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A reporter from St. Louis passed on a tip that the governor was homosexual. Nixon insisted he would never use it. “Even if I thought there was anything to that story about Stevenson’s being a queer (which I don’t) I wouldn’t dream of allowing it to be used in the campaign,” Nixon wrote back. “This personal stuff (true or false) is below the belt.” But in early September, on a shakedown cruise of New England, Nixon made sport of Stevenson’s masculinity, labeling him “Sidesaddle Adlai” and snorting, “Let the other side serve up the clever quips which send the State Department cocktail set into gales of giggles.”*1
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John A. Farrell (Richard Nixon: The Life)