ATIT Reheated: Dick Tuck, American prankster hero

By Jack Brummet, Presidents Editor

"The real Nixon was always there, all I did was keep the spotlight on it."

Dick Tuck is a legendary political strategist and hoaxer who made a life-long career out of making life miserable for Richard Nixon.  He's been a hero of mine ever since Hunter S. Thompson (a friend of his) wrote about him during the 1972 Presidential campaign.

Tuck writes on dicktuck.com: "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal. In the Chinatown Caper, a sign saying "Welcome Nixon" also asked – in Chinese – "What about the Hughes Loan?"  [Ed's note: Howard Hughes had made a large, no-interest,  loan, or possibly a large cash gift,  to Nixon's brother Donald.  This naturally erupted into a scandal...albeit, a containable one]. Once the phrase was translated for Nixon, he rushed over to the crowd, seized the sign and tore it up in front of the TV cameras.  The message was simple: do you want a guy like this running your state or nation? "

"This kind of behavior, these ethical standards had been Nixon's since law school, when he broke into the Dean's office with some friends to see if his grades were good enough to keep his scholarship. It continued in his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Pat Brown, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.

"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer." 

As Adlai Stevenson said during the 1956 Presidential campaign, “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”

My favorite quote by Dick Tuck is from his concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election, in which he received about 10% of the vote:

"The people have spoken, the bastards."

This poster is from Tuck's 1966 Congressional campaign.  He claimed his opponents added the Dick to form the F word, Tuck said he thought voters would think his opponent had done this and he'd "get the sympathy vote" with this tactic. 

In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. He watched first hand as Dick Nixon smeared her as "The Pink Lady."  After that, he made it his mission to mess with Richard Nixon every chance he got.

One of Tuck's best pranks was "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles where children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese.  As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered to him that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?, " a reference to an unsecured/illegal $205,000 loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald.  Nixon grabbed the sign on camera and ripped it up.

After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who gave Nixon a hug and said in front of TV cameras, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."



Tuck and many other people say that he was never malicious in his political pranks. Richard Nixon, however, became obsessed about Tuck, and even railed about him in some of the Watergate Tapes.  But Nixon also admired Tuck, and often compared the dirty tricks committed by staffer Donald Segretti unfavorably to the elegance and humor of Tuck's political shenanigans. After the Watergate blew up in the newspapers, Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, saw Tuck in the Capitol.  Haldeman reportedly turned to Tuck and said, "You started all of this." Tuck replied, "Yeah, Bob but you guys ran it into the ground."

In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck told a reporter, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit."  He organized a rally at UC Santa Barbara, and booked the largest auditorium they had.  He booked it on a day when no students would be able to attend, and didn't do any publicity for the rally.  Forty students showed up in the 4,000 seat auditorium.  Tuck got up to introduce Nixon with a long, rambling monologue with many references to Nixon's cut-throat, red-bashing campaign tactics against Jerry Voorhis.  He then announced that Nixon would now speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, of course, had not planned to speak about the IMF. Therefore, when he got up to the podium he was momentarily speechless.  When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."

In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower's Vice President. The Republican Convention was held in San Francisco that summer, and Tuck learned that the route taken by garbage trucks going to the dump led past the convention center. Tuck paid to have all the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon".

Tuck also performed other pranks to undermine Nixon's campaign effort like posing as a fire marshall to provide low estimates of the turnout at Nixon's rallies, or telling bandleaders at rallies that Nixon's favorite song was "Mack the Knife."

In one incident Tuck dressed up as a train conductor and signalled a train to leave the station while Nixon was delivering a speech from its rear platform. Reportedly, the train pulled out of the station with Nixon still speaking. [ed's note:  There is some debate about whether this incident actually occurred].

By 1968, when Nixon ran for President, Tuck spooked Nixon's campaign managers so badly that they  started imagining phantom pranks. A shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters for use at ethnic rallies in NYC. Nixon's campaign manager ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (he hadn't).

During the '68 Presidential campaign, Tuck often hired pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs with his campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One."

By 1972 Nixon decided he needed his own Dick Tuck. Naturally, Nixon's efforts to mimic Tuck's pranks had a vicious bent and went badly awry. Donald Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers alleging sexual misconduct on Hubert Humphrey's part and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included racist language.

Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, he rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally-wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.

Sources:  Dicktuck.com; Wikipedia.com/dick_tuck; jackbrummet.blogspot.com; Stephen J. Whitfield. "Nixon as a Comic Figure," American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring 1985, 114-132; Ron Kurtus, "Did Dick Tuck Cause Watergate?" revised August 28, 2000.

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