NOW MORE THAN EVER

Until the 1960 presidential race soured things between them, Jack Kennedy would often side with Richard Nixon against the Left. When a prominent socialite at a dinner party sneered at the “dreadful” Republican from California, the young Democrat from Massachusetts savaged her: “You have no idea what he’s been through. Dick Nixon is the victim of the worst press that ever hit a politician in this country. What they did to him in the Helen Gahagan Douglas race was disgusting!”

There is a certain world, however, in which not even a Kennedy can make the sneer at Nixon go away. Publication of Greg Mitchell’s Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady shows the Nixon haters returning to the scene of one of his earliest crimes: that “low . . . diabolical” California campaign — as the defeated Mrs. Douglas later called it for the Senate in 1950.

To his credit, Mitchell has exhumed one of the most colorful political campaigns in modern American history. Even Hollywood was divided, with Humphrey Bogart talking on the radio for the Democrat while Hoagy Carmichael gave concerts for the Republican. And the candidates themselves were more dramatic than any casting director could have found. Two-term congressman Richard Nixon had won fame helping expose Alger Hiss — the Soviet agent who had presided over the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta earlier that same year. Three-term congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas had won hers as a glamorous Broadway actress who married Melvyn Douglas — himself a famous matinee idol who, in the 1939 Ninotchka, had romanced a lovable Soviet agent played by Greta Garbo.

By 1950, however, the Soviets were not so lovable. When Greece and Turkey were threatened in the spring of 1947, Truman did something Roosevelt had failed to do: halt the Soviets’ westward expansion. But the eastward spread of communism continued with the 1949 triumph of the Red Army in China, and the early months of 1950 saw the global Communist threat reach into America itself. A federal jury convicted Alger Hiss of perjury. Physicist Klaus Fuchs admitted carrying atomic secrets to Russia, possibly with the help of an American spy ring. Adding to the ruckus, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy claimed the State Department was riddled with Soviet sympathizers. And then, in June, Communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea. The Cold War had suddenly turned hot.

For politicians like Helen Gahagan Douglas, the sending of American GIs to fight the North Koreans would prove catastrophic. While she was in Congress, Douglas would meet regularly with Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and others who objected to Truman’s anti-Communist line. While she stopped short of backing Wallace’s third-party presidential run in 1948, her vote against aid to Greece and Turkey was telling. To be fair, she (like Mrs. Roosevelt) never showed the passion for foreign policy that she had for domestic issues: She was far less interested in battling communism than in maintaining federal irrigation support for small farms, the issue that drove her into the 1950 Senate race in the first place.

There were Democrats, of course, who had little patience for her stands, among them the man she had targeted for defeat — incumbent senator Sheridan Downey, who roared, “Mrs. Douglas gave comfort to the Soviet tyranny by voting against aid to both Greece and Turkey. She voted against the President in a crisis when he most needed her support and most fully deserved her confidence.” Before withdrawing from the Democratic primary, Downey would make, for the Republicans’ later use, a devastating attack on his challenger: accusing her of “a consistent policy of voting along with the notorious Vito Marcantonio,” the congressman from Harlem who voted the Communist line all too consistently. And it was another Democratic opponent, Manchester Boddy, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News, whose tabloid gave Douglas that uncharitable but unavoidable sobriquet “The Pink Lady.”

Douglas’s victory with almost exactly 50 percent of the primary vote in California reflected divisions about her candidacy among Democrats elsewhere. Harry Truman would refuse even to have a campaign picture taken with Douglas, and Jack Kennedy would go so far as to deliver a substantial check to his Republican colleague, leaving Nixon, as a secretary later recalled, ” flabbergasted.”

The stage was set for the November election. As Greg Mitchell neatly puts it in Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, “She was a progressive Democrat, he a moderate Republican. She was effervescent, he was intense. She was wealthy, a famous actress from the East; he was an attorney of moderate means from Whittier. She declared that Communist sympathizers posed no serious threat to America; he had helped send Alger Hiss to prison.” But this fair summary of the candidates doesn’t stop Mitchell from a clear preference. The California Senate election, he writes, would end “the career of one of the most impressive women ever to appear in American politics,” while “Nixon would forever remain Tricky Dicky,” the tag coined for him during the Douglas campaign.

Mitchell shares Douglas’s opposition to the Cold War and lampoons the motives of those who opposed communism in the 1940s and ’50s — writing of the “hysteria” over communism as though the “hysteria” itself were the threat. Despite all the recent evidence of Alger Hiss’s guilt, in Mitchell’s recording of history, Hiss still “allegedly” passed those documents to the Soviets. Nixon investigated merely “alleged” Communists. When FBI agents followed the trail of confessions leading to Julius Rosenberg, they were merely fulfilling some bureaucratic need “for more arrests.” Does Mitchell find catching spies and traitors a seedy pursuit, a pastime beneath a gentleman of good manners? Was it bad form for the people protecting this country to find and apprehend the crowd who carried the A-bomb secret to Moscow? The question is not why people like Truman, Nixon, and Kennedy were worried about communism, but why people like Mrs. Douglas then — and Greg Mitchell now — were not.

