Almost as soon as I left San Francisco I realized that I did not have a recent photograph of Pat to carry with me. I wrote to her and she went to a portrait studio and had one taken. I was happy when it arrived, but it made the separation even more painful for me.
I was assigned to the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command at Nouméa on the island of New Caledonia. We were officially known as SCAT from our initials. Our unit was responsible for preparing manifests and flight plans for C-47 cargo and transport planes as they flew from island to island. The planes brought supplies in and flew the wounded out. We would unload the boxes and crates of supplies and then carefully carry aboard the stretchers of the critically wounded.
Like many assigned “down the line,” I wanted to get where the action was, and I spent a lot of my time trying to get a battle-station assignment. Finally, in January 1944, I was assigned to Bougainville, which was a target for occasional Japanese bomber attacks. Shortly after I arrived, the Japanese staged an assault. When it was over, we counted thirty-five shell holes within a hundred feet of the air raid bunker six of us shared. Our tent had been completely destroyed.
Many fighter and bomber pilots came through Bougainville on their way to battle missions, and I felt that they deserved the best we could possibly give them. I used my SCAT resources to get small supplies of chopped meat and beer. Everyone in the unit had a nickname, and I was known as Nick Nixon. Whenever I received a fresh shipment, I opened “Nick’s Hamburger Stand” and served a free hamburger and a bottle of Australian beer to flight crews who probably had not tasted anything to remind them of home in many weeks.
After serving on Bougainville, I requested and received an assignment as officer in charge of the SCAT detachment that was to support the invasion of Green Island. We landed in the bay in a PBY seaplane. The Japanese had already retreated, however, and the only danger came from a few straggling snipers and the ever-present giant centipedes.
The Seabees immediately went to work constructing an airstrip. A few days before it was completed, an Army B-29 bomber that had been seriously damaged flying over Rabaul had to use it for a crash landing even though some of the Seabees’ equipment was still standing on it. It was dusk, almost dark, and we all cheered as the plane came in on its belly. Then we watched in horror as it crashed head-on into a bulldozer and exploded. The carnage was terrible. I can still see the wedding ring on the charred hand of one of the crewmen when I carried his body from the twisted wreckage.
My poker playing during this time has been somewhat exaggerated in terms of both my skill and my winnings. In Whittier any kind of gambling had been anathema to me as a Quaker. But the pressures of wartime, and the even more oppressive monotony, made it an irresistible diversion. I found playing poker instructive as well as entertaining and profitable. I learned that the people who have the cards are usually the ones who talk the least and the softest; those who are bluffing tend to talk loudly and give themselves away. One night in a stud poker game, with an ace in the hole, I drew a royal flush in diamonds. The odds against this are about 650,000 to 1, and I was naturally excited. But I played it with a true poker face, and won a substantial pot.
It was a lonely war for most of the men in the South Pacific, filled with seemingly interminable periods of waiting while the action unfolded thousands of miles away. We devoured the copies of Life magazine that filtered through to us, and, as much out of boredom as out of piety, I read and reread the old illustrated Bible that I had brought with me. Letters from home were the only thing we really had to look forward to, and I wrote to Pat every day during the fourteen months I was away. She has kept all those letters to this day.
When I was on Green Island I met Charles Lindbergh, who was flying combat missions testing new planes for the Air Force. The CO invited me to a small dinner in Lindbergh’s honor, but I had to decline because a month before I had agreed to host a poker game. Today it seems incredible to me that I passed up an opportunity to have dinner with Charles Lindbergh because of a card game. But in the intense loneliness and boredom of the South Pacific our poker games were more than idle pastimes, and the etiquette surrounding them was taken very seriously. A quarter of a century later I was able to rectify this error when Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh accepted our invitation to attend a state dinner at the White House.
In July 1944 my overseas tour of duty was completed and I was ordered back to the States. I caught a cargo plane from Guadalcanal to Hawaii, and when we made a fueling stop at Wake Island in the middle of the night I got out to stretch my legs. For the first time I saw one of our war cemeteries. I shall never forget those white crosses, row after row after row of them, beginning at the edge of the runway and stretching out into the darkness on that tiny island so far away from home. I thought of all the men who were still out there fighting for these little bits of unfriendly and often barren ground, and I wondered, as I often had before, why Americans or the Japanese thought they were worth fighting and dying for. Of course, I knew that they were the essential stepping-stones for bringing the war home to Japan, and that we had to capture them just as the enemy had to defend them. But standing on Wake, waiting for the plane to be refueled, I was overcome with the ultimate futility of war and the terrible reality of the loss that lies behind it.
CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR
1947–1952
As soon as I reached San Diego I phoned Pat, and she flew down from San Francisco, where, during my time overseas, she had been working as a price analyst for the OPA. I was at the airport gate waiting for her. She wore a bright red dress, and when she saw me standing there her eyes lighted up, and she ran to the barrier and threw her arms around me.
