Nixon's Congressional Voting Record

Opinion is divided about whether Nixon deliberately sought out HUAC membership. Wicker cites William Rogers, who was one of Nixon's secretaries of state, to the effect that the extremism and flamboyance of the leadership of HUAC did not help Nixon's reputation (Wicker, 1991, p. 49). Ambrose's view (1987, p. 152) is that, of all the people who served on HUAC, Nixon was the only member who was ever to "profit from his association with it." His early poverty had taught him that he needed to figure out an advantage in taking a political position. Wicker is inclined to the view that Nixon did not seek out but was offered HUAC membership, not only because of Nixon's assertion in his autobiography that the Speaker of the House urged him to get on it to "smarten it up" but also because Nixon limited his visibility in HUAC's high-profile and ul

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stricken childhood, Nixon was active in supporting the employer class rather than the working class where labor relations were concerned. According to Aitken (1993), Nixon's experience of his father's unsuccessful jobs kept him from opposing legitimate union rights, as many Republicans wanted to do. But he adopted the view that unions limited options of individual workers who were forced to strike by union leaders. Aitken says that Nixon wanted to find a way to "reduce industrial strife to a minimum" (1993, p. 134). The implication is that labor strife fostered by union challenges to management put livelihoods at risk, and living in the margins had been a common feature of Nixon's past. Therefore, Nixon voted for the Taft-Hartley Act, designed to gut the New Deal's 1935 Wagner Act. It did not outlaw unions, the original intent, but did outlaw closed shops, and provided that union shops had to be approved by a majority vote of the workers, and forbade unions to contribute to political campaigns. In addition, it required union officers to certify that they were not communists, It was made law in 1947 on an override of President Truman's veto, and Wicker assigns to Nixon a "minor, freshman's role" (p. 60) in helping the override. A
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