Julie Nixon’s Pet Project: Relocating Checkers

Checkers, the dog sometimes credited with saving Richard Nixon’s career, may someday be laid to rest near her former owner.

Nixon’s daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower wants to exhume the remains from a Long Island, N.Y., pet cemetery and move them to the grounds of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, near the graves of the former president and his wife, Pat.

Checkers was central to a speech that Nixon, then a candidate for vice president, made in 1952. Nixon denied wrongfully accepting money from supporters but admitted that he accepted one gift--”a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate,” sent from Texas. Checkers died in 1964.