Soft On Communism

In the item below we mentioned the local now pay-walled fish-wrap/cage-liner/dog-trainer & wished you luck w/ the link to one of their items. Speaking of almost literal devils, we then came upon the L.A. Times & The Nix:

The Nix w/ the microfilm from the pumpkin.
PHOTO COURTESY OF X-RAY DELTA ONE.

But all of Nixon’s youth, intellect, and energy—in particular a talent for debate—would not have been enough to defeat Jerry Voorhis, not even with Nixon’s willingness to hint that Voorhis harbored softness toward Soviet Communism. What helped most was the intercession of a newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

Today, you often hear the complaint that too many shouting, cable-enhanced voices have drowned out sensible political debate, and perhaps that’s true. One tends to forget, though, that newspapers like the Los Angeles Times had one voice—and that it overwhelmed all the others. That voice was shaped by the paper’s political editor, Kyle Palmer, an undersized, charming, and deeply partisan man who’d been with the newspaper since 1919. It is no exaggeration to say that Nixon, for all his vaunted antipathy to the press, owed his career to this single journalist and his paper.

[...]

By “we,” Palmer meant not only himself but the paper’s owners, the Chandler family, who likewise made no effort to hide their political leanings. When Nixon visited the Times, Palmer escorted him into publisher Norman Chandler’s office. “His forthrightness, and the way he spoke, made a deep impression upon me,” Chandler told Kornitzer, “and so—after Nixon departed—I told Mr. Palmer: ‘This young fellow makes sense. He looks like a comer. He has a lot of fight and fire. Let’s support him.’” Nixon was suitably appreciative: “After all, I was nothing at the time, a small-time lawyer just out of the Navy,” he told Kornitzer. “The support was tremendously important in assuring my nomination for Congress.”

A marriage made by Hell.