The other fault of Mitchell’s book is that it doesn’t do what good campaign books must: convey the sound and the fury of an actual campaign. The little taste Mitchell does give us of the battle whets our appetite for more: Furious at his rival, Nixon once shouted “I’ll castrate her”; informed of the threat’s clinical infeasibility, he continued, “I don’t care. I’ll do it anyway.”

Mitchell subtitles his book “Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas — Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950,” and he’s right that sex and personality would play as big a role in the election as the candidates’ ideologies. With the notable exception of Lyndon Johnson, Helen Douglas’s colleagues in Congress found her galling. After the election, Jack Kennedy would tell a Harvard seminar that she was “not the sort of person I’d like to be working with on committees.” An example of her off-putting manner was her calling a “cheap gimmick” Senator Downey’s withdrawal on the grounds of poor health from the Democratic primary — alienating Downey’s supporters in the party. Even Vito Marcantonio would lend a hand to her defeat, encouraging Nixon to repeat Downey’s connecting of Douglas and Marcantonio’s voting record. Given such venom from her Democratic colleagues, Nixon’s account of his rival, rendered in his own post-Watergate memoirs, seems fair: “Mrs. Douglas was a handsome woman with a dramatic message. She had many fans among the public and many admirers in the press and in the entertainment industry, but she was not, to put it mildly, the most popular member of the House of Representatives.”

Nixon, as it turned out, needed no prodding from Marcantonio. Douglas, he told voters again and again, was “pink right down to her underwear,” and he sent out a leaflet the same color as her alleged underwear. Here Mitchell makes a sound point about the Douglas predicament. “Gender,” he writes, ” perhaps as much as Cold War politics, played a crucial role in her defeat.” As the author notes, only six women had been U.S. senators before 1950. And only one of them, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, had first come to the Senate by election.

But the difficulty of Douglas’s position makes Nixon’s unforgettably nasty tactics all the more perplexing. “There is only one way we can win,” he declared early in his barnstorming. “We must put on a fighting, rocking, socking campaign and carry that campaign directly into every county, city, town, precinct, and home in the state of California.” In fact, Nixon would have won easily regardless. The conviction of Hiss and the invasion by North Korea made him the early leader; the entry of Communist China into the war made him the prohibitive favorite.

Nixon would later write in his memoirs that he had attacked Douglas’s judgment but “never questioned her patriotism.” He did, however, do just that in a broadcast on election eve: “Right at this moment, as I speak to you, the lives of American boys are being snuffed out by the ruthless aggression of Chinese Communist forces in North Korea. . . . It seems incredible that a candidate for the highest legislative body in the land . . . would ask you for your votes tomorrow while flatly refusing to tell you which side she is on in this conflict.” Basing his charge on Douglas’s failure to oppose U.N. membership for the new Chinese regime, Nixon converted a legitimate difference of opinion into grounds for treason.

Nixon won the 1950 senatorial election with 59 percent of the vote, much the same percentage he received in his landslide in the 1972 presidential campaign against George McGovern. As he would again in 1972, he based his campaign in 1950 on dirty tactics and outright lying — turning a huge victory into a tainted one. And by lumping together the entire American Left (from one-worlders like Douglas to popular frontists like Henry Wallace to fellow travelers like Vito Marcantonio), he made enemies who would haunt him to the grave and past it.

In sounding the alarm with his courageous exposure of Alger Hiss two years before, Nixon proved well-positioned on communism. Douglas, however, was caught hopelessly off base — and stayed off base the rest of her life. In the memoirs published after her death in 1980, she wrote:

I’m told I had a chance even after the Korean War started, but that when the Chinese communists started fighting Americans, I was dead. I know that’s true. There was the United States fighting communism and I was the person who said we should limit the power of the military and try to disarm the world and get along with Russia. Korea was the critical element in Nixon’s victory. I think that with it, he didn’t need his smear tactics; he would have won anyway without character assassination and misrepresentation of my record. I had been all over the country talking about the United Nations and what it could do to avert war — and here we were at war in Korea under a United Nations flag. I talked about world cooperation — and men of many nations were killing one another in Korea. I had warned about the arms race — and now we were rushing guns to Korea. I said we had to live together — and men were dying together.

It was her record, not how Nixon characterized it, that made her vulnerable.

That is, however, precisely why we must — in revisiting the 1950 California Senate race — do what Greg Mitchell recommends but fails to do in Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: distinguish the question of what the reasonable foreign policy was at that moment from the question of what we make of Richard Nixon’s political tactics and what they foretell about his later campaigns. While I do not demand latter-day confessions by those who were wrong about the danger of communism, I refuse to cheer Mitchell’s late hit at a figure who, for all his tragic sins of character, was so defiantly and loudly right. Nasty, but right.

Author of Kennedy & Nixon, Christopher Matthews is Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner and host of CNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.