Dr. Frank Kingdon, chairman of the policy committee of the National Citizens Political Action Committee, announced that the PAC would back candidates in 99 house races and 23-24 Senate races. Kingdon was president of the University of Newark, a former minister and protege of Reinhold Niebuhr and a radio commentator, His announcement came after a luncheon meeting of the committee attended by members from 13 states at the Hotel Commodore in New York. Two US Senate candidates from North Dakota, one of whom was running in a special election to succeed a Democrat who had died, and the other challenging a Republican incumbent in November, attended.
In a response to a question, Kingdon said the PAC would support candidates of either party who were for the policies of President Roosevelt but that they were not ready to support a third party. The reporters also wanted to know where the PAC stood in the upcoming Senate race in New York. Kingdon answered that the PAC supported the incumbent Mead but that if he decided to run for governor instead of returning to the Senate, the committee viewed several candidates favorably, including former governor Herbert H. Lehman; former mayor Fiorello La Guardia; Henry Morgenthau Jr, the former Secretary of the Treasury; public housing advocate and department store heir Nathan Straus; Henry Epstein, the former New York solicitor general; and Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. They would gladly include Eleanor Roosevelt on the list but understood she was not available for nomination.
Kingdon was also asked about his reaction to a comment made by Attorney General Tom C. Clarke that the PAC should rid itself of radicals. Dr. Kingdon said that it depended on the meaning of radical and that the PAC wanted to keep as members those who sought to go to the root of the problem. The National Citizens Political Action Committee had been formed as a parallel organization to the CIO PAC, which represented the interests of its affiliated unions, and it had ties in New York to the American Labor Party. It was meant as an alliance of non-union members who supported unions with advocates of racial equality and other New Dea supportersl, to work together with the labor unions as a liberal counterbalance in the Democratic Party to the Southern segregationists and big city political machines. For the most part, its members were liberal Democrats and Socialists. But the PAC allowed Communists, fellow travelers and sympathizers to participate. Although Communist Party members constituted a small minority, thanks to party discipline and organization they had considerable influence, often working covertly. The other problem was that their participation made the PAC a target for Right Wingers, like an ambitious young congressional candidate in California named Richard Nixon, who used the involvement of the Communists to tar the candidates that the PAC supported. In the 1946 elections support by the PAC became an albatross rather than an asset in many races, although Truman's growing unpopularity by election time was an even bigger problem for Democratic candidates. The Republicans, despite offering no coherent policies of their own, swept to victory in most races, including the New York Senate race where former governor Lehman, the eventual candidate, was trounced by moderate Republican Irving Ives. Lehman would be elected to the Senate in a special election in 1949.
In the post-war years the divide would deepen in the non-Communist Left between those who were willing to work with Communists on common causes and those who distrusted the motivation and tactics of the Communists and wanted them purged from all progressive organizations. As one of the latter group said, the problem with the "united front "was that it was more of a front than it was united. The Communist Party formed alliances when they were expedient and quickly dropped them when they were not. This dispute would weaken the liberals in years to come even as the American Communist Party dwindled to irrelevancy except in the eyes of the Right Wing.
Kingdon himself would get caught in the middle of this game. Earlier he had served as president of the Union for Democratic Action, the forerunner of Americans For Democratic Action, an alliance of the non-Communist Left. He would split with the UDA over his support of working with the Communists on common causes. He spoke out against the constitutionality of the HUAC witch hunts, as did the ADA despite its vigorous anti-Communism, and criticized the FBI, which previously had cleared him of having Communist Party affiliation or sympathies. This opened him up to Right Wing attacks that lost him his radio job in 1947 when his advertisers bolted. He initially went along with other PAC leaders in the formation of the Progressive Party and initially supported Henry Wallace's candidacy for president in 1948. He withdrew his support before the election, accusing the Progressive Party and the Wallace campaign of being under the control of the Communists. He subsequently found himself a target of attacks from both the Right and the pro-Stalin Left and he was no longer trusted by the anti-Communist Left, which viewed him as an apostate for his previous actions.