| Notes |
Helen Douglas and Richard Nixon had served two simultaneous terms in Congress from 1946 until 1950. He was the 37-year-old up-and-coming star in the increasingly reactionary national Republican Party. She was the Democratic Party’s bright and shining hope who, as one of the first women in the U.S. Senate, would be a powerful voice for an enlightened social policy. At the beginning, she was widely favored to win. But the “fifty campaign” would go down in American history as the dirtiest ever—the contest that historians and scholars have concluded was pivotal in gender politics.
Nixon had managed to gain the support of Rabbi Max John Merritt—a strong Jewish leader in Los Angeles—and with his endorsement came money from Hollywood tycoons and executives including Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures), and Darryl Zanuck (Twentieth Century-Fox). |