Customer Reviews

Center Stage

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.