Although I was home now, I was still in the Navy. In January 1945 I received orders to go East to work on Navy contract terminations. During these last months of the war and the first months of peace we lived in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore.
Those were momentous times for Americans. In April Pat and I were in Bookbinders Restaurant in Philadelphia when our waiter came over and said he had just heard on the radio that FDR had died. Like everyone else, we were shocked and saddened by the news. A month later the war in Europe was over, and we saw the newsreels of Soviet and American troops shaking hands at the Elbe. In August Pat and I joined the throng in Times Square to celebrate V-J Day.
RUNNING FOR CONGRESS: 1946
Pat was expecting our first child, and now that the war was over we began to think seriously about what I should do in civilian life. The answer came in September in the form of a letter I received in Baltimore from Herman Perry. Manager of the Bank of America’s Whittier branch, Perry was one of the community’s Republican leaders. He had been a classmate of my mother’s at Whittier College and was an old family friend. His letter was to the point:
Dear Dick:
I am writing you this short note to ask if you would like to be a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946.
Jerry Voorhis expects to run—registration is about 50–50. The Republicans are gaining.
Please airmail me your reply if you are interested.
Yours very truly,
H. L. Perry
P.S. Are you a registered voter in California?
Perry knew of my interest in politics from our discussions before the war about my running for the state assembly. But in 1941 I had been a newly married young lawyer just starting a career; in 1946 I would be a demobilized Navy lieutenant commander with a wife and child. It was clear that if I were to go after the congressional nomination seriously, it would require my full-time effort and attention. Pat and I would have to be able to support ourselves and finance the campaign at least until the primary in June. If I won the nomination, we could count on campaign funds from the party organization, although we would still have to pay all our personal expenses. With my pay, Pat’s salary, and my poker winnings, we had managed to save $10,000 during the war. We had planned to use it to buy a house. Pat was
dubious about spending our savings on what was at best a risky political campaign. But the more we thought about the possibility of returning to Washington as a congressional family, the more enthusiastic we became.
Two days later I called Perry and said that I was honored by his letter and excited by the prospect of running for Congress. When I told him that I could be in California to begin campaigning by the first of the year, he poured some cold water on my enthusiasm by saying that the nomination was not his to offer. He had written to me on behalf of a candidate search committee, known as the Committee of 100, established by the Twelfth District’s Republican leaders to try to find someone who had a chance of beating Voorhis. He felt that if I were interested I would have a good chance, but the committee would probably interview several other candidates before deciding which one to endorse.
The next morning I wrote Perry a letter confirming my interest. I added: “I feel very strongly that Jerry Voorhis can be beaten, and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at him. An aggressive, vigorous campaign on a platform of practical liberalism should be the antidote the people have been looking for to take the place of Voorhis’s particular brand of New Deal idealism. My brief experience in Washington with the bureaucrats and my three and a half years in the Navy have given me a pretty good idea of what a mess things are in Washington.”
I flew back to Whittier for the Committee of 100 dinner meeting at the William Penn Hotel on November 2, 1945. The group’s search had produced six prospective candidates, and each of us was to make a speech describing the reasons for his candidacy. I wore my Navy uniform; I didn’t own a civilian suit.
Since I drew the lot as last speaker on a long program, I decided that brevity would be as much appreciated as eloquence. In the first speech of my political career I described my view of the two conflicting opinions about the nature of the American system.
One advocated by the New Deal is government control in regulating our lives. The other calls for individual freedom and all that initiative can produce.
I hold with the latter viewpoint. I believe the returning veterans, and I have talked to many of them in the foxholes, will not be satisfied with a dole or a government handout. They want a respectable job in private industry where they will be recognized for what they produce, or they want the opportunity to start their own business.
If the choice of this committee comes to me I will be prepared to put on an aggressive and vigorous campaign on a platform of practical liberalism and with your help I feel very strongly that the present incumbent can be defeated.
I returned to Baltimore to wait for the committee’s decision. It was after two o’clock in the morning on November 29 when the phone rang in our apartment. Roy Day, a member of the committee, shouted into the phone, “Dick, the nomination’s yours!” I had received sixty-three votes. My closest competitor, Sam Gist, a furniture store owner from Pomona, received twelve.
While I was waiting to be discharged from the Navy I began a crash course in politics and public affairs. Each night when I got home from work I pored over magazines, newspapers, and books about Congress and campaigns. I wrote to House Minority Leader Joe Martin, introducing myself as the prospective Republican nominee for the Twelfth District, and I visited him in his office in the Capitol. I talked with several Republican congressmen, seeking their evaluations of Voorhis. Through the Republican Campaign Committee I obtained his complete voting record, and I spent several days familiarizing myself with it. By the time of my discharge and return to California in January, I was confident that I knew Voorhis’s record as well as he did himself. As it turned out, I knew it even better.
In the initial meetings with my campaign advisers, we agreed that the first thing I had to do was to become known throughout the district. While I was well known in the Whittier area, I was a stranger in all the other towns.
