Occasional contributor Bill Katz coments on the news of the day at Urgent Agenda, though he continues to save some of his deepest relections on life and politics for us. Bill wrote for us most recently about Hollywood justice, Hollywood being the place where he spent a part of his career working for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Today Bill takes a look back at Richard Nixon's famous Checkers speech.

Much mocked for its bathos, the speech is something of a tour de force. With his political future on the line and with nearly 50 percent of the 1952 viewing audience looking on, Nixon spoke for thirty minutes in an empty NBC studio from five pages of notes sketched out on a legal pad. Even critics of Nixon such as Garry Wills, who devotes a chapter to the speech in Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, pay tribute to the speech's shrewd jousting with Eisenhower to stay on the ticket. The jousting with Eisenhower is part of the inside story of the speech. In his account below, Bill captures "the outside story."

It’s an American ritual – the explanatory speech. A politician gets in a jam, then makes a speech “explaining” why he’s in said jam, why it’s all so unfair, and how the wife and the kids are suffering. He then graciously takes "full" responsibility for his actions, and says that it’s time to move on to more important issues.

Barack Obama recently gave an explanatory speech about his foul-mouthed pastor, and it was certainly one of the smoother ones I’ve heard. Not better, just smoother.

In my lifetime there've been several major explanatory speeches. Before Obama's there was John F. Kennedy's speech to the Houston ministers in 1960, explaining his Catholicism, and Bill Clinton's 1998 speech, explaining the way he mentored young interns. But the first, the gold standard, the model for all that came after, was, of course, Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, delivered during the 1952 presidential campaign. Ah, those were the days. A guy could cry his heart out on national TV, and there weren't any late-night comics to ruin the effect. I thought it would be interesting to reexamine that speech, in light of Obama's effort a few weeks back.

Nixon, a U.S. senator from California, had just been chosen as the Republican vice presidential candidate by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Within a few days, though, a story appeared in the then-liberal New York Post under the headline, "Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary."

It was a bombshell. Eisenhower was running on his integrity. He couldn't very well have a bribe taker on his ticket. Top strategists told him to dump Nixon.

Nixon, though, decided to take his case directly to the American people through the new medium of television. As his wife, Pat, looked on with the required pride that would become standard issue on these occasions, Nixon addressed the nation on September 23, 1952. The speech saved his career. Americans, including a young me, watched salvation occur on 10- and 12-inch black-and-white TVs, from brands like DuMont, Admiral, and Philco.

It's easy to squirm when watching the speech today. But in 1952 it was an act of genius. There had never been anything like it. It was theater, and the star knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote the script.

Nixon had one great advantage going in: He looked ordinary. I recall the grainy image of this weary-looking man, with a five-o'clock shadow, asking us to give him a break. Later in his career he spoke of his ordinariness, saying that when Americans looked at Jack Kennedy they saw what they wanted to be, but when they looked at him, they saw what they were. On that night in 1952, they saw a man much like themselves, and they felt for him.

The first part of "Checkers" was, in fact, pretty routine. Nixon described the charge, and responded:

"I am sure that you have read the charges, and you have heard it, that I, Senator Nixon, took $18,000 from a group of my supporters."

He explained:

"Not a cent of the $18,000 or any other money of that type ever went to me for my personal use. Every penny of it was used to pay for political expenses that I did not think should be charged to the taxpayers of the United States."

That was the heart of Nixon's defense. He also said that contributors were given no favors:

"I just don't believe in that, and I can say that never, while I have been in the Senate of the United States, as far as the people that contributed to this fund are concerned, have I made a telephone call to an agency, nor have I gone down to an agency on their behalf."

And then something happened. The whole tone of the speech changed…with a single question. How, Nixon asked, does a man on a senator's salary (then $15,000 a year)pay for his political expenses? He answered: "The first way is to be a rich man. So I couldn't use that."

Now the speech was suddenly about Nixon – not a candidate, a politician, but your friend and neighbor, trying to make ends meet. It got better: "Another way that is used is to put your wife on the payroll." But, he said:

"I have found that there are so many deserving stenographers and secretaries in Washington that needed the work that I just didn't feel it was right to put my wife on the pay roll -- my wife sitting over there.

"She is a wonderful stenographer. She used to teach stenography and she used to teach shorthand in high school. That was when I met her."

To me, that was the most important moment of the speech, maybe of Nixon's early career. People today may not appreciate what the words "stenography" and "shorthand" meant in 1952. Women who had to work to help support their families often became stenographers or secretaries. They took shorthand in high school. No, Pat didn't teach some high-toned stuff like English literature. Pat taught those working-class girls their shorthand. Pat knows you. She's one of you. We are you. That was the key to the speech. "Stenography" and "shorthand" were the first notches in that key.

Talk of the charges against him receded. This was pure Nixon:

"And so now, what I am going to do -- and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics -- I am going at this time to give to this television and radio audience, a complete financial history, everything I have earned, everything I have spent and everything I own, and I want you to know the facts."

And that's exactly what he did. It was humiliating:

"I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car. We have our furniture. we have no stocks and bonds of any type. We have no interest, direct or indirect, in any business. Now that is what we have. What do we owe?

"Well, in addition to the mortgages, the $20,000 mortgage on the house in Washington and the $10,000 mortgage on the house in Whittier, I owe $4,000 to the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. with an interest at 4 percent.

"I owe $3,500 to my parents, and the interest on that loan, which I pay regularly, because it is a 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 loan, which I have on my life insurance."

It worked. It worked because Nixon was everyman in trouble. It worked because the things he revealed that night weren't extraordinary, they were common. The part of the address that gave the speech its name followed the theme of "I am you":

"One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don't they will 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 that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and, believe it or not, the day we left before 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. You know what it was?

"It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had 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, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it."

All together now: Squirm.

But read those words, put yourself in 1952, and realize why Richard Nixon survived, and why Eisenhower said to him after the speech, "You're my boy."

Checkers, who died in 1964, is buried on Long Island, in New York. People still plant American flags at the dog's tombstone. After all, he helped save a senator and launch a presidency.

Posted by Scott at 6:07 AM  |    |