re: #259 Dark_Falcon

I think some of it was the legacy of his VP run in 1952 having almost been derailed over allegations of a “secret slush fund”. What made that so bad was that even after forensic accountants proven Nixon hadn’t done anything wrong, the press, smelling blood, largely ignored the accountants report and kept right on hammering Nixon. Nixon went into the TV speech he gave on the topic knowing he had to hit the ball out of the park or Eisenhower was going to drop him from the ticket.

Nixon did in fact hit a home run with the speech that entered history as the “Checkers Speech” and was able to silence the untrue allegations and become Vice President. But the memory of how he was gone after seems to have stayed fairly raw.

The Checkers Speech entered history as a hilarious theatrical feature after Watergate. Unadulterated.