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'Tricky Dick' vs. the Pink Lady
Thomas D. Mcavoy / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images; Getty Images
Nixon’s victory over Helen Gahagan Douglas was one of the nastiest in history, and a prototype for today's GOP smear tactics. In an exclusive excerpt from The Pink Lady, Sally Denton revisits the infamous Senate campaign.
Sixty years before Hillary Clinton ran for president, and Sarah Palin for Vice President, Helen Gahagan Douglas was the first woman in America who had the capacity, the credentials, the ambition, and the political gravity to realistically aspire to the highest office in the land. During her rise as an American female politician she struggled to define herself in the highly charged climate of Red Scare America. Her trajectory from Broadway star, to California congresswoman, to vice-presidential contender, to senatorial candidate seemed unstoppable—until her 1950 Senate race against Richard Nixon.
Smears had happened before in political history, but not with such blatant lies and sophisticated orchestration.
In a carefully orchestrated whispering campaign of smear, fear, and innuendo that would go down in American history as the dirtiest ever—while also becoming the model for the next half-century and beyond—Nixon exploited America’s xenophobic suspicions and reflexive chauvinism with devastating consequences. Nixon’s henchman, Murray Chotiner, introduced his own brand of dirty tricks to the political campaign. Five years after the historic 1950 California match, Chotiner spoke to a Republican National Committee school for campaign workers about the Douglas-Nixon race and political strategy for the future. It would be one of many secret lectures Chotiner would give to “GOP schools” and where he would meet the protégés who would succeed him: Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. His 14,000-word syllabus, which became a legendary GOP dirty tricks manifesto, laid out a simple formula: “Discredit your opponent before your own candidate gets started…associate your opponent with an unpopular idea or organization, with just a suggestion of treason…above all, attack, attack, attack, never defend.”
The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas. By Sally Denton. 256 pages. Bloomsbury Press. $26.
It was September 11, 1950. Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the record crowd on a balmy Southern California afternoon. Journalists noted that she wore a gray suit over a black blouse, and the Los Angeles Daily News reported on her “right nice hair-do.” Fashion and triviality aside, the former first lady and widow of FDR was eloquent and animated in her speech to the thousands who had gathered. She had traveled here from New York to support her dear friend, Helen, who was locked in one of, if not the, most bitter Senate campaigns in U.S. history.
It was here, at Bixby Park in Long Beach, while Mrs. Roosevelt appealed to the crowd, that Helen’s supporters first noticed Republicans passing out pink slips of paper. “The Pink Sheet”—implying that she was a communist, “hinting darkly at secret ties,” as one historian put it—would become notorious in the annals of political dirty tricks. It would earn for its creator the sobriquet of “Tricky Dick.” The nickname, which Helen attached to her adversary, would haunt Nixon for decades to come. Forever branded as the “Pink Lady,” Helen was the first Hollywood figure to rise meteorically in national politics, the first female to gain entrée into the male-dominated smoke-filled rooms of a Democratic national convention, the first American woman seriously considered as a vice-presidential contender.
This day in the park, Helen laughed at the ludicrousness of the Pink Sheet, dismissing it as an unsophisticated, sophomoric attempt to deflect attention from the many real issues and challenges facing the nation. Eleanor Roosevelt was less sanguine, urging her friend to “set the record straight.” Helen was neither a communist nor a communist sympathizer. She was a New Deal progressive, an unabashed liberal. “I failed to take his attacks seriously enough,” she later remarked, upon realizing that her enemies had distributed more than a half-million copies of the slander sheet throughout California. “I just thought it was ridiculous, absolutely absurd.” Only later did she grasp the full impact.
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Paul Schrodt is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to New York magazine, Radar, and Esquire.com.
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As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono. McKinnon is co-chair of Arts & Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers.
Next Stop, the Senate
Sally Denton is a writer based in Santa Fe and author of six books, including The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America and the forthcoming The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas (Bloomsbury Press).
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Sally Denton is a writer based in Santa Fe and author of six books, including The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America and the forthcoming The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas (Bloomsbury Press).
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Sally Denton is a writer based in Santa Fe and author of six books, including The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America and the forthcoming The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas (Bloomsbury Press).
periscope
Nixon was liar and a fraud all his life. He justified his dishonesty with his ambitions for political power. The problem for America is that he wasn't the first or the last to employ "the smear," or the "outrageous lie" as campaign tactics.
We saw it when Gore was smeared for "claiming" he invented the Internet, and when Kerry was smeared by the Swiftboat Liars - all on behalf of Bushboy, the most unfit and unelected president in our history.
Of course McCain and the Republican Party were back at it with the Obama smears about him being a "terrorist sympathizer," and other insidious drivel, but for once it didn't work.
It seems Americans have to be scared out of their minds by the failures of a Republican administration like Bushboy's to realize that Republicans will say and do anything to get elected.
SFGiants
Well, periscope, you are right. But I suppose some comfort can be taken from it in on way,
I saw the Nixon-Frost interview when it first came out, and I watched it replayed after Nixon died, and--while I'm not a terribly nasty person--it crossed my mind that Nixon was the first person to lie from beyond the grave.
Chuckv
And you have not even mentioned Nixon's worst act. According to Steven Ambrose in his biography of NIxon, he came into the presidency knowing that Vietnam was not winable. But he allowed another 30,000 Americans, and God knows how many Vietnamese, to die during his first term so that his re-election chances would not be hurt.
