Johnnie Walters, IRS commissioner under President Richard M. Nixon, dies at 94

Source: Washington Post

By Emily Langer June 26 at 7:56 PM

In a recorded conversation in the Oval Office on May 13, 1971, Richard M. Nixon laid out for his aides the job qualifications for the next commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. ... “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he’s told, that every income tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends,” the president told H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, according to a transcript published years later in The Washington Post. “Now it’s as simple as that. If he isn’t, he doesn’t get the job.”

The man who got the job was Johnnie Walters, a fellow Republican then serving as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s tax division. ... Mr. Walters said he did not know of the president’s demands when he became commissioner on Aug. 6, 1971. Once in office, by all accounts, he refused to participate in the administration’s attempts to use the tax agency for political purposes — most notably, to intimidate through audits or threatened audits the individuals on the Nixon “enemies list.”

Mr. Walters took office at a time of particular consternation among Nixon administration officials. They had found his predecessor — Randolph W. Thrower, who died in March at 100 — insufficiently cooperative with their efforts to make appointments and intimidate adversaries. ... The president bitterly recalled being audited during the Democratic administration of President John F. Kennedy, who had defeated him in the 1960 election. In the run-up to Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, White House counsel John W. Dean III furnished Mr. Walters with the administration’s “enemies list,” naming hundreds of individuals to be targeted for tax investigations.

“I was so shocked,” Mr. Walters told The Post years later. “During the Kennedy years, things were done that shouldn’t have been done. But this would have ruined the entire tax system. I said, ‘John, do you realize what you’re doing? If I did what you asked, it’d make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic.’ ”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/johnnie-walters-irs-commissioner-under-president-richard-m-nixon-dies-at-94/2014/06/26/e6ae4906-fd3d-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html

---

Last year, amid the controversy surrounding IRS scrutiny of conservative groups applying for exempt status, Mr. Walters expressed his concern.

“I’m distressed at what’s happening and particularly with IRS,” he told the Greenville News. “IRS must be run nonpolitical. Our tax system otherwise will fail and we can’t afford that.”

Do we need to be reminded why we want people of the highest caliber running the IRS?

I hope there are copies of his obituary posted throughout IRS HQ and in every field office.

Well done, Mr. Walters.