Trump was not the first US President to accuse the other side of conspiring to the other side to remove Erica McAinter from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on 1 August.
When Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969, my uncle Herold Goldstein was the Assistant Commissioner of the Goldstein Manpower and Employment Statistics. He wrote in his memoirs (which I edited and self-published after his death in 2007) that Nixon was the only President he worked in BLS in his 35 years who came to meet government employees.
Labor Secretary George Shulz presented him as a person in charge of unemployment data. Nixon smiled because he shook Uncle Herold’s hand and said, “Keep them low!” Uncle Herold said that he felt that the President was making fun.
Whenever the unemployment rate decreased slightly, the administration urged the BLS for good news, but Uncle Herold said that the decline was not statistically important. Finally, in July 1971, after such a more controversy, Nixon abolished the press conference with BLS employees, and was taken away from Herold to report the unemployment rate.
Herold wrote in his memoir that Nixon was sure that all civil servants were holders from the Democratic administration and were out to defeat them. He described, with a touch of pride, an incident described in the Nixon Chief of Staff HR Haldman’s DiaryNixon commented from his cabinet, “You have a complete department full of wipers and they will strike because they want to defeat us … for example: in Goldstein of Labor Statistics, a leftist fundamentalist who hates us.”
In his revaluation, he wrote: “I resigned. I was eligible for retirement, so I retired. Later later, President Nixon also resigned between Watergate. So the government lost both the wiper and VP.”
Uncle Herold knew that when he wrote his memoirs that Nixon had also accused Herold and his colleague of being a part of a “Jewish cabel” who deliberately trying to look bad. When he wrote his memoirs, Herold chose not to mention the context of “Jewish Cabel”.
It became anti -sematic slur more famousPart of the story. But Herold did not pay attention to that my best explanation for him is that whatever happened was a more derogatory part of a dedicated civil servant’s harsh work, which served Democrats and Republicans equally for 34 years.
In his vague game on the word wiper, Herold suggested who the real vipers are. Let us hope that Trump’s such dictatorship and anti -counterpart techniques would eventually work for them and also worked for Nickens.
Aviva Goldstein is the niece of Herold Goldstein and editor of her uncle’s memoirs.
