Man’s best friend

Fala also had a role in FDR’s 1944 reelection campaign. That story begins in July 1944, when Fala accompanied the President on boat trip across the Pacific Ocean for a meeting with military leaders in Hawaii. During their journey home, FDR visited the Aleutian Islands before continuing on to the American mainland. But when the President arrived in Washington D.C., a rumor began circulating that Fala had been accidentally left behind on one of the Aleutian Islands and that FDR had ordered the Navy to send a destroyer back to retrieve him.  Well, as the presidential campaign heated up that fall, Republicans jumped on this rumor and accused the President of spending millions of taxpayer dollars in his effort to rescue Fala from the island. Of course, the story was completely false and FDR devised an amusing way to disarm his critics. The President chose his moment carefully. On September 23, 1944, he was scheduled to make his first important campaign speech at a dinner attended by hundreds of friendly union leaders FDR brought down the house with what became known as his “Fala Speech.” That speech served to energize his election campaign by showing the public that the President still had the magic political touch he had demonstrated in his previous three presidential campaigns. In fact, historians often cite the “Fala speech” as a key moment in the 1944 election—one that helped to put Roosevelt on a path for reelection in November.  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.  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? 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.

All this background and no quoting of the joke. Disappointed.

[Fala Speech](https://youtu.be/qqt7b9veFo8?si=D2G-QUprMOJNvYS8) link because the post doesnt have it

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