THE CASE AGAINST NIXON
Rubin, Morris H.
THE CASE AGAINST NIXON by MORRIS H. RUBIN / do not like thee, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell; But this I know, and know full well, I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. The quatrain above turns...
...The Associated Press reported Oct...
...Douglas—in large measure because he succeeded in making the big lie prevail...
...The California delegation to the Republican National Convention was pledged to the then Governor Earl Warren...
...Two examples: One—When he left to confer with Rockefeller, Nixon was firmly on record as favoring the continuation of the moratorium on nuclear testing...
...In his recent biography of the Vice President, The Facts about Nixon, William Costello wrote: "Some of Nixon's excesses have been excused by friends on the plea that he is ambitious...
...Two years ago, U.S...
...Thus, on August 31, 1953, speaking before the American Legion Convention in St...
...He flitted about from one position to another, helping McCarthy on some occasions, criticizing him, mildly, on others...
...The quatrain above turns up occasionally in the biographical literature on Vice President Richard Mil-haus Nixon...
...Nixon's views have changed to some extent in recent years, but the reasoning is often obscure and the new position undefined...
...The "old Nixon" was much in evidence at the Chicago convention...
...Asked to say whether Hiss' reputation for "integrity, loyalty, and veracity" was "See the Difference...
...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...
...Jerry Voorhis, who had served five terms as Democratic Congressman in the district, was Nixon's 1946 opponent...
...Immediately thereafter, Nixon's followers began soliciting Central Committee members in an effort to defeat Ahmanson...
...It is clear from the record that Smith knew what he was talking about...
...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...
...It might in some instances be three per cent, in some instances four, in some instances five...
...It is used to convey the notion that while a great many Americans do not like Nixon, they are unable to account for the cause of their dislike...
...In his Eisenhower: The Inside Story, Donovan reported that Nixon had participated in Cabinet sessions significantly enough to be quoted only about twenty or more times...
...And then there are the most irreconcilable of the Nixon twins— the Nixon who argues for "the moral values that have made us great" and the Nixon who has made duplicity and distortion the hallmarks of his political campaigns...
...With assurances from all concerned that the election would go as planned, Knight left on a yachting trip honeymoon...
...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...
...Douglas and Marcantonio voting the same way, most were on relatively minor, non-controversial matters on which there was substantial agreement among all factions...
...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...
...I for one emerged with the conclusion that there is not one Nixon, but two Nixons, who have a habit, when dealing with controversial issues, of trying to keep both sides happy and provide everyone with something favorable to quote...
...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...
...Some time later, Young revealed that an analysis of the 3,746 employes—half the number cited by Nixon—who were dismissed or who Herblock in the Washington "Well, Look Who's Here" 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...
...It simply did not exist...
...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...
...Again his principal weapon was a calculated campaign to pin the red label on an opponent whose anti-Communist credentials were unassailable and whose record in Congress had been denounced by the Communists as that of a "capitalist warmonger...
...The three factions of California Republicanism, headed by Nixon, Knowland, and Governor Goodwin Knight, agreed on the selection of Knight's friend, Howard Ahmanson...
...It was not "well known" at all...
...There is a Nixon who was pro-McCarthy, but the trail also leads to a Nixon who was anti-McCarthy...
...Four years later, when he ran for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon sharpened his technique...
...The Democrats did in fact capture Congress, but of course there was no re-hiring of "security risks...
...News if World Report, commenting on a speech by Nixon in Boston, reported: "Nixon proposes tax relief for business and for individuals in the upper income brackets...
...As Robert Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune reported in his semi-official Eisenhower: The Inside Story, "almost before the echoes of his testimony had died away he [Stassen] was cut off from the rear...
...Republican" himself, Nixon opposed the Taft-Wagner-Ellender public housing bill in 1948...
...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...
...At the same time Nixon advocated a "general sales tax" of one and one-half per cent which would be "added to the factory price of manufactured products"—regarded as one of the most regressive of all sales taxes...
