voorhis is against unity with Communists on any issue under any circumstances...
...Although Nixon and his apologists have denied that he accused President Harry Truman of being a "traitor," the fact is that he conveyed that impression to countless Americans by his sleight-of-hand juggling of words...
...If this is true, it is a remarkable coincidence that Nixon's voting record in Congress bore a striking resemblance to the needs and desires of those who supported him...
...It is clear, as this campaign swings into its decisive stage, that Nixon is doing his smoothest best to live down his role as GOP hatchet man...
...He moves from intervention to anti-intervention with the same ease and lack of anguish with which a copywriter might transfer his loyalties from Camels to Chesterfields...
...Far from "performing a great disservice to us and the rest of the free world," Stevenson was expressing the statesmanlike conviction that the United States needed to expand its economy to meet the challenge of Soviet growth, and that in this era economic power might well be more important than military power in the struggle between East and West...
...There is the Nixon whom Wilson characterizes as a "liberal Republican" but there is also the Nixon The Wall Street Journal embraces as a "conservative Republican...
...The California delegation to the Republican National Convention was pledged to the then Governor Earl Warren...
...THE TROUBLE WITH NIXON A Documented Report / by Morris H. Rubin THE biggest problem facing Rich- ard Milhous Nixon, wrote one of his friends among the Washington correspondents, "is to overcome the impression in some groups, particularly those who think of themselves as intellectuals, that some undefined tricky quality in Nixon makes him unsuited for the Presidency...
...The attempt to find "a comparison" was an obvious maneuver to smear her by planting false impressions in the voters' minds, by fraudulently associating her record with that of a notorious Communist Party liner...
...I have seen Nixon in action on many occasions—at political conventions, on the campaign stump, and in Washington, as Representative, then Senator, and now Vice President...
...Nixon replied with this typical statement: "What Mr...
...Scandal brushed briefly against Nixon during the 1952 campaign...
...Nor was this all...
...Perhaps the crispest analysis of this curious political behavior came from Richard H. Rovere writing in Harper's: "What stands out in any consideration of the whole record is the flexibility that suggests an almost total indifference to policy...
...It is his consistent swinging on major issues that makes it difficult to assess his record with any degree of accuracy...
...But observe how Nixon's "pink sheet" threaded its way through a jungle of innuendo, half-truths, and downright distortion: "Mrs...
...From this clear position expressed by Stevenson, Nixon tortured words and distorted ideas in order to leave with his audience the charge that Stevenson preferred the Soviet economy to our own...
...Now, when Stevenson made his original comment, which Nixon tore out of context, he was not praising the Soviet system or expressing dislike of our own, but he was noting, and expressing grave concern over, the official fact that the Soviet economy was expanding greatly while ours, in this period of brief business recession in 1954, had been contracting...
...Douglas voted with the majority adhering to the bipartisan program on all occasions but one...
...The California strategy, agreed to by all delegates, including Nixon, was that this large delegation show no preference for Eisenhower or Taft because to do so might throw the convention to the one preferred and rob Warren of any opportunity to make a real fight for the nomination...
...This prediction was preposterous, of course, for except for its own staff, Congress does not make appointments to the federal civil service, nor does it prescribe the security regulations which govern the executive department in its hiring of employes...
...But Nixon the liberal has voted in favor of some measures strengthening social security...
...I further charge that Mr...
...Suppose we turn to the record...
...Is is true, as Wilson suggested in his Look piece, that "every charge impugning Nixon's integrity thus far has, upon investigation, shown that the facts have been twisted and tortured into something they are not...
...He said they tolerated and defended Communists in the government...
...He sided with his party in 1948 in favor of tax reduction despite Mr...
...The United States Senate votes on ratifying international treaties and confirming Presidential appointments...
Vol. 20 • October 1956 • No. 10
