Monday, September 28, 2009

FDR memorial


Second stop on excursion.
Posted by at

2 comments:

Olivia W. said...

Fala is named after Scottish ancestor John Murray. His full name is "Murray the Outlaw of Falahill"--Fala for short.

Fala was so popular, he had his own secretary to manage his fan mail.

Fala was nicknamed "The Informer" by the Secret Service because the sight of him signaled that FDR was near by.

When Fala was accidentally left behind during a presidential trip to Aleutian Islands off Alaska, Republicans lambasted FDR for sending the navy back to retrieve the dog and wasting tax dollars. In a 1944 speech nicknamed the Fala Address, the President chided Republicans for the criticism:

"These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, now they include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn'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 had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him - at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars- his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog."

September 28, 2009 at 9:45 PM
TJE said...

I like.

September 28, 2009 at 9:58 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)