Legman
Peter Edson’s “shoe leather” reporting prompted Richard Nixon’s famous Checkers speech.
Sometimes the work of Wabash men that was incredibly well known during their lifetime falls into obscurity in the decades after they pass. So it is with Peter Edson, Class of 1920, whose work as a journalist led to one of the most famous speeches in U.S. history.
Edson came to Wabash from Fort Wayne, IN, where he was a “high-school correspondent” for the Fort Wayne News- Sentinel. At Wabash he pledged the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and worked on The Bachelor. An excellent student, Edson was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, but his education was interrupted by World War I. From 1917 to 1919 Edson served in the infantry, returning to Wabash to graduate in 1920.
Edson worked for several newspapers on his way to earning an MA from Harvard and landing a position with the Newspaper Enterprise Association. The NEA provided copy to local papers across the country, and by 1932 Edson was editor in chief, becoming the Washington columnist for the service in 1941. His column, “Behind the Scenes,” was a daily feature in more than 700 newspapers with a readership estimated at more than 16 million people–about 10 percent of the country’s population.
Around Washington, Edson was known as a “shoe leather” reporter: He got out on the streets and chased down his story. His style of reporting paid off while he was covering the Republican convention in Chicago in 1952 and overheard some comments about a “Nixon fund.”
Edson was curious about the $20,000 linked to then–Vice President Richard Nixon and wrote about it but couldn’t find out more. As a 1977 article from the NEA describes it, “Following an appearance on Meet the Press, Edson asked Nixon, ‘What’s this about a fund you have?’ Nixon pushed back with a special broadcast during which he spoke of his humble beginnings, his wife, Pat’s, ‘good Republican cloth coat,’ and another political gift his family received, a puppy which his girls named Checkers.”
Nixon’s strategy worked, and he was retained on the Republican ballot in 1952.
Edson served the College as an alumni trustee from 1952 to 1964, and Wabash awarded him an honorary degree.
But he is best remembered the way this ad for the NEA put it: a man who reached millions as a “correspondent who goes after the facts, ‘legman’ style,” and provides “readable, reliable reporting of the significance, the color, and the human interest behind the events in our nation’s Capital.”
—BETH SWIFT, archivist, Ramsay Archival Center