Gellman Irwin F. - The Contender, Richard Nixon: the Congress years, 1946-1952: with a new preface

THE CONTENDER

ALSO BY IRWIN F. GELLMAN

Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles

Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 19331945

Roosevelt and Batista: Good Neighbor Diplomacy in Cuba, 19331945

The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 19521961

IRWIN F. GELLMAN

RICHARD NIXON THE CONGRESS YEARS, 19461952

With a New Preface

First Yale University Press edition 2017. First published in 1999 by The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Preface to the Paperback Edition copyright 2017 by Irwin F. Gellman. Copyright 1999 by Irwin F. Gellman.

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FOR MY WIFE GLORIA GAE

The state of current scholarship on Richard Nixon requires me to state, at the outset, that I am neither for nor against him. My purpose in writing The Contender was never to boost Nixons historical reputationnor to depress itbut rather to provide the basis on which any such reevaluation must be built. I hoped to write, to the extent that the written record and my own abilities allow, an accurate chronicle of this very interesting and complex mans early life and career in Congress. Before we can begin to discern the larger historical meaning of events or embark on the always fraught task of attempting moral judgments, we need some reliable knowledge of what those events were: the things various people actually did and said and what in fact happened.

I did not begin as a Nixon advocate; far from it. Like many academics, I did not have a positive opinion of him. But neither was I a Nixon hater. What drew me to the subject was that I had written extensively on Franklin D. Roosevelt and had examined a large amount of material written by Democrats. I had not seen a similar amount of data from a Republican perspective. What I discovered in my research was that no one had carefully explored Nixons rich collection. In spite of this, many had written their personal judgments based on erroneous assumptions without reviewing essential documentation.

When The Contender was released, in the summer of 1999, I anticipated controversy, but the amount of hostility and the reasons for it surprised me. Although most reviewers discussed the merits of my arguments, a vocal minority saw nothing to be gained from any analysis of Nixons congressional career. I was castigated as a revisionist because I based my account of his rise on the extensive documentation in his own manuscripts, and in many other collections, and because I used that written record to challenge and correct a wide variety of factual and interpretative errors.

The energetic novice politician who emerged from those records, whom a significant number of Californians had found immensely appealing, is hard to reconcile with the darkly paranoid figure of the Watergate years that dominates popular imagination. Nixon was controversial even before then, of course, but I believe the stain of Watergate makes him ineligible, in many peoples minds, for the reassessment normally applied to historical figures over time. For some, the ineligibility even extends to corrections of fact.

Most of the dubious statements later accepted as true were first conjured up by Nixons political opponents. For example, Roger Morris, in his 1990 account of Nixons early career, charged that the Committee of 100, formed to support Nixons first run for Congress in 1946, was composed of millionaires who secretly bankrolled his campaign. (Morris never explains how he uncovered this secret.) In fact, the committee included a wide variety of Republicans, mostly small businessmen and partisans, who passionately championed the defeat of Nixons opponent, the five-term Congressman Jerry Voorhis. Nixons campaign did not depend on massive amounts of secret funding; he received contributions from many supporters and also put up his own money.

The reasons Nixon won were not mysterious. He began running against Voorhis in January 1946; the congressman did not start campaigning until late September. Nixons and Voorhiss documents alike demonstrate that Nixon did not conduct a dirty campaign against the incumbent; he had no need to do that. Voorhis was an awful candidate. Even during the month or so Voorhis spent actively campaigning, he did not particularly exert himself. The charges that Nixon employed nefarious means to defeat himfor instance, that Nixon activists phoned voters and told them Voorhis was a Communistcame long after the results were in and were never credibly verified. The idea that Nixon did something unsavory to secure his victory was persuasive to those who took it as a given that he was too unpopular to win on his own, but it does not emerge from the record.

Upon entering Congress in January 1947, Nixon quickly declared himself an internationalist, unlike many in his party. Six months later, as a member of the House Select Committee on Foreign Aid (better known as the Herter Committee), he traveled to Western Europe to help assess the physical damage caused by World War II and the need for United States assistance. This led to the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, both of which Nixon enthusiastically championed. As a member of the Education and Labor Committee, he helped to draft the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted union activities. He voted for it, and after Truman vetoed the bill, Nixon joined the overwhelming majority who overrode the veto.

His efforts on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) drew, by far, the most headlines. Many authors have particularly condemned him for his role in investigating the Hollywood Tena group of prominent individuals from the movie industry who were publicly attacked for past Communist involvement and forced to appear before HUAC, and who refused to testify, went to prison, and were later blacklistedeven though Nixon had not participated. He was in Europe with the Herter mission at the time of the hearings.

Many of Nixons adversaries accused him of Red baiting and saw him as a clone of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fawn Brodie, in Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (1981), claimed: McCarthy was Nixon in caricature, Nixon out of control, Nixon turned nihilist. Many authors depend on Brodie for their portraits of the Nixon-McCarthy relationship, but there were vast differences between the two men. Nixon never made the wild, scattershot accusations of Communist infiltration that got McCarthy so much press. Nixon targeted those who admitted they had Communist connections.