The US President is often credited with a quote that politics has to cooperate with not the most pleasant people. We checked whether the authorship of this statement belongs to Roosevelt.

According to the common version, the phrase about the “son of the son” Franklin Delaino Roosevelt said in 1939 to the Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somosa, in which the dictatorship was established in the country. Despite this, the USA Supported Somos and sought to make Nicaragua an ally in the impending war. This version of the origin of the expression can be found, in particular, in the collection of quotes Citaty.net, Encyclopedia of the magazine "Around the world" and one of the materials TASS. However, in some sources authorship attributed And other American statesmen - for example, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Cordell Hall and Dina Aucocon.

Although the meeting of Roosevelt and Somosa is really took place In Washington in 1939, historians pay attention to the fact that the first mention of the phrase allegedly uttered by the US president appeared much later. Researcher David Schmitz discoveredthat such a source is the publication of 1948 in Time magazine. Somosa dedicated to the article in which this phrase is given was published without a signature. Nevertheless, her author reports: “In order to prepare President Roosevelt for a visit, Sumner Wells sent him a thorough note about Somos and Nicaragua. In Washington, they told the story of how Roosevelt read this text and remarked: "As the Nicaraguan could say, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch."

How Notes The Quote Investigator portal, already in the 1960s in the USA there were several versions of the origin of this phrase, and far from always the characters were Roosevelt and Somos. So, in 1968, in the presentation of journalist Alistair Cook, the president said so about his one -party man, an unnamed mayor of a large city. A year later, a note appeared in one of the Seattle newspapers, according to which Roosevelt called the leader of the Dominican Republic Rafael Trukhillo “our bitch son”.

Moreover, for the first time, a similar phrase appeared 70 years before the meeting of Roosevelt and Somosa. In July 1868, in the small newspaper The Daily Journal in North Carolin, a dialog was published, whose participants did not name by the name: “These arguments of the radicals remind us of the answer of one of the parties trying to convince the voter to vote for a certain candidate whose character was not the best. "He is a great villain!" - the friend was indignant. "But he is our villain," - a meaningful answer sounded. " Over the next decades, this phrase has been used repeatedly, only replacing the characteristic: instead of the “bitch son”, “bastard”, “scoundrel” and even “class A bastards” appeared in the expression.

Thus, the authorship of the statement about the “our son of a son” cannot be attributed to Franklin Roosevelt - this rhetorical structure circulated in American politics long before the visit of Somosa to Washington. Moreover, it causes serious doubts and whether the American president spoke this phrase in principle. All evidence in support of this version appeared after the death of Roosevelt and diverge in who exactly the politician gave such an unflattering characteristic.