Incidentally, Ambrose was a quite conservative person, by no means a leftest, and extremely patriotic.
danielcmalloy
Dirty politics is redundant. To say any campaign is "gender" politics is missing the point. Win at any cost. They aren't playing marbles. They are playing for a senate seat in the most powerful country in the world. Politics is full of nasty people. Hollywood is concerned with their image and eat their own. Unions are corrupt. Wow! Thanks for the heads up. Nice photo.
nortonclybourn
Life is so simple when you can dismiss everybody as corrupt. That way you don't have to waste time making friends.
No, Nixon was truly evil, not an ordinary opportunist.
xlntcat
Until women quit squealling about phony sexism and get ready to take whatever is dished out, they will never rise to the WH. Pretending that this was the first or the only individual to be falsely accused of being a communist is revisionist history and totally false. This was common practice and has been resurrected against Obama.
SCMax101
No one said that this was, "the first or only individual to be falsely accused of being a communist," but to ignore the obvious sexism that exists in politics is obtuse and ignorant.
estcruzer
I don't know who you people are but you don't want women who will "quit squealing" to ever try for the WH. You don't understand that men are the weaker sex, always were and always will be - we only predominate because the women are willing to let us play that role. If they ever drop the facade we won't stand a chance.
Glenda1976
Nixon was out for himself, just like any other politician. He wasn't her campaign manager.
xlntcat
And Nixon had mental and emotional problems, but he was not more evil than any other politician.
JackHughes
Same old story: Republican sleaze and Democratic spinelessness.
briansays
I believe Will Rodgers said
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American
The lesson of Nixons methods fully exposed in 1950 would not be lost on the Kennedys in 1960
Nor on Californians who reelected Pat Brown in 1962
It took the Vietnam war to bring Nixon back
But again and in the long run tripped up by his flaws
misha1000
"Communist League of Negro Women," the postcards carried the message: "VOTE FOR HELEN FOR SENATOR. WE ARE WITH HER 100%."
I believe Nixon's campaign also placed a full page newspaper advertisement with that copy. But in the end, he was destoyed. Same thing with Roy Cohn. The only way I knew he had died, was Andy Rooney's comment on 60 Minutes. It wasn't noted anywhere else.
They both made a career out of destroying the careers of others. Some legacy.
What they are doing to Obama is mild compared to the past.
quatermass
But look how far we've come: by today's measures Nixon appears
like a man of the Left and D.C. employs more Jews than Haifa.
GPatton
Well, there were a lot of California comsymps around at the time, and she was close with many of them, after all. And her affair with Alger Hiss? George Patton
misha1000
"And her affair with Alger Hiss?"
Proof and links, please.
GPatton
Adlai told me about it; he was jealous! George Patton
keemia
60 years of smear tactics and IDIOTIC Democrats still haven't learned to counter. Therein lies the problem.
GPatton
Dems like Joe Kennedy were pushovers, pantywaists, right. George Patton
Hotfrostins
Good information in the article, I can recognize the very same tactics being used against President Obama today, although instead of a whispering campaign it is a FOX News shouting extravaganza, but the tactics are very similar. A sad commentary on the lack of respect Americans seem have embraced and allowing it not only to poisin our political system but journalism as well. Today we must endure what that has produced within our system, special intrests with large sums of money being able to control propaganda using the same old smear and dirty tricks, there by determining the outcome of election. It may have been the birthchild of "Tricky Dick" but the GOP has evolved and escalated it into a hybred beast by blending the forces of so called conservative policy with extreme news media propaganda waring against socialism and all liberal boogeymen, which they feed to the masses 24/7.... the potential for polarization violence to be unleashed in the near future is huge as the escalation continues 24/7.
shag11
"Greatest country in the world" my ass. I used to be heavily involved in politics, until I saw this type of nastiest from the national to the local level. I couldn't stomach teaching my child to be honest, and then being involved with people who couldn't care less about the truth.
As for Nixon, you reap what you sow. He's gone down as one of the most disgraced political figures of all time, and appropriately so. How people of any sector can allow their people to be trashed, yet support a candidate is beyond me.
SteveStone
I must be the only person here who actually saw Nixon campaigning (on b/w TV and in person) in 1950 southern California, and I can attest to the fact that "dirty" and "dirtiest" don't even begin to describe things. Our generation knew it was a cardinal sin to question a woman's character in public (Tricky Dick stopped short of calling Mrs. Douglas "a Communist whore," but only just short) because in those days a woman had little recourse to refute such charges.
From that time forward, I KNEW that Dick Nixon was a swine.
Further, I'm probably the only one here who actually heard Nixon's "Checkers" speech (driving from Omaha to San Jose) on the radio. Even today, fifty-odd year later, remember it makes we want to retch.
cathay
As 2008 taught us, smears and misogyny are not just endemic to the Republican Party.
Karma eventually caught up with Tricky Dickey for all his years of lies and corrupt politics.
Karma can be delayed but never out run. After smearing the Clintons as racists and stealing the nomination from Hillary (MI/FL) as well as his MoveOn/ACORN/SEIU organized thug tactics at the caucuses and bussed in from out of state "voters", I can't help but wonder what Karma has in store for Obama and his enablers.
bewell40
Voters want to believe in the person they vote for or to loathe the one they vote against. They just want image, some vague composite eliciting general agreement. They don't want specific detail of how that image will interact with the situations at hand. Detail makes clear the give-and-take of fixing anything. It separates us into smaller groups. So all political parties do what we ask: upgrade our candidate and/or downgrade the other(s).
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