campaign, and stating that any impression that Douglas was pro-communist was justified by her record. He said Douglas was part of a whispering campaign accusing him of being "anti-Semitic and Jim Crow". In his 1978 memoirs, he stated that "Helen Douglas lost the election because the voters of California in 1950 were not prepared to elect as their senator anyone with a left-wing voting record or anyone they perceived as being soft on or naive about communism." He indicated that Douglas faced difficulties in the campaign because of her gender, but that her "fatal disadvantage lay in her record and in her views". History and legend Contemporary accounts ascribed the result to a number of causes. Douglas friend and former Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes blamed Roosevelt's weak candidacy and what he believed was Nixon's use of the red scare. Supervisor John Anson Ford of Los Angeles County chalked up the result to Nixon's skill as a speaker and a lack of objective reporting by the press. Douglas's campaign treasurer, Alvin Meyers, stated that while labor financed Douglas's campaign, it failed to vote for her, and blamed the Truman Administration for "dumping" her. Douglas's San Diego campaign manager claimed that 500,000 people in San Diego and Los Angeles had received anonymous phone calls alleging Douglas was a communist, though he could not name anyone who had received such a call. Time magazine wrote that Nixon triumphed "by making the Administration's failures in Asia his major issue". As Nixon continued his political rise and then moved towards his downfall, the 1950 race increasingly took on sinister tones. According to Nixon biographer Earl Mazo, "Nothing in the litany of reprehensible conduct charged against Nixon, the campaigner, has been cited more often than the tactics by which he defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas for senator." Douglas friend and McGovern campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz, in his 1973 biography, Perfectly Clear: Nixon from Whittier to Watergate, focused on the race and the Pink Sheet, and alleged that Nixon never won a free election, that is, one without "major fraud". Historian Ingrid Scobie came to a different conclusion in her biography of Douglas, Center Stage. Scobie concluded that, given voter attitudes at the time, no woman could have won that race. Scobie stated that Nixon's tactics, which used voter anger at communists, contributed to the magnitude of Douglas's defeat, as did the fragmentation of the California