Richard Nixon, The Early Smears

 

 

Richard Nixon began his political career after he was discharged from the US Navy in 1946.  He impressed a group of small businessmen, farmers, fruit orchard owners and sundry other Republican contributors--called The Committee of 100--to run as a GOP stalwart against a five-term Democrat, Jerry Voorhis.   

Few expected him to win, even among his backers, and Nixon at first received very few contributions for his efforts. Voorhis himself didn't take Nixon seriously, according to Stephen Ambrose in his 1987 book "Nixon: The Education of a Politican".  The incumbent spent much of the campaign in Washington, solidifying his image as a hard-working legislator.  

That was a huge mistake by Voorhis.  "Tricky Dick"--as Nixon  came to be known in a later campaign--was not one to be underestimated.  He began to smear Voorhies as a Communist sympathsizer.  He did it by trying to tie Voorhies to the CIO Labor Union, which did have some Communists among their ranks.  The problem was the CIO hadn't endorsed Congressman Voorhis.   Only one small local branch of a local CIO had issued a recommendation on a mimeopgraphed sheet of paper for its rank-and-file to vote for Voorhis.  Nixon and his team took this small handbill paper endorsemdent by one small segment of the CIO and turned it into a big lie that the whole union, and especially the Communist elements, had endorsed the Democrat. 

That same year,the  Communist Party newspaper "People's World", had denounced Voorhis as "against unity with Communists under any circumstances".  In truth, the incumbent was simply a liberal/progressive type, a mainstream New Deal Democrat friendly with working-class interests.  He had even introduced a bill in the the House of Representitives in 1940 calling for all Communists to register with the national government!

Meanwhile, in the state of Wisconsin, another Republican was having similar success in wresting a Senate seat from Robert LaFollette, Jr..  The candidate's name--Joseph McCarthy.     

To quote StephenAmbrose (Nixon, Volume I, 1987, page, 129)

 "...both Voorhis and (Senator) Robert LaFollette, Jr had become anathema to the Communist Party, because they  had denounced Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. But the truth mattered not one bit to either Joe McCarthy or Nixon."  

This  was 1946 and FDR was dead and the war was over and the GOP was desperate and the country was used to stories of spies and cloak and dagger espionage generated by radio shows and Hollywood films. If the Nazis wren't a threat anymore, go to the next best thing.  A new villiany must  be found. And it wasn't like Russia's interests in Eastern Europe were exactly in accord with the other former Allies.  

  By the time Voorhis got back to his district, he was under attack from every right-of-center newspaper in Orange County and Pasadena with ads placed by the Nixon campaign and the Committee of 100.  He also performed poorly in four debates against the young challenger.  Nixon was a formidible debater and kept Voorhis on the defensive with the outlandish CIO endorsement claim.  Voorhis responded with long ponderous appeals; Nixon just shot back with more headline grabbing attacks--"The Los Angeles Times", the paper run by arch-conservative, anti-union Owen Chandler, endorsed Nixon and no doubt kept the headlines a'grabbing.   Nixon won the election and continued his tactics for most of his career, first getting an important seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He can be glimpsed below briefly near the beginning of a documentary on the HUAC witchhunts that started in Hollywood in October, 1947.  

One can't help wondering if the history of the USA would have been different if Nixon's earliest opponent had taken him as a serious contender.  Nixon did get his comeuppance with the Watergate imbloglio--but not after almost thirty years as a major force on the national and world stage.