Today, former President Richard Nixon is mostly known for the Watergate scandal that drove him from office. However, this wasn’t the first political scandal he was involved in. In 1952, he was the Republican nominee for Vice President, and during the run-up to the election, he secretly accepted more than $18,000 in gifts from political donors. When the public discovered this, the backlash was swift and severe, and it threatened to get him kicked off of the Republican ticket.

While Nixon’s actions were not technically illegal, they were considered improper and smacked of bribe-taking, and the fact that Nixon tried to hide them made voters extra suspicious of him. To keep himself from getting kicked off the Republican ticket, he decided to turn to the new medium of television for help.

So he bought a half hour of TV time, sat in front of the camera with his wife, and explained how he lived a humble lifestyle and did not use any of the money he received for personal gain. The crux of the speech involved him expressing openness to returning most of the gifts, but insisting that he would not return the dog named Checkers that he had been given, because his children loved it so much. The speech was carefully crafted to paint a picture of himself as a humble, dog-loving family man, a man just like them, that Americans could trust and relate to.

Nixon’s direct emotional appeal to the voters through his televised speech was not just a tactic, it was a game-changer. It reshaped his public image, making him appear more relatable and sympathetic and effectively quashing any talk of dropping him from the Republican ticket. More importantly, it marked a new era in political campaigning, the modern era, where direct emotional appeals to voters over mass media became the backbone of all political campaigning.