CHAPTER 7

COMMUNISM AND REPUBLICANISM

In large measure, the overriding narrative of the Cold War will be set in motion by America’s right-wing counterrevolutionaries who unleash J. Edgar Hoover, back Richard Nixon, indulge McCarthyism, institutionalize a giant military-industrial complex, use an out-of-control CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments, employ racist and nativist dog whistles, slam the social safety net, and, in sum, stoke fear and division during an era when the United States had no serious external enemies and should have spent more dollars and effort in building a more perfect union. In this climate, as writer Talia Lavin neatly summarized, people could be viewed as socialists or communists for arguing that it was bad that Americans died broke because they got sick, or that poor people should eat, or that corporations shouldn’t write laws.

Frustrated Republicans, long eclipsed by Franklin Roosevelt’s appealing audacity of hope, would choose a contradictory counterattack engaging our primitive fight-or-flight response: telling voters that someone was out to get them. The new fact of a Cold War was seen as an opportunity, not a tragedy, and, like cynical movie producers who abuse proven plot lines, the GOP dusted off the Red Scare from a not-too-distant past. “Fearful people,” media researcher George Gerbner told Congress, “are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures.”

Starting with the midterm elections of 1946, the Republican Party repositioned Roosevelt’s New Deal as a secret communist plot. This ideological cri de coeur even had a waiting manifesto. In a 1941 edition of Life, following a story about iceboating, publisher Henry Luce had written an incongruous editorial. It was incongruous because Life was the first all-photographic magazine in the United States, keyed to light entertainment, and Luce’s nearly seven-thousand-word editorial, stretching across five pages, was all text… and deadly serious. The headline read THE AMERICAN CENTURY. Luce’s screed urged America to wean itself from FDR’s pinkish New Deal:

The President of the United States has continually reached for more and more power, and he owes his continuation in office today largely to the coming of the war. Thus, the fear that the United States will be driven to a national socialism, as a result of cataclysmic circumstances and contrary to the free will of the American people, is an entirely justifiable fear.

In the simplest terms, Luce argued it was time for America to lead as top dog and the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was not yet managing that task adequately enough. Luce was giving voice to a battle under way between Republican internationalists like himself and the big-government, labor-friendly Roosevelt, who had just been elected to an unprecedented third term. Backing Luce was an oligarchy of old money that was becoming increasingly impatient with Roosevelt’s popularity and populist impulses. Put another way: Wall Street was tired of being sublimated to Main Street.

Luce’s worldview was of a piece with his upbringing: born in China to WASP missionaries who preached, to the alleged unenlightened of an ancient civilization, the virtuous trifecta of a Christian faith inside a democratic society powered by a free enterprise system. After attending Yale and Oxford, Luce had made a pulpit out of his new national magazines. In 1923, he published the first issue of Time. The business monthly Fortune followed in 1930, and in 1936, Life made its debut. Their print perspectives were married by Luce’s muscular Christianity and vehement anticommunism. By 1941, Life’s pioneering photojournalism had made it the most successful of the three. It was estimated that some sixty million readers would look at a “passed-on” copy every month—at the barber shop, or the beauty salon, or in the periodicals section of the local library. That astonishing reach explains why Luce used Life to launch his vision of the American Century:

Ours cannot come out of the vision of any one man.… It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people.

In 1946, one of the opening salvos against Truman and the Democrats came from Tennessee congressman B. Carroll Reece, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Reece argued that the America of 1946 confronted a choice between “Communism and Republicanism.” Senator Robert Taft accused Harry Truman of seeking a Congress “dominated by a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering communism at home.” Author Fred Cook would observe that such rhetoric was often a smokescreen. In The Nightmare Decade, Cook wrote, “The real foe was always the American liberal—the New Dealer, the innovator, the idealist who saw the injustices in American society and advocated the use of the instrumentalities of democratic government to effect reforms. To the emperors of the status quo, such shakers and movers were dangerous men.”

During the 1946 election season, everything anyone would ever need to know about Richard Nixon, little of it laudatory, was fully evident in the way he conducted his very first campaign. Seeking a seat in the House of Representatives, Nixon had been handpicked by Old Guard Southern California ranchers and bankers who hated FDR, the New Deal, labor unions, and, within their own echo chamber, shared a conviction that America was headed to a disastrous socialism. Nixon’s opponent was Jerry Voorhis, the five-time, liberal-minded incumbent in California’s 12th District, which served an agricultural area in Orange County, on the eastern fringe of Los Angeles.

According to Nixon, he was summoned back to his home state of California in the fall of 1945 by a Whittier banker seeking to gauge his interest in running for Congress. At the time, the then thirty-two-year-old Duke Law graduate was in the final months of his Navy tour of duty, settling terminated war contracts on the East Coast. In reality, he received blanket support from all of the state’s most powerful business leaders, including the archconservative Chandler family, who had built a fortune in railroads, held wide and diverse interests, and owned the state’s biggest and most influential newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

In an unpublished memoir, Voorhis would claim that Nixon’s financial support was even deeper and wider, writing, “The Nixon campaign was a creature of big Eastern financial interests… the Bank of America, the big private utilities, the major oil companies.” While Voorhis was spending the bulk of his time in Washington, D.C., serving his constituents, Nixon had the financial wherewithal to mount a ten-month campaign and was able to hire—or was “advised” to employ—Murray Chotiner, a campaign manager notorious for coloring outside the box.

Like all the campaigns to come, Nixon’s 1946 race used unethical scheming and unsubstantiated attacks. His political bible appeared to be an old favorite, The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli. The sixteenth-century Italian diplomat, tutored by the Borgias, rationalized how unscrupulous tactics can be justified to achieve power. By 1946, being called Machiavellian was a bad thing. Nixon, however, really did believe that politics was a cutthroat survival of the fittest.

Nixon hammered the fiction that his opponent was a tool of the communists. In fact, during his five terms, Jerry Voorhis had put his loathing of communism very much on the record. For example, he had served on the House Un-American Activities Committee, and sponsored the eponymous 1940 Voorhis Act, which required communist organizations to register with the Justice Department. Nonetheless, in the last days of the election, voters were besieged by mystery callers saying, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Much later, in an aside to White House counsel Leonard Garment, Nixon would admit that dishonesty was one of his central tenets: “You’ll never make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.”

As biographer Stephen Ambrose would write, Nixon “made the transition from nice Quaker boy to ruthless politician without even noticing.” In The Fifties, David Halberstam observed, “If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and the resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself had seized on the anti-communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country.”

In the 1946 midterms, Nixon and his fellow Republicans enjoyed a substantial victory, gaining majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1931. The Republicans picked up fifty-four seats in the House and eleven in the Senate. The Chicago Tribune—owned by isolationist and vociferous New Deal critic Robert “Colonel” McCormick—gushed that the results were the greatest victory for the country since Appomattox. The new arrivals in the 80th Congress also included Wisconsin’s thirty-eight-year-old Joe McCarthy, elected to the Senate, and twenty-nine-year-old John Kennedy, of Boston, who joined Nixon in the House.