...and weeks afterward there was still nothing to indicate what these "very basic disagreements" were about...
...Still, despite the twists and turns that clutter up the record, it is possible to piece together a discernible pattern in Nixon's career...
...This secret document, he charged, proved that the Communist Party was "determined to conduct its program within 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...
...It would be fatal to under-estimate it . . . We cannot afford to stand still...
...But when he signed the memorandum with Rockefeller, Nixon permitted inclusion of the fact that two years earlier he, Nixon, had spoken favorably of a five per cent rate of annual growth...
...There is the Nixon who criticized the war in Korea, but there is the Nixon who insisted that war in Korea was the only way to stop Communism...
...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 undisputed fact that the Soviet economy was expanding greatly while ours, in the brief period of business recession in 1954, had been contracting...
...He turned up on both sides of American policy regarding Korea and Indo-China...
...This dangerous, well-oiled scheme contains plans for adding forty billion dollars to the national debt by 1956...
...In a speech, at Rock Island, Illinois, October 21, 1954, he used a specific figure—6,926 security risks fired from Federal service by President Eisenhower...
...I further charge that Mr...
...American youth was promised "the best education system" and the opportunity for all to go to college regardless of financial circumstances...
...Although Nixon and his apologists have denied that he accused President Harry Truman of being a "traitor," the truth is that he artfully conveyed that impression to countless Americans by his sleight-of-hand juggling of words...
...Truman a traitor [accusing him of covering up a Communist conspiracy for political reasons], what is...
...Douglas was clearly not...
...Contrary advice come from the Vice President...
...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...
...Nixon voted to save U.S...
...The official record reveals the extent of the deceit involved in this kind of Nixon campaigning...
...I do not like thee, Richard Nixon...
...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...
...Douglas voted with the majority adhering to the bipartisan program on all occasions but one...
...A few paragraphs later, however, Nixon was doing precisely that—out-promising the Democrats...
...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...
...It was Nixon's advice that prevailed...
...Perhaps no phase of Nixon's career has done more to earn him the soubriquet of "tricky Dick" than his conduct as a political campaigner...
...Wage-earners were promised increasingly higher wages "in honest dollars" and better social security than ever before...
...Hardly a week later, Nixon broke a Senate tie vote and killed a measure providing for Federal aid to education...
...His friend and former political lieutenant, Paul G. Hoffman, chairman of the board of the Studebaker-Pack-ard Corporation, for instance, was urging him to let McCarthy have it with both barrels...
...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...
...I have never been one to discount this strength...
...But facts that belied his charges did not deter Nixon from his mission as Republican hatchet-man in the 1954 campaign...
...The case against Nixon seems overpowering...
...William Costello summed it up, in his heavily documented The Facts about Nixon, when he wrote: "Almost from the start Nixon showed a grasp of the opportunistic art of voting on one side of the fence while a bill was being amended and perfected, and then switching to the other side or being conveniently absent when the measure came to a final vote...
...Senator Robert A. Taft, a public servant whose conscience yielded nothing to his political ambitions, was one who rejected that defense...
...For example: • Nixon insisted that "not one cent" of the money "ever went for my personal use...
...good or bad," Stevenson replied that Hiss' reputation was good...
...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...
...When he went to the Senate in 1951, he supported a ninety-day tax windfall of $500,000,000 for corporations, and that same week he voted against plugging the largest loophole in the Federal tax system, the oil depletion allowance...
...To achieve power, he has corrupted the truth, smeared his opponents, betrayed his friends, invoked ugly innuendo and the furtive accusation as his major weapons of political warfare, and relied heavily on a capacity for slippery evasion of commitment that enables some of his supporters to hail him as a conservative and others to embrace him as a liberal...
...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...
...The principal difference between the Democratic platform and the Nixon speech, in the fields covered by both, is that the former consists of a series of specific pledges while Nixon's promises are clothed in the sweeping generalizations that have characterized most of his major addresses during his political career...
