Tricky Dick Nixon, Walter Cronkite, and CBS
Television: A New Tennessee Williams Letter
Given his bohemian, peripatetic lifestyle, Tennessee Williams has rarely
been tagged as a popular commentator on, or even participant, in American
presidential elections. In a brief essay entitled “Facts About Me,” Williams
asserted that he “had no acquaintance with political and social dialectics. If you
ask what my politics are, I am a Humanitarian” (66). In fact, he voted in just one
U.S. presidential election, casting his ballot in 1932 for Norman Thomas, the
Socialist candidate who was as much of as an outcast from center stage politics
as were Williams and his disruptive plays. Yet Williams nurtured a contempt for
one of America’s most vilified presidents—Richard Milhouse Nixon—that
extended over four decades. Williams’s comments in his correspondence,
including a new letter published for the first time later in this article, his
interviews, and notebooks helped to contribute to the popular canon of Nixon
phobia.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Nixon was a California
congressman and then a senator serving on the House Un-American Activities
Committee, chaired by Eugene McCarthy, the inquisitorial senator from
Wisconsin, he attracted Williams’s derision for his role in the Alger Hiss case
and, no doubt, for his purging of Williams’s friends in the theatre, including his
longtime director, Elia Kazan, and fellow playwright, Arthur Miller. In a letter
dated August 23, 1952, to Kazan, Williams was outraged that Time magazine
had put Nixon on their cover: “They are taking the gloves off. The Divine Nixon
is on the cover! He looks like the gradeschool bully that used to wait for me
behind a broken fence and twist my ear to make me say obscene
things . . . Jesus, what’s going on?! Nixon has also come out for McCarthy! Will
support his candidacy without necessarily endorsing all his views and says
Eisenhower will, too. We must get to the States for this election, Brother..
(qt. in Notebooks, 558). At the time, Kazan and Williams were in Germany
preparing for the opening of Camino Real (1953), perhaps Williams’s most
revolutionary play. Needless to say, Williams did not come back to the States to
cast his vote against the “Divine Nixon” and the Republican Party. In a letter of
October 8, 1952, to Gilbert Maxwell, Williams claimed a standing membership
in the “Nix on Nixon Club” (Selected Letters 453).
Nixon remained Williams’s bete noir. After winning a second term for the
presidency, Nixon again harassed Williams’s correspondence. In a November
10, 1972, letter to his confidante and self-proclaimed executrix, the Countess
Maria St. Just, Williams satirically compared Nixon’s political tricks and
posturing with those of his younger brother Dakin, who at the time was running
for a U.S. senate.