Lou Carrol, 83; Gave Nixon the Puppy Made Famous in the ‘Checkers Speech’

Lou Carrol was a traveling salesman living in a small town in Texas in July 1952 when he stopped in a late-night diner and read a newspaper article in which Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, expressed a desire to have a puppy for their two young daughters.

Carrol, a Republican, was an admirer of Nixon, then a senator from California who had been named Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential running mate. More significant, however, Carrol was the owner of a cocker spaniel named Boots, who had recently given birth to a large litter.

After reading the newspaper article, Carrol impulsively headed over to a nearby Western Union office and sent a telegram to Nixon’s office in Washington.

“On behalf of the great state of Texas, I wish to offer the Nixons a cocker spaniel puppy, purebred and registered,” Carrol recalled beginning his telegram.

The black-and-white-spotted puppy that he sent to the Nixons would be named Checkers.

“I had no idea she’d be such a big deal,” Carrol later told the Chicago Tribune.

Carrol, who earned a minor footnote in history as the man who gave Nixon the dog that the vice presidential candidate named in the historic speech that saved his political career in 1952, died of natural causes April 3 in Hoffman Estates, Ill., his family said. He was 83.

About a week after sending his telegram to Nixon’s office, Carrol and his first wife, Beatrice, received a letter from Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

“Sen. Nixon was leaving Washington today and asked me to acknowledge and thank you for your ... offering to send down a cocker spaniel puppy,” Woods wrote in the letter that Carrol kept framed in his den. “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.”

Carrol’s gift would have gone unnoticed if Nixon had not been accused that September of making personal use of an $18,000 fund contributed by his supporters in California -- a fund that Nixon said had been established for political expenses such as mailing and travel.

Many of Eisenhower’s advisors urged him to drop Nixon from the ticket, a view echoed in a number of newspaper editorials.

The beleaguered Nixon defended himself against the charges in a nationwide radio and television address broadcast from the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. In his speech he detailed his modest personal assets and debts.

“One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too,” Nixon told his millions of listeners. “We did get something, a gift, after the election” from a “man down in Texas.... You know what it was?”

“It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the 6-year-old, named it Checkers.

“And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

In response to what became known as Nixon’s “Checkers speech,” the Republican National Committee was swamped with telegrams and letters in support of Nixon.

And the day after the speech, a grinning Eisenhower met Nixon at the airport in Wheeling, W.Va., and told him, “You’re my boy!”

“If it hadn’t been for that broadcast, I never would have been around to run for the presidency,” Nixon wrote in his 1962 book “Six Crises.”

Tricia Nixon Cox said Wednesday that she was learning to play checkers when her family received the puppy and that when her father asked what the dog reminded her of, she responded, “Checkers.”

Although Lou Carrol turned up on the 1950s quiz shows “I’ve Got a Secret” and “What’s My Line,” he never received much publicity for his role in providing the sentimental element to Nixon’s career-saving speech.

“Nor was I seeking it,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 2002, the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s Checkers speech.

“It was just one of those things you do spontaneously,” Carrol said. “There’s a joy in doing that kind of thing.

“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.”

Checkers died in 1964.

Carrol, who was born in Lynn, Mass., and earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Indiana University, retired 10 years ago as senior executive vice president of sales for Lawson Products in Des Plaines, Ill.

He is survived by his wife Alice; two sons, Robert and Clark; a daughter, Lisa; a stepdaughter, Linda Ray; a brother, Arthur; and five grandchildren.