Target: The Issue

For more than two years. Democratic leaders have been agreed on the identity of the party's Political Enemy No. 1. It is Richard Nixon. Since Dwight Eisenhower's political armor is hard to pierce, it has been logical Democratic strategy to shoot at the second man. In mid-campaign, 1952, Democratic strategists thought they had downed their man--and the G.O.P. too--with their shouts about the "Nixon fund," but Nixon skillfully turned the attack to his and his party's advantage. Since then, Democratic leaders have watched Nixon's every move, ready to kick when the word was passed. Last week a new Democratic attack on Nixon was in full kick.

"Open Season." The new anti-Nixon movement was set off during last fall's campaign by Adlai Stevenson, who accused the Vice President of perpetrating "McCarthyism in a white collar." A week after the election, Steve Mitchell, then Democratic National Chairman, called upon Nixon to "retract and apologize for his campaign excesses." When Congress convened, House Speaker Sam Rayburn took up the cudgel, growled that Democrats "are not going to say that just because we do not like somebody politically he is soft on Communism." At a Democratic luncheon in Washington last week, Delaware's Freshman Representative Harris B. McDowell cried: "It's open season on the Vice President."

After that, Republican leaders decided that the attacks had become serious enough to return the fire. At his press conference, Dwight Eisenhower moved into the battle. When a reporter asked how he felt about the criticism of Nixon, Ike bridled slightly and asked a question of his own: Was the reporter's query based on what Nixon actually said or on what the critics said he said? The reporter replied that he was working from the critics' words, not from Nixon's deeds.

After establishing that point, the President went on: He had never heard of Nixon's making any sweeping condemnation of any party. The Vice President had talked about certain individual cases and the way they were handled administratively, had questioned good judgment, but not loyalty.

The record clearly supported the Eisenhower position. Even in his "Chamber of Smears," a display in Washington designed to dramatize the attack, Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler could actually show only scattered and minor references to the Vice President. Most of the space was devoted to local advertisements against Democratic candidates that had no connection with Nixon, e.g., a Wyoming ad that called U.S. Senator Joseph C. O'Mahoney "Foreign Agent 783" (because that was his number as a registered congressional lobbyist for Cuban sugar interests).

One Democratic exhibit blandly repeated an error that had been discovered and corrected last September. In a speech at Huron, S. Dak., Nixon had said that the Republican Administration was "kicking the Communists and fellow travelers and security risks out of the Government . . . by the thousands." An Associated Press dispatch misquoted Nixon, leaving out the phrase "fellow travelers and security risks." Although a tape recording proved what Nixon had said, the Democratic strategists are still using the erroneous dispatch.

Closed Cases. Throughout the campaign, Nixon hit the Democrats hard on the Communist issue. But he never adopted Joe McCarthy's line that the Democratic Party is the party of treason. Carefully pointing out that he was not charging disloyalty or treason, he made the very different charge that the Democratic Administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had, in some very important instances, failed to understand and to meet the threat of Communist subversion. To support his case, he could and did point to specific closed cases, e.g., Soviet Agent Harry Dexter White was permitted to build a whole cadre of followers in the U.S. Treasury despite repeated warnings from the FBI; Soviet Agent Alger Hiss, whom Nixon helped uncover, was unconscionably defended by Harry Truman and Dean Acheson.

The Democratic attack on Richard Nixon is not aimed primarily at the Vice President, although knocking him out politically would be a useful byproduct for the Democrats. What the party strategists are really trying to do, with help from Democratic-leaning reporters of the press and radio-TV, is to perform a quick rewrite of history. Before 1956, they want to erase the record of negligence in dealing with Communist subversion.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.