If you needed more proof that Richard Nixon was a crook and a crumb, this books lays it out. Mitchell spins a great tale of campaign anecdotes and informative history about California politics that tells it like it is, and keeps you turning pages. Also some great background on how the anti-communist paranoids destroyed lives in Hollywood and elsewhere. If this had been published before 1968, Nixon would have never been elected.

Two weeks before election day in 1950, the Republican Senatorial candidate in California--Richard M. Nixon--accused the Democratic Senatorial candidate in California--Helen Gahagan Douglas--of being the conduit through which the decisions made by Josef Stalin in the Kremlin flowed to the United States Congress:

"This action by Mrs. Douglas," Nixon explained, "... came just two weeks after [U.S. Communist Party leader] William Z. Foster transmitted his instructions from the Kremlin to the Communist national committee.... [Thus] this [Communist] demand found its way into the Congress" (Mitchell (1998), p. 209).

Later on Nixon campaign manager Murray Chotiner would try to erase--or perhaps forget his role in?--history, claiming that the Nixon campaign of 1950 "had never accused Douglas of 'sympathizing' or 'being in league with' the Communists." Nixon himself claimed that he "never questioned her patriotism" and that he had been smeared by her. Nixon biographers like Jonathan Aitken would refer to Nixon's relatively clean hands in the 1950 Senate campaign.

But the most important thing was that Nixon won the 1950 California Senate race. Because he won the 1950 California Senate race he went on to become Vice President in 1953, and President in 1969. But perhaps more important, the way he won the 1950 Senate race--the fact that his tactics then worked--warped American politics for nearly half a century.

How was it warped? Into a pattern of "lie whenever you can" and "demonize your political opponents." Thus later on Nixon speechwriter William Safire would paint a picture of a President Nixon threatened by:

...a lynch mob, no cause or ideology involved, only an orgy of generalized hate.... The hall [where Nixon was speaking] was actually, not figuratively, besieged.... The Secret Servicemen, who always had seemed too numerous and too officious before, now seemed to us like a too-small band of too-mortal men... (William Safire, Before the Fall).

But Nixon's chief of staff would have a different view of the same situation. As H.R. Haldeman expressed it in his diary:

...we wanted some confrontation and there were no hecklers in the hall, so we stalled departure a little so they could zero in.... Before getting in car, P[resident Nixon] stood up and gave the V signs, which made them mad. They threw rocks, flags, candles, etc. as we drove out.... Bus windows smashed, etc. Made a huge incident and we worked hard to crank it up, should make really major story and might be effective. (H.R. Haldeman)

And Nixon would demand that his top aides--H.R. Haldeman, Henry Kissinger--"use any means" to defeat the "enemy... conspiracy" of his domestic political adversaries. What did Nixon think of as "any means"? We know from his immediate subsequent demand:

Was the Brookings Institute raided last night? No? Get it done. I want the Brookings Institute's safe cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that makes somebody else responsible... (Stanley Kutler)

that in 1971 the "any means" included burglary, theft, the planting of false evidence, conspiracy to frame innocent parties. We don't know how much further "any means" went, or would have gone.

Thus there is a sense in which the Nixon-Douglas campaign of 1950 was key to shaping America not just because of the character of the politician (Nixon) whom it elevated to prominence, but because, as Greg Mitchell writes in his preface:

[The race] set a divisive and rigid agenda for forty years of election campaigns. Until 1950, candidates [who]... campaigned primarily on an anti-Communist platform... usually lost.... [Republican presidential candidate] in 1948 Thomas E. Dewey... criticized fellow Republicans who called for repressive new measures to control subversives.... Republican and Democratic leaders alike interpreted the outcome [of the 1950 election] as a victory for McCarthyisam and a call for a dramatic surge in military spending.... Red-baiting would haunt America for years, the so-called national security state would evolve and endure, and candidates would run and win on anti-Sovietism for decades..." (p. xix).

