A look-back in media history.
1952. The question from a reporter to the candidate was this:
“Senator, what is this ‘fund’ we hear about? There is a rumor to the effect that you have a supplementary salary of $20,000 a year, contributed by a hundred California businessmen. What about it?”
The question was directed to young California Senator Richard M. Nixon, the 1952 Republican vice presidential nominee on the GOP ticket led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The New York Post, then owned by millionaire liberal heiress Dorothy Schiff, soon let Nixon have it. The headline on the front page screamed: "SECRET NIXON FUND: Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon IN Style Far Beyond His Salary."
The money donated was to “pay expenses for travel, printing and mailing of speeches, and extra clerical help - expenses which were strictly political in character and for which, therefore, I could not properly be reimbursed by the government.”
What followed was all political hell breaking loose, driven by the then-liberal Post and then others in the media, forcing Nixon to take to the relatively new medium of television to explain the facts. After running through the state of his family finances Nixon famously said there was one gift he had personally accepted, the cocker spaniel dog given to his two young girls.https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jeffrey-lord/2021/01/23/it-didnt-start-trump-remember-early-press-lie-about-republican
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