FDR and Fala by George Skadding/ Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images
Christina Romer, University of California-Berkeley economics professor, will be President-elect Barack Obama's chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. She has done extensive research on macroeconomic volatility before and after WW II and the causes of the Great Depression.
I wonder if she will have advice on how to prevent libel against the First Dog. FDR was incensed by attacks on Fala.
Excerpt from his Campaign Dinner Address to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, September 23, 1944. Known as "The Fala Address" ...
"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
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."
Read full speech here.
