Ever wonder why presidential candidates should release their tax returns? RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay offers some views from a distinctly Rhode Island perspective.
On Oct. 3, 1973 – 43 years ago today – a 31-year old Providence Journal-Bulletin reporter named Jack White broke a story about then-President Richard Nixon. It seemed that Nixon cheated on his income taxes.
It turned out to be the biggest story in White’s distinguished career as an investigative reporter in Rhode Island, Boston and on Cape Cod. And It ended up as the final nail in Nixon’s Watergate coffin.
It all started with Nixon’s 1969 tax return. In July of that year Congress got rid of a part of the tax code that allowed a sitting or former president to donate his papers to a non-profit or public archive and take a large tax deduction. Congress changed the rule after deciding that a president’s papers already belonged to the public.
This issue didn’t become public until 1973, when it was mentioned in passing during a lawsuit related to the Watergate break-in, says Mitchell Zukoff, a Boston University journalism professor who has researched this topic and wrote about it for the New York Times.
At stake was the question of whether Nixon had adhered to the deadline imposed by Congress when he took a $500,000 deduction for his vice-presidential papers, wrote Joseph Thorndike, a professor at the Northwestern University Law School , who has also researched the matter.
Nixon refused to make his returns public and the White House flacks brushed off the topic.
White, who was raised in Pawtucket, got the president’s tax returns from a source. His union, The Providence Newspaper Guild, was on strike at the time. White carried the story notes in his pocket as he walked a picket line for 13 days with fellow guild members. Fearing he would get beat by one of the many Washington reporters, he made nervous telephone calls every day to Washington to see whether another news outlet had the story.
(It was out of the question for White to cross the union picket line; he was union loyalist, scion of a family of construction union leaders in Rhode Island’s Local 57 of the Operating Engineers). When the strike ended, White published his piece.
It showed that Nixon had paid taxes of only about $793 in 1970 and $878 in 1971, despite earning an income of more than $400,000. Zuckoff estimated that the president paid about the same federal tax as a family of three with an income of $8,000 in 1970 dollars.
The result was the predictable outcry and calls for Nixon to fully release his returns. White’s story led to one of the most famous presidential utterances in American history. At a newspaper conference a month after the story broke, White’s editor, Joe Ungaro, pressed the president about his taxes.
Nixon said he welcomed the kind of reporting White had done, then said, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.’’
Nixon’s reaction
Nixon finally released his tax returns in December of 1973 and asked a Congressional committee to review his gift, which was of his vice-presidential papers. An investigation revealed that Nixon’s tax preparer had , indeed, illegally back dated the $500,000 deduction.
In May 1974, White won journalism’s highest award, the Pulitzer Prize, for his work. Three months later, Nixon resigned.
White died of heart failure at age 63 in 2005. He was still working as an investigative reporter at Providence’s WPRI-12 television station. He never disclosed his source to anyone, says his son, Tim White, who now holds his father’s old job as a WPRI investigative reporter. Tim White says he is trying to find out who the source was.
Ever since Jack White’s story, every major party candidate for the nation’s highest office has made public his or her tax returns. — except for Donald Trump. Which makes sense—Americans have long been willing to pay their fair share of taxes so long as they believe that every taxpayer is treated equally.
Or, as Zukoff writes, “On at least one subject, Nixon got it right: The American people need to know if their president is a crook.’’
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday on Morning Edition at 6:45 and 8:45 and on All Things Considered at 5:44. You can also follow his political reporting and analysis at our `On Politics’ Blog at RIPR.org