...In 1950 he opposed higher corporation taxes...
...do not like thee, Richard Nixon, The reason why's not hard to fix on: It's the public interest you play tricks on...
...At Nixon's suggestion Dulles received McCarthy at the State Department and assured the Senator that he had acted in the national interest...
...Three times in 1949 he voted for crippling amendments to the social security program...
...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...
...When he went to the Senate, he supported crippling amendments to the public housing program in both 1951 and 1952...
...Anyone who reads the record, it seems to me, cannot escape the conclusion that he has violated every principle of decency and fair play...
...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...
...She voted against the Greek-Turkish aid bill because she felt that the United Nations 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...
...When the Eisenhower Administration took over from the Democrats, Nixon charged, "We found in the files a blueprint for socializing America...
...This is a harsh judgment, I know, but the record confirms it...
...it would wreck the economy...
...When reporters asked James Bas-sett, Nixon's press secretary, if Nixon had intended to call the President of the United States a crook, Bassett's bland response was that there were crooks and incompetents in the Administration, but that Truman was one of the incompetents...
...In the critical field of foreign affairs Nixon sometimes speaks up in the language of liberal internationalism, but it is difficult to evaluate the record itself, again because of his habitual practice of leaning now one way and now another...
...Would California send Marcantonio to the United States Senate...
...Nixon made his own files available to McCarthy and "McCarthy gratefully accepted," we are told...
...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...
...He went down the line in 1949 for legislation that withheld the benefits of the seventy-five cent minimum wage law from an additional million workers...
...Nixon said that "Never . . . have I made a telephone call . . . nor have I gone to a [government] agency" in behalf of a contributor...
...On one or two occasions he cast a vote for REA legislation, but mostly he was aligned with those who would curtail rather than expand one of the most useful and successful programs in our time...
...A striking example of the Vice President's slippery method of campaigning 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...
...But when one seeks to apply that test to Nixon's voting record, he finds himself stumbling through a wilderness of contradictions...
...The fact that the Political Action Committee had refused to endorse Voorhis precisely because he was so unequivocally anti-Communist did not in the slightest deter Nixon from referring repeatedly to "the PAC candidate and his Communist friends...
...It was Nixon who amended the "Resolution of Censure" adopted by the Senate to read simply "Resolution...
...Something of the "old Nixon" turns up in his handling of the "religious issue" in this campaign...
...But the fact has been established that it was precisely this fund which enabled Nixon to make the down payment on his Washington home...
...In this campaign the principal piece of Nixon campaign literature was the "pink sheet...
...The truth is— and again it is difficult to believe that Nixon did not know it—that the Eisenhower Administration was unable to uncover a single Communist in the entire Federal establishment...
...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 personal plane trips for Nixon and the printing of Nixon's personal Christmas cards...
...He was then requested to give a sworn statement, which he did...
...It was the political huckster rather than the man of "deep religious conviction" who was troubled enough to jettison the Senator from Wisconsin...
...The New York Times reported, but many American dailies failed to include this highly significant bit of intelligence: "Mr...
...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...
...It is certainly true that he has been tidying up in preparation for his candidacy for the Presidency...
...He seemed to favor the liberalized tariff program, but voted for crippling amendments...
...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...
...Nixon argued that "no contributor to any of my campaigns has ever received any consideration . . ." 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...
...Nixon claimed that the fund was used for "expenses I didn't think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States...
...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...
...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...
...Thus, he voted for several measures broadening social security, but reversed himself by opposing the inclusion of 750,000 additional workers in the system...
...Knowland, chairman of the delegation, had had similar opportunities to advance his own political fortunes at the convention...
...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 sixty-six of these Mrs...
...Only two were concerned with matters of "internal security" and here Mrs...
...Nixon's position in the critical area of taxation remains unchanged...
...The late Senator Robert A. Taft had grave misgivings about Nixon on some of these counts...
...Wilson added: "Those who like Nixon recognize that many people have formed this impression of him, but they cannot understand why...
