I’m starting to feel nostalgic about Richard Nixon. I never thought that would happen. But when I measure that guy against a lifelong grifter like Donald Trump, it’s an easy call.
Yesterday marked the 67th anniversary of what’s commonly known as “the Checkers speech” – the night in 1952 when Nixon, a young senator newly nominated as Dwight Eisenhower’s GOP running mate, bought 30 minutes of TV time to defend himself against corruption charges, and finished by declaring that his little dog Checkers, a gift from supporters, was staying in the family: “I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what (critics) say about it, we’re going to keep it.” The public’s positive response was so overwhelming that Ike, who’d been inclined to dump Nixon, had no choice but to keep him.
The address is remembered today as the first manifestation of TV’s power in the political realm; Nixon essentially went over Ike’s head (and the heads of Ike’s establishment Republican team) to appeal directly to the average voter. But another key aspect of this episode is typically overlooked: the trivial corruption charges that Nixon was compelled to refute. In fact, Nixon and his staffers, forever after, referred to this episode not as the “Checkers speech,” but as “the Fund speech.”
This is where my nostalgia kicks in.
Can you imagine, in today’s fetid political climate, that anyone would raise an eyebrow about Nixon’s so-called “secret” fund? Basically, 76 donors had put together some money – each donor, capped at $500 – to help Nixon pay some campaign expenses, like mailing Christmas cards to supporters. Despite the alarmist headline that accompanied the story in the liberal New York Post – “SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND KEEPS NIXON IN STYLE FAR BEYOND HIS SALARY” – the truth was this so-called scandal was small potatoes and the amount of money, even then, was chump change.
As journalist Garry Wills, the most assiduous student of this episode, wrote years later, “The story did not justify that sensational (headline), and neither did subsequent investigation. The fund was public, independently audited, earmarked for campaign expenses, and collected in small donations over two years by known Nixon campaign backers. It was neither illegal nor unethical.”
And yet, the news cycle churned with this story for nearly a week, and Eisenhower fanned it by declaring that he wanted a running mate who was “clean as a hound’s tooth.” Ponder that phrase for a moment, because it shows how far we’ve since fallen. Back then, it was deemed scandalous to have a national candidate whose campaign expenses had been paid by loyal donors. But in 2016, few seemed to know, or care to know, or if they knew they didn’t care, that the Republican presidential nominee’s track record featured (among other things) extensive ties to mob figures – including his first two business partners in Atlantic City.
Trump was mobbed up, as was his lawyer-consigliere, Roy Cohn, and he had a repugnant habit of stiffing the small business contractors who worked for him (as Hillary Clinton pointed out during the debates, to no avail). If you contrast those scandals (and dozens more) with the Nixon Fund, you’re quite likely to admire Nixon’s televised transparency. He didn’t falsely boast of being a huge financial success, the greatest, the best, the biggest. Quite the opposite, in fact:
“I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car. We have our furniture. We have no stocks and bonds of any type. We have no interest of any kind, direct or indirect, in any business. Now, that’s what we have. What do we owe? Well, in addition to (my) mortgage – the $20,000 mortgage on the house in Washington, the $10,000 one on the house in Whittier – I owe $4500 dollars to the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., with interest 4 and 1/2 percent. I owe $3500 to my parents, and the interest on that loan, which I pay regularly, because it’s the part of the savings they made through the years they were working so hard – I pay regularly 4 percent interest. And then I have a $500 dollar loan, which I have on my life insurance.
“Well, that’s about it. That’s what we have. And that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much. But Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she’d look good in anything.”
OK, maybe that last part was a tad corny. But 67 years ago last night, addressing 60 million viewers after the Milton Berle show, this was a guy of authentically modest means talking candidly in the wake of a bogus scandal. This was not a guy born to wealth, steeped in scandal, and repeatedly bailed from bankruptcy by a rich pop. Grading on a curve, Dick Nixon was definitely the good old days.
There’s one big caveat, of course. The Checkers episode fed Nixon’s instinctive belief that enemies were out to get him, and two decades later his paranoia consumed him. But in the immediate aftermath of Checkers, basking in public support for his vice presidential candidacy, he was ecstatic. At a stadium rally, he declared that “all you have got to do in this country of ours is just to tell the people the truth.”
If only Nixon had hewed to his own advice. The kind of advice that Donald Trump has never believed at all.