Posted on 06/27/2014 5:08:10 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
Johnnie M. Walters, a commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service under President Richard M. Nixon who left office after refusing to prosecute people on Nixon’s notorious “enemies list,” died on Tuesday at his home in Greenville, S.C. He was 94.
His son Hilton confirmed the death.
Nixon had fired his first I.R.S. commissioner, Randolph W. Thrower, for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents. Mr. Thrower, who served from 1969 to 1971, died at 100 in March.
Mr. Walters represented the Middle American values Nixon trumpeted. As a sharecropper’s son, he followed a mule with a plow as a boy and went on to be an assistant scoutmaster, lead a Rotary Club and preach as a layman in a Baptist church. Before coming to Washington, his only political activity was as treasurer of the Republican Party in Greenville.
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Mr. Walters had not been told of Nixon’s other job requirements, as revealed in a White House conversation recorded on May 13, 1971. “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,” the president said.
Mr. Walters failed to follow this script — which was unknown to him — when John W. Dean III, the White House counsel, summoned him to his office on Sept. 11, 1972. Mr. Dean handed him the “enemies list” of 200 people, most prominent Democrats, whom he wanted investigated.
“I was shocked,” Mr. Walters said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post. “John, do you realize what you’re doing?” he remembered saying. “If I did what you asked, it’d make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A good and honest man of integrity. RIP sir, and thank you.
You mean there was a time when the IRS believed that it’s mission was to serve the people and obey the law?
No. Don't be foolish. All this means is that Johnnie M.Walters was a RINO.
You don't get to head the IRS if you don't know how it works and what it's for.
Nixon just lost control of the machine, that's all.
...to serve the people and obey the law?
What a silly concept.
Donald Crichton Alexander . . . was appointed Commissioner of Internal Revenue by President Richard Nixon in May 1973, and was replaced in February 1977, early in the Jimmy Carter administration . . . Alexander resisted attempts by Nixon to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate Nixon's political enemies, resulting in a string of attempts by Nixon to fire him. Early on in his tenure as Commissioner, he dismantled the IRS Special Service Staff, which had been used to pursue detractors of the administration and its policies in Vietnam. Alexander served in the Army in World War II, receiving the Bronze Star and the Silver Star.
All three Nixon IRS commissioners were Americans unlike the unstable radical scum in Obama's IRS.
Now will the Nytimese, et al. stop saying that Nixon used the IRS to prosecute opponents? Of course not. He "endeavored" to, he didn't as Red Skelton, would say, "doed it."
Back then the 1960s Marxist-Alinsky campus radical, psycho spoiled brats were on the campuses and in the streets.. now they are the Obama Administration and arguably the Establishment along with their ideological litters.
John Dean was the most corrupt liberal to ever serve a President and inspires Obama’s minions to this day.
NYTimes finally covers the IRS scandal... Nixon’s.
RIP.
He is vile, that’s for certain. Without Dean, there would’ve been no Watergate.
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