Checkers

Even as it was directed at the public, Nixon’s speech had another, far narrower audience: the Republican National Committee and his running mate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who were weighing whether to remove him from the ticket. Nixon’s goal was to show Republican Party leaders that he had the voters behind him and would be an effective spokesperson for their message. That message had an internal nickname: “K1C2,” for Korea, communism, and corruption. Even as he defends himself from charges of corruption, Nixon spends much of his time subtly reiterating this message—leveling accusations of corruption against his opponents in the Democratic Party. He implies that Adlai Stevenson II and John Sparkman represent a continuation of the failures of the Truman administration, and he claims that the purpose of the fund in question is

to handle these necessary political expenses of getting [his] message to the American people and the speeches [he] made—the speeches that [he] had printed for the most part concerned this one message of exposing this Administration, the Communism in it, the corruption in it (Paragraph 12).

Here and throughout the speech, Nixon equates communism and corruption, casting himself and his party as America’s last line of defense against these intertwined evils.