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</div><div><div style="font-size: small;"><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style=""><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In 1946, a popular, liberal, five-term congressman from Southern California, Jerry Voorhis, was running for reelection against a political unknown—a 33-year-old former Navy logistics officer named Richard Milhous Nixon.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Voorhis had explicitly rejected the endorsement of any group that didn’t disavow communism. But Nixon, onstage in a debate in South Pasadena, thunderously brandished at him a piece of paper that supposedly contained an endorsement by a Communist-infiltrated group. Nixon followed this up with a well-financed advertising campaign darkly hinting at more of the same. He pulled off a stunning upset on Election Day and quickly gained a seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Nixon went on to run for the US Senate in California in 1950, against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, it was on a wave of flamboyant Red-baiting. Workers from Nixon’s phone banks called hundreds of thousands of registered voters, asked if they knew that Douglas was a Communist, and then hung up. White voters received postcards from a nonexistent Communist League of Negro Women, saying, “Vote for Helen for Senator.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under sunny skies at a Douglas campaign rally of 5,000 people in Long Beach’s Bixby Park, with Eleanor Roosevelt speaking, Douglas supporters noticed people passing out leaflets on pink paper that accused their candidate of sinister Communist ties. Nixon claimed that his opponent—who, he noted, was married to Jewish actor Melvyn Douglas—was “pink right down to her underwear.” The “pink sheets” helped defeat Douglas, and two years later Sen. Nixon was elected vice president.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What remains in Van Deman’s well-expurgated files shows few traces of his aiding candidates for elective office—something that would have been illegal for a man whose clerical help was provided by the US Army. Nonetheless, several clues in the 97 boxes suggest that the general played a role in Nixon’s rise to power. The ambitious young politician had been no stranger to Van Deman. He had ties to the general’s protégé, Combs, and had been a featured speaker at a conference that Combs and Van Deman had helped organize in 1948 of state Legislature Red-hunters from around the country. </font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Van Deman’s files hold hints of the help he provided Nixon. One is a photograph of a Nixon campaign event where a demonstrator opposing the candidate is identified by one of Van Deman’s trademark code numbers. Another is an agent’s report with a revealingly hostile reference to Nixon’s adversary: “A few more Helen Gahagan Douglas’s and the left-wing congressmen will be prying open the most secret records of the federal security agencies.” Finally, Van Deman’s spies had long been collecting damaging information on Douglas’s actor husband: Agent B-11 listed him, for example, as a supporter of efforts to send bandages and clothing to victims of the Spanish Civil War, and another report identified him as part of a group of Hollywood luminaries supporting striking lettuce pickers.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">California Democrats later charged that some of the scurrilous material in the Nixon campaign’s “pink sheets” against Douglas had come from Van Deman. When these accusations were renewed after Nixon became president, unnamed White House officials queried by the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New</em> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">York</em> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Times</em> did not deny the charge. They said only that it was no longer “pertinent.” But for Van Deman to help Nixon at this ruthless stage of his ascent toward the nation’s highest office was highly pertinent. Ironically, the blueprint for the Watergate scandal that finally forced the 37th president to resign could have been taken from Van Deman’s own life’s work: a black-bag job, a secret search for information about political enemies, a mania for surveillance.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; box-sizing: border-box; width: 631.797px; flex: 1 0 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today all of us leave behind so many electronic traces that spying is both easier and more complex than it was in the days of Van Deman’s agents stealing papers out of a car trunk. But there is still a dark thread that stretches back across generations. The general, happily, never reached the White House. But someone who recently did was helped by the release of information pilfered from the opposing political party, and then built a presidency on a way of thinking very similar to Van Deman’s, from suspicion of immigrants to a fondness for conspiracy theories to treating wild rumor as fact. Donald Trump probably never heard of Ralph Van Deman, but one person knew them both: Richard Nixon, a man who, according to Trump, “always wanted me to run for office.” Nixon and Van Deman both would now be smiling.</font></p></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div></div><div><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/how-a-young-army-officer-built-americas-empire-of-paranoia-with-torture-surveillance-and-85000-index-cards/">http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/how-a-young-army-officer-built-americas-empire-of-paranoia-with-torture-surveillance-and-85000-index-cards/</a></div><div></div>