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Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady : Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 Hardcover – January 20, 1998
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Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady is the first book to present a full-length portrait of the campaign widely remembered as one of the dirtiest ever--and pivotal in the history of gender politics. Greg Mitchell draws on a wealth of original documents--including shocking, never-before-published letters and memos by Nixon and his tenacious campaign manager Murray Chotiner--that he recently discovered at the National Archives. In an engrossing blow-by-blow narrative featuring Earl Warren, Edward G. Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, Cecil B. De Mille, Melvyn Douglas (the candidate's husband), Harry Truman, and future presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan, Mitchell vividly captures the sensational 1950 race: the cunning tactics of a young Nixon that rst earned him the indelible nickname "Tricky Dick"; the challenges and criticism Douglas faced as a woman in politics; and the paralyzing fear that marked the dawn of the McCarthy era and blacklisting in the movies, television, and radio. The book is full of startling anecdotes, humorous incidents, and newly uncovered "dirty tricks."
- Print length316 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJanuary 20, 1998
- Dimensions6.75 x 1 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-100679416218
- ISBN-13978-0679416210
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A history of politics's most slimy that's also a page-turner. -- Entertainment Weekly
In his last book, Mitchell showed how major Hollywood studios sabotaged Upton Sinclair in 1934. But here his excursions into Hollywood politics, focusing on McCarthyism and the blacklists, never link up with the main event.... complexities have eluded Mitchell, as have some routine facts. -- The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus
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- Publisher : Random House; First Edition (January 20, 1998)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 316 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679416218
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679416210
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1 x 9.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,202,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,043 in General Elections & Political Process
- #3,342 in Elections
- #6,898 in Presidents & Heads of State Biographies
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About the author

Greg Mitchell is a film director and the author of dozen non-fiction books. His latest book, published in May 2023 is "Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried," is the companion to his PBS film of the same name. His previous book was the award-winning "The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--and America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," published in 2020. Before that was his 2016 bestseller "The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill" (Crown).
His other books include: "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas" (a New York Times Notable Book); "The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor and the Birth of Media Politics" (winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize); "So Wrong for So Long," on Iraq and the media; and two books with Robert Jay Lifton, "Hiroshima in America" and "Who Owns Death?"
Mitchell won numerous national awards as the editor of Editor & Publisher from 2001 to 2009. He began his magazine career as Senior Editor of the legendary Crawdaddy for most of the 1970s and helped create the first major article about Bruce Springsteen (and later was presented with a gold record for "Born to Run").
He co-produced the recent film, "Following the Ninth," about the cultural and political impact of Beethoven's Ninth symphony around the world in recent years, and has served as adviser to other acclaimed documentaries. His articles have appeared in dozens of national magazines and leading newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post.
He lives in the New York City area.
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"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.
Anyone interested in McCarthyism hysteria should add this book to his collection.
Nixon was anti-communist, anti-semitic (Helen Douglas' husband was Jewish), and anti-woman. He made use of all scare mongering tactics.
He was one of the first causes of the current mess we are in now. A veritable eye-opener. Consider, if you will, a man who frightened an entire state into believing in a "communist menace" embodied in his opponent in a senatorial election. He knew otherwise. The man had done the same thing to his previous opponent, Horace Jeremiah Voorhis in his run for congressional representative.
An anti-communist? Why then would Nixon open the U.S. to trade with the Chinese Communists? Business here in the U.S. has sold out to China and the Communists that Nixon so scorned own a big piece of us.