...Asked a few days later by newsmen about the goal of a five per cent increase, the Vice Herblock in the Washington Post "Seldom Has a Candidate Had So Much Experience at Not Being Responsible for Decisions" President replied with characteristic evasiveness: "I would not say that was my goal...
...The overriding fact that emerges from an examination of hundreds of roll calls in which Nixon was recorded in the House and the Senate is that, as James Reston wrote for the New York Times, "You can prove anything by Nixon's voting record...
...Nixon's relationship to McCarthy, like so many other phases of the Vice President's public career, is hard to define...
...Nor has the Vice President played an influential role in the inner councils of the Eisenhower Administration...
...A few years ago, for instance, he hailed Ezra Taft Benson as "the greatest Secretary of Agriculture in our country's history...
...Still, Nixon continued to tell audiences throughout the country that the Republicans had discovered this "blueprint"—and there was no further reference to figurative language...
...On another occasion Nixon charged that "Mr...
...Far from "performing a great disservice to us and the rest of the free world," Stevenson was alerting the nation to a grave challenge by 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...
...It is true that he has traveled widely, but the "new Nixon," much like the "old Nixon" that Senator Taft knew, has continued to "radiate tension and conflict" almost everywhere he has gone...
...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, undependable, and overly ambitious...
...Still more revealing is that on those occasions only four of his comments dealt with substantive matters, while all the rest were concerned with political angles and public relations problems...
...Nixon supported the Marshall Plan but ducked the vote on Point Four appropriations...
...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...
...Despite his obsequious efforts to please everyone, he remains for many a mechanical man with a forced smile and contrived manner...
...Douglas and Marcantonio have been members of Congress together since January 1, 1945...
...But within forty-eight hours Nixon had reversed the reversal, of his position...
...Three—Oil interests gave nineteen per cent of the fund...
...Since then, on numerous occasions, he has loudly protested that "religion is not an issue," thus bringing the subject back to the headlines every time he raises it...
...In a speech at Butte, Montana, October 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...
...Stevenson's purpose may be, such statements of praise for the Soviet economy do the cause of the free world great damage...
...So great was the outcry that the results of the Nixon-conducted ballot were not disclosed to the public...
...is a maximum growth rate...
...One of his friends among the Washington correspondents, Richard Wilson, wrote in Look some time ago that the biggest problem facing Nixon "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...
...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...
...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...
...The following year he maintained his opposition to Federal housing legislation for low-income Americans by voting against an omnibus public housing, slum clearance, and farm housing program...
...Thus, in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1952, Nixon said that President Eisenhower would have only one test: "Is it good for America...
...Two examples: • American agriculture under the Eisenhower Administration, the Vice president said, has become the most productive on earth, but "there is no higher priority than a complete overhauling of obsolete farm programs...
...It was in his first venture in politics as a young man of thirty-three in 1946, that Nixon developed the technique of campaigning that was to be his badge of identification in subsequent campaigns...
...In each case," the New York Times reported recently, Nixon "has reflected the Eisenhower Administration's policy against more liberal proposals sponsored by the Democrats...
...Knowland flew to California from Washington...
...For older citizens he proposed adequate protection against the hazards of ill health and "a greater opportunity to lead a useful and productive life by participating to the extent they are able in the nation's exciting work rather than sitting on the sidelines...
...I shall never mention it," the Vice President said a while back in discussing the subject of religion...
...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 treacherously permitting Communists to undermine our government...
...Fell rhyme may realize...
...Warren and his supporters regarded this as a wholly disloyal performance...
...or a majority of the Democratic members in other cases...
...corporations 500 million dollars by delaying a tax increase for three months...
...As Life reported in 1954 in a debate on Nixon's qualifications, "Warren's friends felt that this was deliberate sabotage...
...among that number, he charged, were "members of the Communist Party...
...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...
...Editorial Research Reports, a highly respected reference source, determined that there were seventy-six "outstanding" roll call votes in the House during the five-year period covered by the "pink sheet...
