ould have required registration of communists and was connected with a bill, never introduced, to "outlaw the communist party altogether" (Wicker, 1991, p. 50). Ambrose says he distanced himself from that effort because he came to feel making political martyrs out of professed communists would not be useful. But Ambrose also cites Nixon's very public interrogation of Jack L. Warner, of Warner Bros. Studios, as well as his announcement of the contempt citations against the Hollywood Ten; in other words, Nixon did not abandon the headline-hunting HUAC in its Hollywood phase. Ambrose's long view of Nixon's membership in HUAC is that he "was something of a moderating influence" (1987), which is fair enough in view of the flamboyantly vulgar conduct of Thomas and other interlocutors of so many who were tarred with the brush of communist sympathy.
When viewed in terms of the prosecution Alger Hiss during his second term and the tenor of the senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, however, the weight of evidence seems on the side of the view that Nixon was not uncongenial to the idea of suppressing what he viewed as dangerously competitive poli
...