Checkers: The Dog That Answered a Corruption Charge

In September 1952, eight weeks before the election, the New York Post reported that Richard Nixon, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had a secret fund of eighteen thousand dollars maintained by California businessmen. Eisenhower's staff considered dropping him from the ticket.

Nixon bought half an hour of national television time and, on 23 September, delivered a speech from the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles to an audience estimated at sixty million people — at that point the largest television audience in history.

The speech does contain a defense of the fund, including a detailed personal financial statement: what he earned, what he owed, the mortgages on two houses, a 1950 Oldsmobile, no stocks or bonds, a two-year-old Airedale. He states that his wife Pat does not have a mink coat but does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.

And then the passage that named it. A man in Texas had heard that the Nixon girls wanted a dog and had sent one, a black and white cocker spaniel, and his six-year-old daughter Tricia had named it Checkers. And regardless of what they say about it, he was going to keep it.

The financial disclosure was not what worked. What worked was the shift in what the audience was doing.

An accusation of financial impropriety invites analytical evaluation: was the fund proper, who gave, what did they get. Nixon replaced that task with a different one — assessment of a person — by supplying domestic, specific, self-deprecating detail of the kind you would only know about someone you knew.

Horton and Wohl's account of parasocial interaction describes what television does with material like this: it produces the sensation of a personal relationship with someone who cannot see you. A viewer who feels they know Nixon then applies the halo effect of chapter 11 — warmth generalizes into an assessment of honesty that the disclosed figures never established.

The close converted feeling into action. Nixon asked viewers to write or wire the Republican National Committee with their view on whether he should stay. Hundreds of thousands did, overwhelmingly in his favor.

That request is chapter 3's mechanism. A person who has sent a telegram supporting Nixon has taken a public position, and the position then has to be defended. Eisenhower kept him on the ticket, and the fund itself was never seriously examined again.