划词已开启6. Richard Nixon - Checkers
My Fellow Americans,
I come before you
tonight as a candidate for the Vice Presidency and as a man whose honesty
and integrity has been questioned.
Now, the usual political thing to do when
charges are made against you is to either ignore
them or to deny them without giving details. I believe we've had enough of that
in the United States, particularly with the present
Administration in Washington, D.C. To me the office of
the Vice Presidency of the United States is a great office, and I feel
that the people have got to have confidence in
the integrity of the men who run for that office and who might obtain
it.
I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or to an
honest misunderstanding of the facts is to
tell the truth. And that's why I'm here tonight. I want to tell you
my side of the case. I'm sure that you
have read the charge, and you've heard it, that
I, Senator Nixon, took 18,000 dollars from a group of my supporters.
Now, was that wrong? And let me say that it was wrong.
I'm saying, incidentally, that it was
wrong, not just illegal, because it isn't a question of whether it was legal or illegal, that
isn't enough. The question is, was it morally wrong? I say that it was morally wrong if
any of that 18,000 dollars went to Senator Nixon, for my personal use. I say that it was morally
wrong if it was secretly given and secretly handled. And I say that it was morally wrong if any
of the contributors got special favors for the contributions that they made.
And now to answer those questions let
me say this: Not one cent of the 18,000 dollars or any
other money of that type ever went to
me for my personal use. Every penny of it was used to
pay for political expenses that I did not think should be charged to
the taxpayers of the United States. It was not a secret
fund.
As a matter of fact, when
I was on "Meet the Press" some
of you may have seen it last Sunday Peter
Edson came up to me after the program, and he
said, "Dick, what about
this "fund" we hear about?" And I said, "Well, there's no
secret about
it. Go out and see Dana Smith who was the administrator of the fund." And I gave him
[Edson] his [Smith's] address. And I said you will
find that the purpose of the fund simply was to defray political
expenses that I did not feel should be charged to
the Government.
