70 Years Ago Today: Richard Nixon Delivers Checkers Speech and Saves His Place as Ike’s Running Mate.

It seems crude by today’s standards, but no one had delivered a speech like it before 1952. Mr. Nixon knew how to modulate, divert and attack. He was also a master of posing a question and then answering it to his advantage.

Nixon sounds defiant notes throughout the speech, but he wavered in the days before he delivered it. Pat Nixon bucked up her husband’s fighting spiriting by reminding him of the consequences of quitting the ticket and slinking away.

Nixon had been in politics for just six years when Dwight Eisenhower picked him as his running mate. When he finished, Nixon thought the speech was a failure. “Nixon soon learned that he was wrong,” according to biography John A. Farrell. “He learned it from the teary eyes of the cameraman on the set, and the awe in the voice of the who wiped away his makeup. He learned it from the cheers of the loyalists on the sidewalk, from an adoring crowd that now filled his hotel lobby, and reports of swamped switchboards and overwhelmed telegraph lines all over the country.” The speech attracted the largest television audience to that time.

The response to the Checkers speech caused Nixon to conclude he had mastered the medium. Eight years later, television would be his undoing when he hobbled into a television studio to face John F. Kennedy.

Published September 23, 2022.