The Pink Lady' by Sally Denton

Richard Nixon could have ended the offer Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate, but a biography shows that happened to carry the torch on behalf of many progressive programs.
By Tim Rutten

It's funny how history often leaves us a legacy to the legendary figures devoid of personality.

Helen Gahagan Douglas, once a champion of progressive politics in California and a stalwart of the Congress of New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, is a name. To the extent that is now remembered, is the victim of Richard M. Nixon 's notoriously dirty 1950 campaign for U.S. state Senate seats.

"Sally Denton The Pink Lady: The Life of Helen Gahagan Douglas" does an admirable job, although sometimes unnecessarily breath to restore beef and tendons of a remarkable woman and political figure, which stands as a kind of archetype of the day Hollywood celebrities are involved today.

Douglas was born at the turn of the century and died in 1980. He was raised in New York the daughter of wealth and privilege who challenged his domineering father, but loving and gave up a promising academic career of a successful career as an actress on Broadway and, later, as an opera singer in Europe. After the 1929 crisis, Americans returned to the stage and met and married American actor Melvyn Douglas.

As a strong supporter of the New Deal, Gahagan Douglas became one of the close friends of Eleanor Roosevelt, and was elected as the second representative of the Congress of California women. In Washington, he became not only a confidant of the two Roosevelts, but also the lover of a rise and Democratic congressman from Texas named Lyndon Johnson.

In 1950, against all advice serious, Douglas decided to run for U.S. Senate against GOP Rep. lifting fierce youth with a taste for red-baiting. Nixon and his political mentor, Murray Chotin, turned the campaign into a virtual compendium of dirty tricks, causing not only unfounded fears about the loyalty of Douglas, but also anti-Semitism, because her husband was Jewish.

What ultimately redeems "The Pink Lady", as the biography is the compelling narrative propulsion of Denton and obvious affection by the author that his protagonist, however allows a series of miniatures sentimental. Thus: "Helen and Melvyn rarely saw each other during his years as a congressman, though often talked on the phone - more about politics and the logistics of raising emotions. His departure - or agreement - it seemed more serious concern Melvyn what Helen did. "I miss his intelligence, his quiet understanding," she wrote, "and I miss him, too, the sense and the ceaseless noise that sometimes disrupt the atmosphere. It all adds up to a piece of my existence that is irreplaceable. ""

There is real pathos there, and real pride here:

"In the 1940s, when gold Gahagan Douglas of the New Deal was outmoded, and his quixotic idealism was too loud for the new era of pragmatism. Happily not respond to the changing mood of America, which increasingly looked like a caricature of an earlier era, an ideologue of the celebrity who had lost his bond with the approval of his mentor and protector, the FDR. Accustomed to eating at the highest levels of government, was relegated to the periphery of political influence. Despite that seemed oblivious to reality, despite their struggle for independence, much of their power has actually been obtained from the men in her life - her father, Melvyn, FDR and Lyndon B. Johnson. With all gone [of life], who had lost their land. "

Denton is also astute enough to note the factor of class that Greg Mitchell noted in his account of the 1950 Senate campaign, "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady." Chotin worked to change, not just against the firm of Nixon-communism with liberalism Douglas suddenly suspect, but also the difference between Pat Nixon and Democratic candidate - "housewife professional scratch off. While Pat was the mistress house par excellence, keeping the fires burning for the family, Helen was the ruthless elite who had abandoned her children and husband in their ambition, tomboy and grab for power. "

As Mitchell notes, "the rich of Douglas, the husband of famous Jews rarely around at least one of the boys always seemed to be away at camp or throughout the country, and his elegant home in the hills does not reflect life middle class. Richard Nixon, by contrast, had everything, at least in terms of voter identification: a first home in a community of all Americans, a Protestant Irish woman usually quite at her side when she I was cooking and sewing and home care and their two lovely daughters near. "

Red-bait, a virulently partisan and pro-Republican media darling thoroughbred channel policy Nixon played a role in the defeat of Douglas, as the popular historical memory still recalls stereotyped. So did an emerging middle class of postwar California, whose members imagined for themselves a life very similar to what Nixon and his handlers planned. Finally, the Democratic domestic policy could not have been more complex or unruly.

Sheridan H. Downey, Sen. Douglas decided to challenge state's primaries, was a former follower of Upton Sinclair that I slowly drift to the right: He ultimately withdrew, and adopted a third candidate, the editor of Los Angeles Daily News. Central Valley, which had been a stronghold of the New Deal, was divided by the complex issues of land and water. Douglas broke into a dispute with the construction trades, a powerful part of the basis of manpower for the Democrats. The statewide Democratic ticket that year was headed by James Roosevelt, who ran for governor against Earl Warren, one of the most popular politicians in California history. Roosevelt, moreover, was rejected by the national party establishment because it was part of a "dump Harry Truman's" effort at the national convention before.

Douglas, in other words, entered into a wall of political buzz saws, and one of them happened to have control of 20th century masters of American politics "of dirty tricks - Nixon, operating in a climate of suspicion and resentment as to the extent of his predilections. He was a man, especially at this stage, who never went to the jugular, when a low blow was available.

Speaking of punches below the belt, for an author so concerned about the consequences of Denton innuendo as it is, it is arrogant in the recycling of almost all waste from ever loose talk circulated of organized crime high level of participation in The Angeles and Hollywood, political and economic affairs during the 1950s. Thus, the alleged ties Paul Ziffren late Chicago mob repeated as fact, as is the role of fixer Sidney Korshak as a mafia / labor. Prison Gangster Mickey Cohen boasts of how he and Meyer Lansky helped finance the 1950 Nixon campaign also accepted as fact.

It is very colorful and black humor Los Angeles, but no journalist stream of consciousness has always justified none of it - all the assumptions and the police despite the FBI's investigation. The only issue more exaggerated than the mob and its influence is the average man's sex life.