Little-Acorn
Gold Member
That was then, this is now.
Never thought you'd long for the days of this President, did you?
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Best of the Web Today: Johnnie Walters, RIP - WSJ
Johnnie Walters, RIP
Remembering when the IRS had integrity.
by James Taranto
June 27, 2014
In the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS commissioner refused to play along with a corrupt administration, the New York Times reports. A White House aide handed him a list of 200 political "enemies" the president wanted investigated. In response, the aide asked: "Do you realize what you're doing?" Then, he answered his own rhetorical question: "If I did what you asked, it'd make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic."
The White House aide's reply was "emphatic," according to the Times: ""The man I work for doesn't like somebody to say 'no.' "
The commissioner went to his boss, the Treasury secretary, "showed him the list and recommended that the I.R.S. do nothing." The secretary "told him to lock the list in his safe." Later, he retrieved the list and turned it over to congressional investigators instead of to the President.
It's enough to restore your trust in the government--except that it happened more than 40 years ago. The corrupt order was delivered by John Dean in September 1972. The commissioner, Johnnie Walters, eventually "testified to various committees investigating alleged Nixon misdeeds," the Times reports. "He left office in April 1973." He died Tuesday; the Times article we've been quoting is his obituary.
Walters wasn't the first IRS commissioner to resist President Nixon's political pressure. His predecessor, Randolph Thrower, was fired "for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents," as the Times notes. Thrower died this March at 100. When Walters took office in 1971, "his stated goals were simplifying the tax process and catching tax cheats," but his job "had grown more complex" when Nixon imposed wage-and-price controls in an economically ignorant effort to curb inflation.
But the obituarist dryly notes that "Mr. Walters had not been told of Nixon's other job requirements," which surfaced in a recorded Oval Office conversation: "I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends."
Never thought you'd long for the days of this President, did you?
-----------------------------------
Best of the Web Today: Johnnie Walters, RIP - WSJ
Johnnie Walters, RIP
Remembering when the IRS had integrity.
by James Taranto
June 27, 2014
In the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS commissioner refused to play along with a corrupt administration, the New York Times reports. A White House aide handed him a list of 200 political "enemies" the president wanted investigated. In response, the aide asked: "Do you realize what you're doing?" Then, he answered his own rhetorical question: "If I did what you asked, it'd make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic."
The White House aide's reply was "emphatic," according to the Times: ""The man I work for doesn't like somebody to say 'no.' "
The commissioner went to his boss, the Treasury secretary, "showed him the list and recommended that the I.R.S. do nothing." The secretary "told him to lock the list in his safe." Later, he retrieved the list and turned it over to congressional investigators instead of to the President.
It's enough to restore your trust in the government--except that it happened more than 40 years ago. The corrupt order was delivered by John Dean in September 1972. The commissioner, Johnnie Walters, eventually "testified to various committees investigating alleged Nixon misdeeds," the Times reports. "He left office in April 1973." He died Tuesday; the Times article we've been quoting is his obituary.
Walters wasn't the first IRS commissioner to resist President Nixon's political pressure. His predecessor, Randolph Thrower, was fired "for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents," as the Times notes. Thrower died this March at 100. When Walters took office in 1971, "his stated goals were simplifying the tax process and catching tax cheats," but his job "had grown more complex" when Nixon imposed wage-and-price controls in an economically ignorant effort to curb inflation.
But the obituarist dryly notes that "Mr. Walters had not been told of Nixon's other job requirements," which surfaced in a recorded Oval Office conversation: "I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends."