Now Greg Mitchell has done an excellent job of taking us back to the campaign of 1950--legitimate fears, the backdrop of American apparent defeat in the Korean War, blacklists, loyalty oaths, and the general belief that a woman's place was in the kitchen, not in the Senate. It is a very, very readable book, and very much worth reading--for what happened in the 1950 Senate race played a remarkably large part in determining what America was to be in the second half of the twentieth century.

I enjoyed this book enormously, extremely well-researched, clear and well-written, entertaining, scrupulous in detail and true to the mark. There's a lot of new "dirt" on Nixon but what is perhaps most valuable is the portrait of Helen Douglas as one of the most remarkable (though flawed) women of the century. Also a powerful depiction of the Red Scare in Hollywood....Really, a must read!

Two-and-a-half stars

Ingrid Winther Scobie is a history professor at Texas Women's University. For her biography of the woman whom Richard M. Nixon is supposed to have dubbed "the pink lady," Scobie got the cooperation of Douglas before the latter's death.

Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900-1980) was a successful stage performer and less successful film actress who married her leading man, Melvyn Douglas (1899-1981). The Douglases were politically engaged lefties in 1930s and '40s Hollywood. When films fizzled for Helen Gahagan Douglas, she had a successful career as one of America's first congresswomen (1944-1950). Her electoral career was abruptly ended by "tricky Dick," her opponent in California's 1950 U.S. Senate race.

I was raised to think of "Nixon's" sobriquet as Scobie does -- as merely a smear. The facts are, however, that Douglas WAS pretty darn "pink." Indeed, members of her own party (as opposed to her Republican opponents) considered her "red," and said so publicly.

Apparently, neither Library Journal reviewer J. Sara Paulk nor the anonymous writer of the book description above carefully read the book, or they'd know that it was not Nixon, but Douglas' Democratic opponent, Ralph Manchester Boddy, who coined the phrase "the pink lady." If they weren't such hardcore, leftist Democrats, they'd know that Nixon never smeared Douglas. It was Boddy who strongly suggested that Douglas was not a "liberal" or even a socialist, but a "traitorous" communist ("red hot") with a "blueprint of subversive dictatorship."

Even forty years later, neither Scobie nor the reviewers can accept that Nixon, who was a moderate Republican, was the much brighter, more capable candidate, and that California voters -- including Democrats, and indeed, much of the Democratic Party -- had soured on socialism. Hence, they must cling to the myth of the Nixon "smear."

As historian Irwin F. Gellman writes, "The U.S Senate contest in California during 1950 has become the stuff where legend has replaced fact. 'Tricky Dicky' smeared Helen Gahagan Douglas, the 'Pink Lady,' thus relying on the anti-Communist hysteria to propel the dirty trickster into the upper house...."

But in point of fact, Gellman continues, "[Douglas'] painfully inept stewardship - not Nixon - guaranteed her demise."

And so, the real smear was the one invented by leftwing Democrats as revenge against Nixon, which they and their successors in politics, academia, and the media have repeated ever since - even after Nixon's death.

Douglas' story fills Scobie's personal need to narrate the life of a strong mother/career woman role model. (She often refers, inappropriately, to her subject as "Helen," as if Douglas were her personal friend, rather than her subject.) Although my role model is gone, I'm not in the market for a new one. Besides, while writing about heroes is a worthy purpose for historians (although feminists heap contempt on that project, if the heroes are white, heterosexual males), the writing must be in service of the truth. But the truth is not Scobie's priority. She considers herself a "feminist biographer," for whom providing a usable past trumps the search for truth.

When it originally appeared, Center Stage had value for me as a chronicle of the postwar swing, in California, away from FDR's left/center, New Deal coalition, and to a center/right (though Scobie sees it as merely right-wing), Republican politics. But with the 1999 publication of Irwin F. Gellman's painstakingly researched, much more honest biography of Nixon's early career, The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952, the already limited value of Scobie's highly partisan work fell even more. Read Scobie, read Gellman, and then tell me what you think.