We began holding a series of “house meetings” in which Republican supporters would open up their houses to as many—or as few—of their friends and neighbors as were interested in coming to meet me. Over tea and coffee, I made brief remarks and then answered questions. These house meetings permitted me to meet hundreds of voters and helped me to enlist the women volunteers whose dedicated work is so important to any campaign. They also let me know what was really on the minds of the voters.
Pat was my best helper. Very soon after Tricia was born on February 21, she volunteered her time for typing press releases, mailing pamphlets, and keeping track of my schedule. She went to many of the house meetings with me and afterward gave thoughtful and sometimes quite persistent critiques of my performances.
Primary day was June 4. At that time California law permitted cross-filing, which meant that a candidate could enter the primaries of both parties. Thus the primary served as a trial heat for the later general election. Voorhis and I took advantage of this, and each of us was on the ballot as a candidate for both the Republican and Democratic nominations. When the votes were counted, each of us, as expected, had won the nomination of his own party. But in the combined vote totals, he had beaten me by about 7,500 votes. I knew I faced an uphill fight if I were to defeat him in November.
I was disappointed at not having done better, but I considered it significant and promising that this was Voorhis’s weakest primary showing since 1936. The Twelfth District was basically conservative and Republican, and I was confident that we could recapture it if we could just maintain the intensity of the primary campaign right through the general election in November. “All we need,” I wrote to Roy Day, now a key campaign adviser, “is a win complex and we’ll take him in November.”
The greatest advantage I had in 1946 was that the national trend that year was Republican. People were tired of the privations and shortages of four years of war, and in the burst of postwar prosperity they were beginning to bridle against the governmental regulations and interference that were written into so much of the New Deal legislation. In the Twelfth District, as in many others across the country, returning veterans could not find homes at prices or rents they could afford; many could not find housing at all. The shortage of consumer goods was exacerbated by the many long strikes in 1946, and prices skyrocketed as a result. Some butcher shops in the district put signs in the window: “No meat today? Ask your congressman.” My ads asked: “Are you satisfied with present conditions? Can you buy meat, a new car, a refrigerator, clothes you need? A vote for Nixon is a vote for change. Where are all those new houses you were promised? A vote for Nixon is a vote for change.” The nationwide Republican campaign slogan in 1946 was, “HAD ENOUGH?” And the answer from the voters was clearly going to be a resounding “Yes!”
In anticipation of a Republican landslide, many Democrats tried to dissociate themselves from their party, and some even campaigned as critics of Truman and his policies. But Jerry Voorhis was far enough to the left of Truman that this was one problem I did not have to worry about.
Shortly before the campaign officially began in September, I received a request from a group called the Independent Voters of South Pasadena to participate in a debate with Voorhis. Most of my advisers were dubious about the idea, especially after they discovered that the Independent Voters group consisted predominantly of New Deal liberals. I felt, however, that as a challenger I could hardly turn down an invitation to debate my opponent.
As it turned out, the debate was not really a debate at all. It was more a joint public meeting in which each of us made an opening statement and then responded to questions from the floor. Voorhis spoke first in a rambling, discursive way about the nature of the executive–legislative relationship and the need for progressive legislation. He defended the record of the Truman administration. In my opening statement I made a hard attack on the bureaucratic red tape and bungling involved in the meat and housing shortages, and I called for strong action to prevent more of the strikes and labor disputes that had been hurting the economy so badly.
In the question period we were allotted th
ree minutes for each answer. I tried to give brisk, concise responses, but Voorhis had trouble keeping within the time limit. There was one question, however, to which he had no trouble giving a short answer. He was asked whether he had once been a registered Socialist. He answered that he had, but only in the 1920s and during the early years of the Depression, when he felt that the two major parties weren’t doing the job.
Then one of my supporters asked Voorhis to explain his “peculiar ideas about money”—a reference to his pet ideas on monetary reform, which had been known as his “funny money” program ever since he presented it in his book Out of Debt, Out of Danger. His colleagues in Congress had not been able to understand his program, and neither could the voters in Pasadena that night.
When it was my turn, one of Voorhis’s supporters accused me of making false charges against Voorhis by claiming that he had been endorsed by the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. This question opened what became—at least after the fact—the most famous and controversial issue of the 1946 campaign.
The PAC had been established as a political arm of organized labor to support Franklin Roosevelt in the 1944 election. A sister organization, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), was set up to permit non-union participation. Until his death, labor leader Sidney Hillman served as chairman of both groups, and many other leaders of CIO-PAC also served on NCPAC. Both groups interviewed candidates and then made funds and campaign workers available to those whom they endorsed. It was estimated that in 1944 the two PAC organizations contributed over $650,000 to political campaigns. Although the leadership of both groups was non-Communist, the organizations were known to be infiltrated with Communists and fellow travelers who, because of their discipline, wielded an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Such influence was viewed as a problem because there was an emerging concern about Soviet postwar intentions and a corresponding apprehension about the communist movement in America.
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