Checkers speech forever changed U.S. political landscape, Texas pair

TV appearance that saved Nixon's spot on Ike's ticket given 50 years ago

She taught music. He was a traveling salesman. They never gained much fame. But, with help from their cocker spaniel Boots, they may have changed the course of history.

Had Beatrice Carrol not been hired to teach piano at a women’s college in Texas, had Lou Carrol not picked up a paper to read during a lonely dinner on the road, had Boots not been paired up with a stud named Ace and given birth to a litter of black and white cockers two months before the Republican National Convention in 1952, Richard Nixon it could be argued might never have been president.

It was the Carrols who gave the Nixon family the puppy they would name Checkers.

And it was Checkers who provided the sentimental hook in a speech that helped the then-U.S. senator from California secure his role as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate.

Nixon’s “Fund Speech,” better known as his Checkers speech given 50 years ago on Sept. 23, 1952 was historic on several levels. It was the first time a politician, bypassing news organizations, made a direct appeal to the public on television. The speech was watched by the largest audience television had ever amassed. And, most historians now agree, it resulted in Eisenhower turning around a decision to remove Nixon from the ticket.

But like so much else when it comes to the man who would later serve as the nation’s 37th president, the Checkers story is full of contradictions and Nixonian equivocations.

Nixon barely knew the dog when he gave the speech. He implied she was a surprise when, in fact, his staff had known about the planned gift for more than a month. And he confused the sex the dog was female but he called her a male.

Those discrepancies granted, not as alarming as an 18 1/2-minute gap on a White House tape recording never received the kind of scrutiny that Nixon would in 1974, when the Watergate scandal and investigation led to his resignation as president.

For Lou Carrol, “that whole Watergate mess” made for some uncomfortable times, as well. While he had remained in relative obscurity, while he had never boasted about his gift to Nixon, he became after that hesitant to mention it at all.

To this day, few know he is the “man down in Texas” Nixon referred to in the speech.

“It was just one of those things you do spontaneously. There’s a joy in doing that kind of thing,” he said. “Every time I’d see those children those pictures of them and the dog and how happy they looked it put a smile on my face.”

Traced to Texas

They were newlyweds when they moved to Texas in 1950, both recent graduates of Indiana University, she with a master’s in music and piano, he with a business degree.

When she got offered her first job teaching piano at what is now known as the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Tex. he lined up a sales job that allowed him to be based there, as district manager for a company that sold chairs, desks and school supplies.

Belton, a small town about 60 miles north of Austin, seemed almost foreign. “I had never experienced Southern Baptists,” said Beatrice Carrol, recalling that students at the school weren’t allowed to swim or dance in mixed company.

After arriving in Belton, the Carrols decided to get a dog, partly because Louis was frequently on the road. He wanted a good watchdog. She wanted a cocker spaniel. Boots turned out to be both.

A little more than a year later, they took Boots to a breeder. She gave birth, that June, to a litter Bea says eight puppies, Lou says nine. That summer, Beatrice, pregnant with their first son, cared for the pups while Louis was on sales trips.

On one such trip that July, Lou was in Tyler, Tex., when he picked up a newspaper and read an interview with Pat Nixon, whose husband had earlier that month been chosen as Eisenhower’s running mate. In the interview, Pat was quoted as saying she wanted to get a dog for their two young daughters, Tricia and Julie.

For Louis Carrol, the inspiration was instant.

“Back in those days they still had Western Union,” he recalls. “So I marched on over to Western Union and wrote a telegram. …”

“‘On behalf of the great state of Texas, I wish to offer the Nixons a cocker spaniel puppy, purebred and registered,'” Carrol said, recalling the message.

“And I sent it on its way to Richard Nixon in the Senate.”

It was dated July 22, 1952.

When he got back home, he told his wife an independent voter what he had done. “My reaction was disbelief, just absolute disbelief,” she says.

Offer accepted

About a week later, the Carrols received a letter from Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who would become famous more than two decades later for erasing crucial portions of the Watergate tapes.

“Dear Mr. Carrol,” reads the letter, dated July 26 and now framed and hanging on Carrol’s wall. “Senator Nixon was leaving Washington today and asked me to acknowledge and thank you for your offering to send down a cocker spaniel puppy. The senator had been planning to buy a puppy for the little girls and they were particularly fond of cocker spaniels. I know therefore they will be delighted to receive this puppy.”

