September 23, 1952: Richard Nixon's "Checkers Speech"

September 23, 1952: Senator Richard Nixon of California, the Republican Party's nominee for Vice President, has been accused of receiving a personal use fund of $18,000 – about $200,000 in 2022 money. (My, how quaint it now sounds.) But since the Republicans have been hammering the Democratic Party over the issue of "corruption," Nixon and their Presidential nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, look like massive hypocrites, and it's hurting them.

Nixon had been elected to Congress in 1946, from Orange County, California, to the east of Los Angeles, already becoming one of the most conservative places in the country. The local Republican Party wanted someone to defeat Jerry Voorhis, a 10-year Congressman loyal to the New Deal of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And, like so many other newly-elected Congressmen that year, including John F. Kennedy in Massachusetts, he was a veteran of World War II. He accused Voorhis of being a Communist sympathizer, which was a lie, but it worked, and he won.

In 1948, Nixon was on the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated former State Department official Alger Hiss for espionage, but could only charge him with perjury because the statute of limitations had run out. Nixon wanted the public, viewing Congressional hearings on television for the first time, to believe he had real a microfilm that had become known as "The Pumpkin Papers." But the tide was turning in America, and, had that microfilm been released before the Presidential election, it likely would have meant the defeat of President Harry Truman and the win of Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York.

In 1950, Nixon tried to get promoted to the Senate, as did another Representative, former actress Helen Gahagan Douglas. Since Communists were "Reds" and Communist sympathizers were "pinks" or "pinkos," Nixon's campaign released "the Pink Sheet," detailing all of Douglas' left-wing associations. He even said something that wouldn't have been allowed in movies at the time, due to the Hays Code: "She's pink, right down to her underwear."

The Douglas campaign struck back, claiming he was a tool of California's archconservative newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times and The Oakland Tribune. An editorial cartoon showed the publishers of those papers operating Nixon like a marionette. (The San Francisco Examiner, as then run by William Randolph Hearst, could also have been so accused.) It didn't work: He won in a landslide, with 59 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, she gave him the nickname that stuck to him for the rest of his life: "Tricky Dick."

At the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Eisenhower, the great hero of World War II, was nominated for President, a nominating process then controlled by the GOP's Eastern liberal elites. But the Party's conservatives, based in the Midwest and the West, tired of losing under Eastern liberal elites like Wendell Willkie (1940, from a small town in Indiana but known as a "Wall Street lawyer") and Dewey (1944 and 1948, from a farm in Michigan but a New York politician), demanded an archconservative running mate. And so Nixon, only 39 years old, was the choice.

It seemed like a bad choice on September 19, when the New York Post -- now an archconservative paper, but, up until the mid-1970s, known as a paper for liberal intellectuals -- blasted a headline about a "Secret Nixon Fund!" which kept him in a lifestyle his Senatorial salary could not afford.

This is the best picture that I could find of the headline.

Outgoing President Truman, speaking for the Democrats, said, "This will help us, but I'm sorry to see it happen, for it lowers public opinion of politics." But the response from their nominee to succeed Truman, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, was weak: "Condemnation without all the evidence, a practice all too familiar with us, would be wrong."

Letters and telegrams -- the latter being faster than regular mail but slower than 21st Century emails -- came to the Republican National Committee, demanding that Nixon be dropped from the ticket. After 20 years of Democratic Presidents FDR and Truman, Eisenhower was expected to easily defeat the Democratic ticket of Stevenson and his Vice Presidential nominee, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. And it was also expected to sweep the GOP into control of both houses of Congress. But now, Nixon's presence on the ticket was putting all of that in jeopardy.

So the RNC bought a half-hour block of national television time on NBC, spending $75,000 – over 4 times the cost of the fund – to allow Nixon to explain himself. They rented what was then named the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles.

He laid out what he and his wife Pat had, in terms of bank accounts and assets, and what they owed, proving that, contrary to the general image of Republicans -- and to the fact that Stevenson was from a wealthy family, including his grandfather and namesake, who was Vice President under Grover Cleveland from 1893 to 1897 -- they were not rich, and never had been.

In a nod to a recent scandal that involved campaign donors giving Democratic politicians mink coats to give to their wives, Nixon said, "Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat." And then, Nixon mentioned a gift:

One other thing I probably should tell you, because, if I don't, they'll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it.

(At this line, Nixon choked up a little.) You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he'd sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it "Checkers."

And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

Richard Nixon, holding Checkers

It just so happened that this speech came 8 years to the day after FDR delivered a speech defending "my little dog, Fala." His wife, Eleanor, had inherited Fala, who died earlier in 1952. Perhaps Nixon saw a mention of the Fala speech in a newspaper. Or, maybe another Republican did, and thought that mentioning the greatest Democratic President's dog would get the Democrats' goat.

Having defended himself, Nixon then went into full attack mode, and assailed the Democrats, including Truman, Stevenson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whom the Republicans directly blamed for "losing China":

I think the only man that can save America at this time is the man that's running for President, on my ticket: Dwight Eisenhower. You say, "Why do I think it is in danger?" And I say, look at the record. Seven years of the Truman-Acheson Administration, and what's happened? Six hundred million people lost to the Communists. And a war in Korea in which we have lost 117,000 American casualties.

