Checkers Speech - Legacy

Legacy

With The New York Times finding that Senator Nixon's performance had given the Republican ticket "a shot in the arm", Eisenhower and Nixon swept to victory in November, with the Republicans narrowly taking both Houses of Congress. According to Nixon biographer Conrad Black, the speech earned Nixon supporters throughout Middle America which he would keep through the rest of his life, and who would continue to defend him after his death. Critics, however, would later see the address as the "ultimate expression" of the controversial politician's "phoniness." Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose stated that part of Nixon's audience considered the address, "one of the most sickening, disgusting, maudlin performances ever experienced."

Nixon's address was an unprecedented demonstration of the power of television to galvanize large segments of the American people to act in a political campaign. However, the onslaught of negative media attention leading up to the address "left its scars" on Nixon, and the future President never returned to the easy relationship with the press that he had enjoyed during his congressional career. His oft-stated view that the media was the enemy came to play a part in his downfall.

Nixon celebrated the anniversary of the speech each year. The future President disliked the fact that the address soon became popularly known as the "Checkers speech." In his 1962 book, Six Crises (the Fund crisis being one of the six), he would object to the term, "as though the mention of my dog was the only thing that saved my political career." Nixon preferred to call the address "the Fund speech," and made it required reading for his speechwriters. As time passed, the Checkers speech became denigrated, and Nixon biographer Earl Mazo suggested that much of the attitude of "I don't like Nixon, but I don't know why," which contributed to the failure of his 1960 presidential run, can be traced to the Checkers speech. Other commentators suggested that had he not made the Checkers speech, Nixon might have won in 1960. Nixon retorted that without the Checkers speech, he would not have been around to run in 1960.

Checkers died in 1964 and is buried in Wantagh, New York, at Long Island's Bide-A-Wee Pet Cemetery. William Safire has described the adoption of "Checkers speech" as an idiom, used to refer to any emotionally charged speech by a politician.

Despite the many criticisms of the speech in later years, Hal Bochin (who wrote a book about Nixon's rhetoric) suggests that Nixon succeeded at the time because of his use of narrative, spinning a story which resonated with the public:

could identify with the materials of the story—the low-cost apartment, the struggle with the mortgage payment, the parental loans, the lack of life insurance on the wife and children, and even the wife's cloth coat. By reputation, Nixon was a political fighter and also a family man, and the public admired the father who would not give back the family dog "regardless of what they said about it."