She asked Carrol to have the puppy delivered after Sept. 1, when the Nixons would be back in Washington.

The trouble began on Sept. 18, 1952, while Nixon was on a whistle-stop train trip, chugging from California to Oregon.

On that day, newspapers around the country carried a story alleging Nixon was making personal use of an $18,000 fund established for office and campaign expenses.

The charge was all the more embarrassing because Eisenhower and Nixon were campaigning to clean up corruption in the Truman administration. With just six weeks remaining until the election, most of Eisenhower’s advisers wanted Nixon off the ticket. Newspaper editorials urged the same.

Taking it to the people

Nixon decided television was his only chance going not to the news media, but around it.

With the Republican National Committee and other campaign committees footing the $75,000 bill, a half-hour of time was purchased and plans were made to broadcast the speech from NBC’s El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles.

Flying from Portland, Ore., to Los Angeles, Nixon took some postcards from the seat pouch in front of him and began putting down his thoughts. “I remembered the Truman scandal concerning a $9,000 mink coat given to a White House secretary, and I made a note that Pat had no mink just a cloth coat,” Nixon would later write in “RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon.”

“I also thought about the stunning success FDR had in his speech during the 1944 campaign when he had ridiculed his critics by saying they were even attacking his little dog Fala (Republicans alleged Franklin Roosevelt, on a trip to the Aleutian Islands, had sent a destroyer to pick up the dog.) I knew it would infuriate my critics if I could turn this particular table on them.”

He made a note to mention that they had received a gift Checkers and that they planned to keep the dog.

Nixon worked on the speech late into the night. On Sept. 23, an hour before he was to leave for the theater, he received a call from Thomas E. Dewey, former presidential candidate and Eisenhower confidant. Dewey said that Eisenhower’s top advisers wanted him to submit his resignation at the end of the speech. Then he asked Nixon what he planned to do.

Nixon slammed the telephone down, but not before saying this: “Just tell them that I haven’t the slightest idea what I am going to do, and if they want to find out they’d better listen to the broadcast. And tell them I do know something about politics, too,” he wrote in his memoirs.

On the air

In the studio, Nixon turned to Pat and, his voice breaking, said, “I just don’t think I can go through with this one.”

“Of course you can,” Pat answered, taking his hand and walking him to the stage.

He talked about the charges, described his meager beginnings and his military service. He outlined his financial worth his mortgages, his $15,000 salary, his 1950 Oldsmobile and, armed with a just-completed audit and legal review, assured Americans he had neither violated any laws, nor profited personally from the fund.

“I should say this,” he added, “that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.”

Then came the real kicker.

There was “one other thing,” he said. The Nixons did get a gift from “a man down in Texas” a cocker spaniel, and Tricia had 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 him.”

A ‘clever’ maneuver

Beatrice Carrol watched the speech in Indiana, on her parent’s snowy black-and-white television, her mouth dropping open when she heard mention of the dog. “It was like, ‘What? Oh my goodness!’ “

“Let’s put it this way: I never had the admiration for him that my ex-husband did. But I did think they were picking on him at the time. He was very clever about bringing the dog into the picture.”

Sixty million other Americans watched as well.

When it was over, Nixon felt he he had flubbed it “I loused it up,” he said especially the ending. Time had run out while he was still talking.

He left the studio and, slumped in the back of his car, spotted an Irish setter barking on the pavement. “Well,” he said to Pat, “we made a hit in the dog world, anyway.”

Widespread backing

Nixon didn’t know it, but humans had eaten it up. The Republican National Committee received 160,000 telegrams and 250,000 letters backing Nixon by a margin of 350 to 1, according to Jonathan Aitken’s “Nixon, A Life.” That night, though, a dejected Nixon, having not heard from Eisenhower, called Woods into his room and dictated his resignation. She typed it, according to Nixon’s “Memoirs,” and showed it to Nixon’s political consultant, who read it and ripped it up.

Later that night, an Eisenhower aide called to tell Nixon he needn’t worry.

The Carrols continued their nondescript middle class life and eventually went their separate ways. Louis, 79, worked for Lawson Products for 33 years and retired in 1996 as an executive vice president of sales. Remarried and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he lives in Barrington, Ill., a Chicago suburb. Beatrice, 75, lives in Bloomington, Ind.