And I say to all of you that a policy that results in the loss of 600 million people to the Communists, and a war which cost us 117,000 American casualties, isn't good enough for America. And I say that those in the State Department that made the mistakes which caused that war, and which resulted in those losses, should be kicked out of the State Department just as fast as we get them out of there.

And let me say that I know Mr. Stevenson won't do that, because he defends the Truman policy. And I know that Dwight Eisenhower will do that, and that he will give America the leadership that it needs.

Take the problem of corruption. You've read about "the mess in Washington." Mr. Stevenson can't clean it up, because he was picked by the man, Truman, under whose Administration the mess was made. You wouldn't trust the man who made the mess to clean it up. That's Truman. And, by the same token, you can't trust the man who was picked by the man that made the mess to clean it up. And that's Stevenson.

And so I say, Eisenhower, who owed nothing to Truman, nothing to the big city bosses -- he is the man that can clean up the mess in Washington.

It became known as the Checkers Speech, although Nixon always called it "The Fund Speech" in his various books. He closed with this:

And now, finally, I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign. Let me say this: I don't believe that I ought to quit, because I am not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat's not a quitter. After all, her name was Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick's Day, and you know the Irish never quit. (Nixon was also of Irish descent.)

But the decision, my friends, is not mine. I would do nothing that would harm the possibilities of Dwight Eisenhower to become President of the United States. And, for that reason, I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight, through this television broadcast, the decision which it is theirs to make. Let them decide whether my position on the ticket will help or hurt. And I am going to ask you to help them decide. Wire and write the Republican National Committee whether you think I should stay on or whether I should get off. And whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.

Nixon asked viewers to contact the RNC -- not Eisenhower himself, or his campaign staff. That infuriated Eisenhower. But the contacts to the RNC came in 10 to 1 in Nixon's favor. So, the next time they saw each other, late that night, Ike said to him, "Dick, you're my boy!"

Nixon stayed on the ticket. As it turned out, his presence had no effect on the election at all. Eisenhower won in a landslide. On January 20, 1953, 11 days after his 40th birthday, Richard Milhous Nixon was sworn in as Vice President of the United States.

Checkers lived until 1964, never making it to the White House with Nixon when he finally got there in 1968-69. Television saved Nixon's career in 1952, stopped it short in 1960, seemed to end it with his "last press conference" in 1962, revived it in 1968, ended it in 1974, buried his historical reputation with his interviews with David Frost in 1977, and, try as he might, he couldn't use it to save his reputation by the time he died in 1994.

Every so often, after this, we would hear that there was a "New Nixon," one who was not a vicious partisan attack dog. It always turned out to be a hoax. In 1968, his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, brought up the occasional references to "The New Nixon," and said, "My fellow Americans, anybody who has had his political face lifted that often can't possibly be very new."

After losing the 1960 Presidential election, Nixon set about writing a book about his political experience thus far. He titled it Six Crises, and listed the Checkers/Fund Speech as one of them, along with the Alger Hiss case, President Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, his troubled 1958 tour of South America, his 1959 "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita Khrushchev, and his defeat to Kennedy.

The El Capitan Theatre opened in 1927, under the name The Hollywood Playhouse, with a seating capacity of 1,500 that has always been maintained. At the time of the Checkers Speech, it was owned by NBC, and was the filming location for The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Lawrence Welk Show, which switched to ABC in 1955; the game show Truth Or Consequences, which launched host Bob Barker to stardom; and one of the earliest TV reality shows, This Is Your Life.

ABC bought the building in 1963, and renamed it The Hollywood Palace, broadcasting a variety show of the same title there from 1964 to 1970, a taped, West Coast, Saturday night counteroffer to CBS' live, New York-based, Sunday night Ed Sullivan Show. ABC moved Welk's show back to the building, but sold the building in 1978. On August 6, 1996, The Ramones played what turned out to be their last show there.

Since 2004, the theater has operated as a dance club under the name Avalon Hollywood. It is at 1735 N. Vine Street, across from the Capitol Records Tower, 1 block from the famous corner of Hollywood & Vine, and 10 blocks east on Hollywood Boulevard from Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

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September 23, 1952 was a Tuesday. Jim Morrison was born that day. No, not the lead singer for The Doors. This Jim Morrison was a major league infielder, usually a backup, from 1977 to 1988. Also born that day was major league pitcher Dennis Lamp. And this was the day that Rocky Marciano won the Heavyweight Championship of the World, knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott. I have a separate entry for that event.

Only 10 Major League Baseball teams were in action that day:

* A doubleheader was split at Ebbets Field. The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Phillies in the opener, 5-4. Johnny Rutheford outpitched Karl Drews. George "Shotgun" Shuba hit a home run. This game clinched the National League Pennant for "Dem Bums."

The Phillies won the nightcap, 1-0. Billy Loes pitched 10 shutout innings, and Curt Simmons pitched 11. Johnny Wyrostek doubled home Eddie Waitkus in the top of the 12th, making a winning pitcher out of Kent Peterson, and a losing pitcher out of Jim Hughes.

In the 1st game, Jackie Robinson went 1-for-4 with an RBI; and Duke Snider went 1-for-3 with a walk and 2 RBIs. Both went 0-for-1 in the 2nd game, and then were rested the rest of the way.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Washington Senators, 4-3 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Cleveland Indians, 10-1 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

* The St. Louis Browns beat the Detroit Tigers, 3-1 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (It was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.)

* And the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Stan Musial doubled home the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning.