Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

Today we mark two related instances of political canine deflection, two American politicians

FDR and Richard Nixon who used stories about their dogs to help navigate political crises.

And they are related to each other.

So the first was in 1944 in a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in which he lashed out at his political critics, but tucked

into that speech was an anecdote about his dog, Fala, who had also received some criticism

in the press, and that funny and charming anecdote was actually

written with the help of Orson Wells believe it or not and it made the speech

into a hit and it in many ways put FDR back on solid political footing.

Now, cut to eight years later, or 50 some odd years in dog years.

And to the day, to the very day,

vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon is caught up in a

swirl of accusations of his own about improper campaign funding and he is at risk

actually of being dropped from the ticket by Eisenhower and he gives this long speech that includes a

charming anecdote about his dog checkers. This comes to be known actually as the

checkers speech it's one of the most significant in American

political history and it's one that kind of saved Nixon's career. So and

moreover you know there's obviously the relation between these two

speeches and the anecdotes about dogs but you could maybe even think of these two speeches

as a bracket of sorts in American political history.

The first signaling the height of FDR New Deal populism

...