...In the field of housing and rent control, Nixon sided invariably with the real estate interests...
...This alteration is of more than academic interest, for nowhere but in the title had the word "censure" appeared...
...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...
...Never in the campaign did Nixon attempt to document this false accusation...
...Joseph R. McCarthy was still an unknown candidate for a first term in the Senate when Nixon pinned the red label on so dedicated an anti-Communist as Jerry Voorhis...
...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...
...Speaking to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in April, 1958, Nixon said: "The Soviet economy is growing faster than ours...
...Speaking in Beverly Hills, Nixon said: "Mr...
...Scandal brushed briefly against Nixon during the 1952 campaign...
...In the long run it is probably a more important fact than the development of Soviet military power.' "Whatever Mr...
...He had known Hiss only slightly...
...At one point, for example, Nixon and Rockefeller stood together before a battery of television cameras discussing the Republican plank on civil rights...
...Two years later Nixon was campaigning for another office—this time for the Vice Presidency as General Eisenhower's running mate...
...Adlai Stevenson, he cried, had disqualified himself for public trust by going "down the line for the arch-traitor of our generation"—Alger Hiss...
...He has an uncanny capacity for igniting conflict and on major public issues dragging debate to the gutter of bitter personal squabbling...
...Thus, in the field of taxation, he voted twice during his first year in the House for income tax reductions favoring those in the higher brackets...
...The "undefined tricky quality," of which Look's Wilson wrote, becomes readily definable when one examines Nixon's career in detail...
...voted to outlaw industry-wide bargaining for labor...
...Sometimes in that campaign Nixon would even indulge in such shoddy language as calling Stevenson "Adlai the ap-peaser, who got a Ph...
...Thus, in a major address in Chicago earlier this year, he extolled the achievements of the Eisenhower Administration, but he was quick to carve out a spacious escape corridor in each instance...
...As Douglass Cater, The Reporter's gifted Washington correspondent, pointed out, Nixon "offered no explanation for his part in the boat-rocking only two days before...
...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...
...it would dash our peoples' hopes for a better life...
...Truman, Dean Acheson, and other Administration officials for political reasons covered up this Communist conspiracy and attempted to halt its exposure...
...He would "reduce rates on corporations and high income people...
...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...
...We couldn't go for Warren, but Dick did just what we wanted him to...
...A curious footnote to this shabby performance by Nixon is the fact that nearly four years later the Vice President adopted precisely the same position that he found so pro-Communist when taken by Stevenson...
...Nashville Tennessean We Have to Face the Possibility Now, Marcantonio was indeed a follower of the Communist Party line, as Mrs...
...As Paul Butler, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said, "If that's not calling Mr...
...I would say that my goal, and I think the only proper goal for those who do not buy the theory of government-manipulated growth...
...There was literally nothing in his record that disclosed the slightest sympathy for any Communist ideology or method...
...Douglas and Marcantonio voted the same way but so did a majority of the House itself, Republicans and Democrats alike, in some cases...
...After the 1952 convention, in conversation with Joseph Polowsky, a friend and supporter, Taft spoke of Nixon regretfully as 'a little man in a big hurry,' noted that he had a 'mean and vindictive streak' when frustrated, and summed up his personality as one tending to 'radiate tension and conflict.' The Senator expressed a fervent hope that circumstances would never permit Nixon to accede to the Presidency...
...Two—Manufacturing and distribution interests gave nineteen per cent of the fund...
...Nixon has frequently said that a candidate's record of voting on the major issues ought to be the dominant consideration in determining "how he might approach an international or a national problem...
...We must recognize that economic competition between the free world and the Communist world may well decide the world conflict . . . We hear much today of the great strength of the Soviet Union...
...Douglas voted the sentiments of countless anti-Communist American liberals...
...On the first she had the company of fifty-seven other Democrats and Republicans and on the second forty-seven others of both parties...
...It was Nixon, again, who tendered a helping hand to McCarthy in the hour of his greatest reverse...
