Recently, I bought a pair of Nixon-Agnew cufflinks, issued to commemorate their second inauguration in 1973. I bought them for the kitsch value and because they were cheap. Regrettably, I don’t really know much about Nixon, beyond the Cliffs Notes I’ve picked up from various books and newspaper articles about other subjects.
Until this morning, all I could’ve told you about Helen Gahagan Douglas is that she was the opponent Nixon smeared as the Pink Lady when he ran against her early in his career. But then I stumbled upon the review of a new Douglas biography (that’s right — there’s more than one) and it turns out that she did quite a bit to earn her epithet:
The control of nuclear weaponry was Douglas’s main policy interest, and in 1945 she imagined that this could best be accomplished by sharing the secrets of the atom with the Soviet Union. Most crucially, she opposed Truman on military aid to Greece and Turkey, and said she voted for the Marshall Plan “because of its decency” and not “because of the cold war.” When it came to “decency,” anti-Communism didn’t really make the cut…
The essential reason for Douglas’s loss would be most clearly offered by the congresswoman herself, on plain white paper, in her memoirs. “There was the United States fighting Communism, and I was the person who said we should limit the power of the military and try to disarm the world and get along with Russia.”
Coincidentally, Douglas had an affair with Lyndon Johnson when they served together in the House in the 1940s. After Johnson became president, Douglas wrote him,
“Dear Lyndon, dear, dear Lyndon, . . . Nikita Khrushchev is an old man and he wants to help the cause of peace in his final active years.”