Breaking: The Pink Lady (Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon's Early Nemesis) Was Really Pink!
From a review of a new bio about Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melvyn, an early Nixon foe, and anti-anti-communist martyr whose 1950 loss to Tricky Dick is often used to illustrate the disgraced president's wicked, wicked ways:
[Biographer Sally] Denton claims that the former ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy contributed a large sum of money to Nixon, but doesn't mention that his son Jack publicly expressed his own pleasure in the victory of Tricky Dick. (The nickname is Douglas's admittedly immortal contribution to political nomenclature.) Denton's previous books, including "The Bluegrass Conspiracy" and "The Money and the Power" (written with Roger Morris), have sometimes concerned organized crime and cabals, and here she shapes an unconvincing theory that Douglas's campaign may have been sabotaged when Mob associates "embedded" the lawyer Paul Ziffren in its finance operations. But, as Denton notes, it was Douglas's primary opponent who had first called her the "Pink Lady," and it was the defection of voters from her own party that defeated her in the general election. Truman quite reasonably refused to campaign for her. 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."
Whole thing here, well worth reading for those interested in the battles of the last century.
For Nixon red-baiting completists, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of Jerry Vorhis's The Strange Case of Richard Nixon. Voorhis' The Strange Case of Richard Nixon. Written by the incumbent congressman Nixon beat in his first campaign, the attempted takedown led the one Amazon reviewer to date to write, "If you have not fallen in love with Richard Nixon before reading this book, you will absolutely make him your favorite president after reading this one."
