Nixon was Eisenhower’s running mate that year, and reporters had just revealed that a group of wealthy donors had been quietly funding his personal expenses. The allegation threatened to knock him off the ticket entirely. So Nixon did something no politician had really tried before: he went straight to television, alone, and opened up his finances to 60 million Americans in real time.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned a gift he wasn’t going to return.

A supporter in Texas had heard Nixon’s wife Pat mention on the radio that their daughters wanted a dog. He shipped one up in a crate — a black-and-white cocker spaniel. Six-year-old Tricia named him Checkers. “The kids, like all kids, love the dog,” Nixon told the country, “and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

He wasn’t improvising. Eight years earlier, to the exact day, Franklin Roosevelt had pulled the same move — mocking Republican claims that he’d sent a Navy destroyer to retrieve his Scottish Terrier Fala from the Aleutian Islands. Nixon borrowed the strategy on purpose. A dog, it turns out, is a surprisingly hard thing to argue with on television.

It worked better than anyone expected. The Republican National Committee got flooded with calls and telegrams, nearly all supportive. Eisenhower kept Nixon on the ticket, and the pair won the election easily that November. A 1999 poll of communication scholars later ranked the speech the sixth most important in 20th-century America — not bad, for a half-hour defense that’s still mostly remembered for one paragraph about a spaniel.

Nixon, for what it’s worth, never loved the nickname. He called it his “Fund speech” and reportedly grumbled for years that people acted like the dog was the only reason he survived. History disagreed with him. The speech is still called the Checkers speech, Checkers has his own Wikipedia page, and somewhere along the way, dogs became a permanent fixture of American political theater — the one character in the room nobody’s ever managed to make a scandal out of.