Oh, really? And here I always believed -- I guess because the MediaRats always said so -- that it was because Dicky Nixon was so mean to that nice socialist Congresswoman out in California.
Seems like Dick and Dutch struck a nerve, when they stomped on the Hollywood Reds. PBS was just going on and on last night about how much Arthur Miller (and everyone else) hated Elie Kazan, for talking to HUAC about some of his pink friends, like the odious Clifford Odets, notwithstanding that Kazan wasn't really forthcoming.
Nixon walked on the Constitution, but he was a great preceptor to the People in this, that he did it on a rug laid down by FDR, and he took the Imperial Presidency that liberal ideologues and theorists like Arthur Schlesinger and James Macgregor Burns had created out of thin air, and shoved it where the sun didn't shine -- hard.
At the end of the day, he made them work really hard to get into a snit about his bugging the Democratic National Committee, without the conversation's spilling over into LBJ's having done the exact same thing -- and far more damagingly, in terms of outcomes -- to Barry Goldwater in 1964.
He used their own precious imperial tools against them, and he made them work like the devil to catch him out, without exposing that they themselves had crafted and used these selfsame tools of shadow government.
I've heard this about Alger Hiss being the reason why people hated McCarthy and later, Nixon, but I guess I have no concept of why this would leave the leftists in such a foaming state of mind. Was Hiss like a movie star at the time? What about Hiss was so great that liberals would spend DECADES defending him, and trying to destroy people who were "mean" to him?