Going to the Dogs : Presidents Have Long Played the Canine Card

Has any election analyst yet analyzed that the President might simply have misplayed the canine card?

After all, dogs had rescued faltering campaigns twice before. Once by a Republican dog, Checkers, once by a Democrat, Fala. Canine fealty is nonpartisan.

But Millie never had a chance.

Look back. What the President said on Oct. 29 was, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos.”

Inevitably, the next day’s headlines gave the play to the bozos--Bill Clinton and Al Gore--instead of the dog. Either the spin doctors had barked up the wrong tree or, more likely, the candidate had stepped on his own line. Either way, Millie’s big opportunity in the course of human events went down the tube.

By contrast, recall how Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Fala’s help and a gift for sarcasm, pulled his 1944 campaign out of a tailspin.

Amid, a great war, Roosevelt’s strategy for election to a fourth term had been to appear presidential, indispensable, above partisan politics. It wasn’t working well. Voters were whispering about his health, especially when his doctor, after an examination, artlessly noted “no unusual abnormalities.” The polls began to tilt toward his robust opponent, 42-year-old Thomas Dewey.

But FDR was well enough for a tour of Pacific bases aboard a Navy cruiser. One stop was at Adak Island in the Aleutians.

On his return home, a new rumor arose. It claimed that after departing Adak FDR discovered that Fala had been left behind. Whereupon, went the reports, he ordered a destroyer to steam out and fetch the dog. Rather indulgent, to say the least, of the leader of a nation called to sacrifice; the alleged taxpayer expense increased with each retelling.

In a speech Sept. 23 at a Washington hotel, FDR struck back.

“These Republican leaders,” he intoned, his expression somber, his voice dripping with regretful indignation, “have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or my sons.” Pause. “No,” he continued, “not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.”

Now that’s how to play the canine card, as if trumping an ace, not a glancing reference in a throwaway sentence. Then he squeezed it for all it was worth:

“Well, of course I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.

“You know, Fala’s Scotch and, being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers . . . had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the taxpayers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 million--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.”

The voters chuckled. The President won. Fala outlived his master and is buried near the foot of his grave at Hyde Park.

The lesson was not lost on Richard M. Nixon. His own effort, known in political folklore as the Checkers speech, matched with schmaltz what the Fala speech accomplished with wit. Both worked. Which proves the versatility of what may be christened the political doctrine of Carpe Canem: seize the dog.

In 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower, campaigning against “corruption in government,” promised, with unforeseen irony, an Administration “as clean as a hound’s tooth.”

So the campaign was practically derailed when it came out on Sept. 18, 1952, that his running mate, Nixon, had received $18,000 from a group of rich Californians to help him make ends meet as a senator. An outcry arose in both parties: Dump Dick.

Nixon turned to television to plead his case for staying on the ticket. It was the first year of the new medium’s use in a presidential election and a foretaste of TV’s power.

In a half-hour performance, Nixon acknowledged that the fund existed but said the donors had asked no favors and had not obligated him in any way. Though not quite as forceful as his later “I am not a crook,” it meant the same.

(Well, outgoing President Eisenhower’s 1960 reference to incoming President John F. Kennedy as a “young whippersnapper” didn’t quite come up to “bozos” either, but those were kinder, gentler times.)

Nixon, his voice choked, told a dramatic story of his life, how he had helped his hard-working parents in the family grocery, had struggled and sacrificed through his early years of marriage. He followed with a list of meager possessions made possible by the secret fund, such as his 1950 Olds and his wife Pat’s “respectable Republican cloth coat.”

Then the climax. He had also accepted as a gift, he said, a little cocker spaniel, Checkers. He hoped the politicians wouldn’t attack him for that. “The kids, all the kids, love the dog . . . and regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”

He asked his listeners to let the Republican National Committee know by wire whether he should quit the ticket or stay on “until we drive the crooks and the communists and those that defend them out of Washington.”

A million responded. Nixon flew the next day to Washington and Ike greeted him: “Dick, you’re my boy!”

Dogs, it seems, can affect not only election returns but also those approval-disapproval ratings that presidents track almost as devotedly. If dogs can get politicians out of the doghouse they can also get them in it.

Lyndon B. Johnson found that out one day when he playfully seized his pet beagle--Him or Her, one of the two--by the ears and lifted. Carpe Canem should not be taken literally. News photographers caught him in the act and a nation of dog lovers yelped louder than the dog.

Johnson finally redeemed himself with the dog lobby when he took in a stray his daughter had found abandoned at a filling station in Austin, Tex. The President allowed the mutt, Yuki, to snooze under the table at Cabinet meetings.

Politicians, as politicians will, appear to have turned inside out that old adage, “Love me, love my dog.” They seem to adhere to the reverse, that if people love their dogs they will love them, and set about making their dogs as lovable as they can.

It would help explain an unsolicited announcement by President Bush early in his Administration. In Millie’s first 10 months on the White House grounds, he informed the press one day, she had killed six squirrels, two rats and a pigeon. The reporters were to understand, presumably, that Millie was no wimp.

America has had only 41 presidents (counting Grover Cleveland, who kept sheep, twice) but the pages of White House history are littered, so to speak, with the names of about 80 dogs.

The best dog-namers, or at least the most consistent, were the 30th President, Calvin Coolidge, and his similarly alliterative wife, Grace Goodhue. Their dogs: Peter Pan, Paul Pry, Rob Roy, Prudence Prim, Tiny Tim, Ruby Rough and King Kole. Silent Cal also had a cat, Tige.

As First Pets, though, cats historically have come in a poor second as speechmaking foils or photo-op props. It’s no wonder. Cats seem indifferent toward people, often snobbish. Not a populist image.

Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie had a cat who had kittens in the White House and Father Abraham helped name them. History records little else, not even the names. Teddy Roosevelt had a six-toed cat named Slippers. Caroline Kennedy had Tom Kitten.

Presumably Socks, the 42nd President’s family cat, will accompany Bill and Hillary Clinton to the White House and presumably the transition will be domestically smooth.

Should the new President meet with trouble politically, however, don’t be surprised if a dog appears. Carpe Canem is a policy Socks would applaud.