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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsWe Loungeteers heart our furbabies but only "my little dog Fala" has a Wiki and a statue (YouTube)
The words of the speech (below) don't do justice to the FDR delivery, in Part 7 of Ken BURNS' "The ROOSEVELTS". Wiki, not BURNS, tells that Orson WELLES ad libbed the "my little dog Fala" bit.
ON EDIT: Check out this MASTERFUL DELIVERY!1 There was a lot of drinking at that Teamsters dinner!1
**********QUOTE, from Wiki*****
Fala speech
On September 23, 1944, Roosevelt opened the 1944 presidential campaign in Washington, D.C., speaking at a dinner with the International Teamsters Union. The half-hour speech was also broadcast on all U.S. radio networks.[6] In the speech, Roosevelt attacked Republican opponents in Congress and detailed their attacks on him. Late in the speech, Roosevelt addressed Republican charges that he had accidentally left Fala behind on the Aleutian Islands while on tour there and had sent a U.S. Navy destroyer to retrieve him at an exorbitant cost to the taxpayers:
These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family don't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I'd left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find himat a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollarshis Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself ... But I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my dog.
The idea of turning the Republican charges into a joke was that of Orson Welles. Campaigning extensively for Roosevelt, Welles occasionally sent him ideas and phrases that were sometimes incorporated into what Welles characterized as "less important speeches".[9]:374 One of these was the "Fala speech". Welles ad-libbed the Fala joke for the president, who was so delighted that he had a final version written into the speech by his staff. After the broadcast Roosevelt asked Welles, "How did I do? Was my timing right?"[8]:292293
"The audience went wild, laughing and cheering and calling for more," wrote historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. "And the laughter carried beyond the banquet hall; it reverberated in living rooms and kitchens throughout the country, where people were listening to the speech on their radios. The Fala bit was so funny, one reporter observed, that 'even the stoniest of Republican faces cracked a smile.'":
********UNQUOTE********
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We Loungeteers heart our furbabies but only "my little dog Fala" has a Wiki and a statue (YouTube) (Original Post)
UTUSN
Sep 2014
OP
elleng
(131,053 posts)1. Yes, it was great!
Skittles
(153,174 posts)2. that speech was an inspiration for Nixon's Checkers speech 8 years later
UTUSN
(70,725 posts)4. I will *kick* NIXON ass, yes indeed!1 Arrrrgh!1 n/t
NYC_SKP
(68,644 posts)3. Teddy Roosevelt had a LOT of animal friends, Jackson had a fighting cock! The Kennedys:
Loved their dogs:
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)5. If you don't love fur babies you are not cool.
Very simple.
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)6. quite so!