...In 1949 he responded to the wishes of the oil industry by voting to exempt the independent producers of natural gas from regulation by the Federal Power Commission...
...That pattern reveals a reasonably consistent devotion to the demands of the nation's special interests—the real estate lobby, the private power trust, the oil crowd, and the country's most affluent taxpayers...
...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...
...Nixon often speaks in a friendly tone of the need for social welfare legislation...
...Nor has Nixon wholly abandoned his old techniques...
...People's World, the West Coast Communist paper, complained bitterly that "Voorhis is against unity with Communists on any issue under any circumstances...
...Thus, when in November 1953, McCarthy attacked Administration foreign policy, "he [President Eisenhower] was torn by conflicting advice...
...Nixon defeated Mrs...
...Here, clearly, is an unchanging pattern of behavior from 1946 through 1954 that embodies most of the worst ingredients of McCarthyism...
...There is the Nixon who spoke up for increased foreign economic aid, but there is the ubiquitous twin who pointed with pride because the Republicans had achieved "economy" in reducing the appropriation for foreign economic aid...
...Let's recognize right now that the decision to go into Korea was right because the Communists had to be stopped...
...An analysis of the Nixon speech and the relevant facts of his political career hardly seem to justify the President's delight...
...Nixon's voting record as a legislator ended, of course, when he became Vice President, but he has had seven opportunities to break ties during his incumbency as presiding officer of the Senate...
...An understanding of why "many people" think of the Vice President as "tricky Dick" is not too difficult to come by, it seems to me...
...In the first place, of the 354 votes which found Mrs...
...This year, however, mindful of Benson's unpopularity in the farm belt, the Vice President dropped the word that "it has been well known that the Secretary and I have had some very basic disagreements...
...Nixon's speeches often betray this same quality...
...The American educational system is now the best in the world, he argued, but "inadequate classrooms, underpaid teachers, and flabby standards are weaknesses we must constantly strive to eliminate...
...In this first of his campaigns the youthful Nixon embarked on a stratagem that he was to employ in every campaign thereafter—holding himself up as the man to save the country from those who would strangle it with socialism...
...Nor was this all...
...In his acceptance speech in Chicago, Nixon showed the same ambivalence on major issues that has characterized his public utterances for fourteen years...
...Compare that," he said, "with Harry Truman, Harry Vaughan, RFC Dawson, O'Dwyer, and all the rest of these crooks and these incompetents...
...This is Nixon's most withering comment on McCarthy and McCarthy-ism—"inept...
...During that time Mrs...
...The official records show that Nixon's claims were false—and it is difficult to believe that Nixon was unaware of the facts...
...The same pattern holds for the oil interests...
...Truman . . . for political reasons covered up [the] Communist conspiracy [in the United States] and attempted to halt its exposure...
...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...
...Arriving in Chicago, he retreated from his new stand almost immediately: "Because there is still a chance," he said, "that an agreement may be worked out, I do not believe that we should rock the boat on those negotiations by what we say in the platform...
...Nixon himself frequently voted on the same side as did Marcantonio in many of these instances—112 times, to be exact...
...Voorhis, an earnest, hardworking, dedicated New Dealer, was unassailably anti-Communist...
...Rockefeller, however, persuaded him to reverse his position by agreeing that the Republican platform should flatly urge that the government "resume immediately underground nuclear testing for purposes of improving methods of detection...
...On a few occasions he has voted that way, but the rest of the record is negative...
...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...
...He voted to limit the extension of the Southwest Power Administration, and he opposed funds for power development and tranmission lines in the Missouri Valley and at Bonneville...
...Nixon's midnight meeting with New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the eve of the Republican National Convention shows the "old Nixon" very much in the saddle...
...A New York Times survey earlier in the year yielded much the same result...
...Recently, for example, the Wall Street Journal complained that its reporters "have turned up with a surprisingly large residue of 'I don't know why but I just don't like him' feeling...
...Policies are products to be sold the public— this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market...
