Twenty years before Watergate, then-Sen. Richard Nixon’s national political ambitions were in peril. He was accused of dipping into a private, $18,000 slush fund to cover expenses, and doubts about the propriety of his conduct intensified as the 1952 presidential election campaign unfolded.

Nixon was able to preserve what became a long career in national politics – and kept the vice presidential spot on that year’s Republican national ticket – with a talk on television and radio in which Checkers, his family’s cocker spaniel, figured memorably.

What is known as Nixon’s “Checkers” speech was without precedent, and it came at a moment when television was just beginning to have an impact on American political life.

Although popular memory of the speech has faded, the episode offers a reminder, perhaps loosely relevant these days to President Joe Biden, about how political firestorms – and demands that a controversial candidate quit a national party ticket – can in some circumstances be neutralized.

The “Checkers” case is also a reminder that a whiff of scandal isn’t necessarily destructive to a political campaign.

The 1952 Republican ticket, led by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, won a 39-state landslide over the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. The sweep of the Eisenhower-Nixon victory was an outcome no pollster had anticipated, as I note in my 2024 book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”

But a Republican victory hardly seemed assured in mid-September 1952, when the New York Post reported that Nixon, then 39, had benefited from a private fund set up by supporters to cover expenses incurred as a U.S. senator from California.

The then-liberal Post said the fund was supported by a “millionaire’s club” of Californians and was “devoted exclusively to the financial comfort of Sen. Nixon.” The nest egg allowed Nixon to live in style well beyond what a senator’s salary – $12,500 annually, or about $145,000 these days – could support, the Post alleged.

Nixon was caught unawares and denied wrongdoing. He was slow to realize that the Post’s disclosure........

© The Conversation