October 13, 2006
Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Fred Schwarz is absolutely right in labeling Joe McCarthy a “Joe-come-lately” to the anti-Communist cause, and he is also quite right that the term “Age of McCarthy” lacks a certain specificity, given the wide range of citizens’ organizations (e.g., the American Legion), religious institutions (e.g., the Catholic Church), government institutions (e.g., the FBI, HUAC, the Senate Committee on Government Operations), and private actors who often cooperated under the very loose ideological umbrella of anti-Communism. As Fred points out, it was HUAC that worked in overdrive to ferret out alleged Communists in the film industry. Joe McCarthy’s focus was primarily on alleged Communist moles in various departments of the federal government. I differ somewhat with Fred when he argues: “Not all anti-Communist members of Congress were buffoons, like McCarthy; some, like Richard Nixon, took care to investigate thoroughly and prepare their evidence with care.” It’s true that Nixon was a far more disciplined congressman than McCarthy. In his committee work for HUAC, Nixon was especially careful to get his facts straight and to confine his remarks and questions to what could be proven, rather than what might boost his personal or party fortunes. But Nixon as consummate campaigner was a different character altogether, and sometimes just as reckless as Joe McCarthy. In 1946, during his first congressional campaign, Nixon accused his opponent, Rep. Jerry Voorhis, of accepting the endorsement and assistance of the left-leaning CIO-PAC. In fact, the organization backing Voorhis was the decidedly liberal but anti-Communist National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC). In his debate with Voorhis, Nixon famously repeated the accusation and presented his flustered opponent with a copy of NCPAC’s endorsement, which he passed off as a CIO-PAC endorsement letter. Prior to election day, Nixon’s campaign went even further, distributing 25,000 thimbles that were inscribed, “Elect Nixon: Put a Needle in the PAC,” and using anonymous phone bankers to call registered Democrats and ask, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” In his famous 1950 Senate campaign against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon distributed a so-called “Pink Sheet” purporting to show that Douglas voted down the line with Rep. Vito Marcantonio, a Communist sympathizer who represented East Harlem in Congress. The Pink Sheet claimed that “during her five years in Congress, Helen Douglas has voted 353 times exactly as has Vito Marcantonio, the notorious Communist party-line Congressman from New York,” and that Nixon had voted “exactly the opposite to the Douglas-Marcantonio axis.” In fact, most of these votes concerned routine procedural matters. Only 76 of the votes referenced in the Pink Sheet concerned substantive legislative matters; Douglas voted with Marcantonio only 66 of those roll calls (of the 66 roll calls, Marcantonio and Douglas voted with a majority of Democratic House members 53 times). Nixon himself had voted with Marcantonio on 112 roll calls, despite the Pink Sheet’s claim that he voted “exactly the opposite to the Douglas-Marcantonio axis.” All of which is to say that Richard Nixon was sometimes a hard-working and conscientious anti-Communist congressman. But on the campaign trail he lied with reckless abandon, thus blurring the line that separated him from Joe McCarthy.
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