...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...
...Donovan confirms the fact from official papers that there were bitter quarrels in the White House over McCarthy...
...Nixon's record in the utility area discloses an almost unbroken series of votes in behalf of the private power interests...
...Stevenson refused because of the burden of official duties...
...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...
...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...
...But, again, Nixon wiggled free from something that might commit him to a specific goal...
...A few weeks ago, when he was pressed by newsmen to give an example of a major idea of Nixon's that he had adopted, President Eisenhower replied: "If you give me a week, I might think of one...
...This may have been what Bassett thought Nixon meant to say, but clearly it wasn't what Nixon did say...
...It is often argued in the Vice President's behalf that he has reformed, that there is now a "new Nixon...
...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...
...Douglas voted in agreement with him, but also the issues on which almost without exception they always saw eye to eye, to wit: Un-American activities and internal security...
...So it turned out there was no blueprint at all...
...He is indifferent to means, and committed to one end only—political power for its own sake...
...On issues of foreign policy, Mrs...
...Although one of its sponsors was "Mr...
...As for the thirteen occasions on which the Douglas and Marcantonio votes coincided but were not part of either a House or Democratic majority, nine dealt with such issues as housing, rent control, price controls, and the like...
...Observe now how Nixon's "pink sheet" threaded its way through a jungle of innuendo, half-truths, and downright distortion: "Mrs...
...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...
...Supreme Court, Stanley Reed and Felix Frankfurter,- testified, as did Stevenson, that his reputation was good...
...voted for Taft-Hartley...
...Martin Mer-son, in his Private Diary of a Public Servant, made 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...
...Stevenson has been guilty, probably without being aware that he was doing so [a recurring Nixon device—to seem to be charitable while cutting a man's throat], of spreading pro-Communist propaganda as he has attacked with violent fury the economic system of the United States and praised the Soviet economy...
...It included plans, he asserted, "for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized agriculture, socialized water and power, and socialized atomic energy...
...It is his own record that demonstrates most persuasively that Richard M. Nixon is not fit to hold the office of President of the United States...
...The United States Senate votes on ratifying international treaties and confirming Presidential appointments...
...Most Americans would agree, I think, that Nixon is intelligent, industrious, and resourceful, but many of those who reject him are convinced that he has channeled these qualities into a pattern of political behavior that relies mostly on maneuvers and manipulation—a kind of political sleight-of-hand that frequently results in words and deeds of doubtful morality, especially as they tend to range him on both sides of controversial issues...
...And I serve notice here and now that whatever the political consequences, we are not going to try to outpromise our opponents in this campaign...
...Nixon appears to be a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work...
...Recently, for example, Business Week reported that the Vice President "favors cutting taxes on business to get more growth...
...Nixon's campaign literature argues extravagantly that the "new Nixon" is a man of vast experience at the top levels of policy-making as the result of his nearly eight-year tour of duty as Vice President, but the record hardly confirms this conclusion...
...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...
...Thus: • There is the Nixon whom Wilson characterized as a "liberal Republican" but there is also the Nixon the Wall Street Journal embraces as a "conservative Republican...
...Nixon's principal mission in the campaign was to plant and spread doubt of the loyalty and patriotism of those who opposed him...
...A vote for Nixon," he would cry, "is a vote against socialization of free American institutions .. . [Voorhis] has consistently supported the socialization of free American institutions...
...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...
...He seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then he added the clinching argument: "There's mileage in it...
...If the blows had vigor, it was the vigor of a tricky vicious-ness, not the vigor of a militant, forthright fight for principle...
...I don't remember...
...He said they tolerated and defended Communists in the government...
...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 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...
...Among those who do have a reason for their rejection of the man, the word tricky turns up most frequently...
...And yet in Nixon's campaign strategy this simple act of testifying truthfully as to Hiss' reputation became "a belief in Hiss' loyalty, veracity, and integrity," and this in turn 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 for "public trust...
...It is a striking fact that not a single improvement in the concept or conduct of American foreign policy has resulted from Nixon's journeys abroad...
...But the calculated good behavior of a man on trial can hardly wipe out fourteen years of habitual malpractice...
...In 1947 he voted against a $75 million increase in the school lunch program...
...Warren's great hope at the convention was based on the prospect of a deadlock between the two principal contenders, Eisenhower and Taft...
...Louis, Nixon said that in his decision to halt Communist aggression in Korea, former President Truman was right and "deserves the credit for it...
...The issues at stake involved major conflicts between the liberal and conservative blocs and dealt with significant controversies on Federal aid to education, agriculture, veterans, and organized labor...
...voted to exclude one million workers from minimum wage coverage...
...Twice, in 1948 and 1952, he opposed authorization for the Tennessee Valley Authority to construct supplementary steam plants for power production...
...This device was used to convey the impression that Nixon concurred with Rockefeller...
...But they were dirty blows, packing a poisonous dose of slanderous innuendo...
...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...
...She voted against the Mundt-Nixon Communist Control bill and against overriding President Truman's veto of the Communist Subversive Control bill...
...A year later he voted the same way...
...D. from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment...
...Nixon was largely responsible for the Eisenhower Administration policy—or lack of policy—on McCarthy...
...He voted to saddle organized labor with the Taft-Hartley Law and against giving farmers the Brannan Plan...
...He is cunning rather than creative, quick to reach conclusions but incapable of developing convictions...
...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...
...The reason is not hard to come by...
...Douglas voted the same as Marcantonio 354 times...
...As for civil rights, Nixon promised the greatest progress since the days of Lincoln, while farmers were assured that at long last they would receive their fair share of "America's ever-increasing prosperity...
...Two—Several weeks before his meeting with Rockefeller, the Vice President had publicly ridiculed as "growthmanship" the belief held by Rockefeller and a number of Democratic liberals that the national economy must expand by about five per cent a year to achieve healthy progress and stay well ahead of the Soviet Union...
...But Knowland, an honorable conservative, refused to be a party to such a scheme...
...The "undefined tricky quality" gets itself defined in the process of reading the record, and I suspect that a considerable number of Americans are more familiar with at least portions of Nixon's record than the pundits who fall back on the Dr...
...He lashed out at the Democratic platform: "I happen to believe that their program would be disastrous for America...
...Subsequently a Senate investigating committee reported that fifty-three per cent had been hired by the present Republican Administration...
...Instead, Nixon sought repeatedly 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...
...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 McCarthy-ism...
...Throughout his record in the House and Senate Nixon voted consistently for the position of the real estate lobby: he voted against public housing, farm housing, middle income housing, and slum clearance, and he led the fight to kill public housing in Los Angeles...
...In 1948 and again in 1952 he approved the cession of the tide-lands oil properties to the states...
...It was McCarthy's ineptitude, not his immorality, that disturbed the Vice President...
...Nixon eventually broke with McCarthy, but again for curiously Nix-onian reasons...
...But this was only a beginning...
...There is the Nixon who advocated sending American boys to fight in Indo-China, but there is also the Nixon who argued, afterward, that the Eisenhower Administration deserved credit for standing against the shedding of American blood in Indo-China...
...Nixon voted to give the offshore "tidelands," which the Supreme Court had held to be Federal lands, to the coastal states...
...Here again the familiar pattern appeared...
...Truman and his associates, either through stupidity or political expediency, were primarily responsible for the unimpeded growth of Communist conspiracy within the United States...
...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...
...For example: One—Real estate men gave thirty-six per cent of the fund...
...As Dana Smith put it: "[Earl] Warren has too much the social point of view for the people behind Dick...
...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...
...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...
...The New York governor carefully analyzed the various provisions, after which it was Nixon's turn to say something...
...Knight rushed back from his honeymoon...
...Wilson, his admirer, wrote of the "vigor of his attack" and his "heavy blows...
Vol. 24 • October 1960 • No. 10
