Democratic prankster haunted Nixon
Tuck’s tactics admired, mimicked and distorted by both U.S. parties Richard Tuck in 1973. He died at age 94 on May 28.
Dick Tuck, an impish Democratic Party operative whose practical jokes and pranks helped define modern election combat and who was the political hobgoblin of Richard Nixon for decades, died May 28, at an assisted-living centre in Tucson, Ariz. He was 94.
A friend, Randi Dorman, confirmed the death but said she did not know the immediate cause.
Tuck made his name tweaking national Republican candidates, but also directed more than half a dozen successful state and local races for Democrats. He managed the 1967 campaign of the first African American to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city, Richard G. Hatcher of Gary, Ind., and was an advance man for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 primary campaign. Mostly, Tuck was remembered for his singular ability to hector and haunt Nixon, a Republican whose earliest political tactics included questioning his opponents’ loyalty to the United States.
Their paths first crossed in 1950, when then-California Republican Rep. Nixon was running for an open Senate seat against a liberal Democratic op- ponent, Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon tried to smear Douglas as a communist sympathizer.
At the time, Tuck was a Second World War veteran studying political science on the G.I. Bill at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also was working part time for the Douglas campaign. One of Tuck’s teachers unwittingly asked Tuck to work as an advance man for Nixon’s upcoming campaign visit to the campus.
Tuck called him “an absentminded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest.”
Hardly believing his luck, Tuck arranged for the unsuspecting GOP candidate to speak in one of the largest auditoriums available at a time when he knew few people would be on campus. He introduced Nixon to the sparse audience with a long-winded speech, then called Nixon to the microphone, saying the candidate would speak about a topic “all Californians care about, the International Monetary Fund.”
A flustered Nixon delivered a disjointed speech. As he stepped down from the podium, Nixon demanded the name of the young man who organized the dismal event. “Dick Tuck, you’ve done your last advance,” Nixon snapped.
It would not be the last clash between the two men.
In 1956, as Nixon awaited his party’s celebratory renomina- tion as vice-president, Tuck arranged for the garbage trucks servicing the Republican nominating convention in San Francisco to drive by the Cow Palace convention centre bearing large signs reading “Dump Nixon.”
The morning after Vice-President Nixon debated then-Democrat Sen. John F. Kennedy in the1960 presidential campaign, Tuck put a Nixon button on an elderly woman who walked up to the candidate as cameras rolled. While offering a hug, she exclaimed, “Don’t worry, son. He beat you last night but you’ll do better next time.” Nixon lost the race. Tuck’s best-remembered prank took place during Nixon’s visit to the Chinatown section of Los Angeles during his 1962 bid for California governor. Tuck was working for the Democratic incumbent, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr.
At the time, Nixon faced questions about a $205,000 loan his brother, Donald, had received from Howard Hughes, the billionaire industrialist and defence contractor.
Tuck distributed signs to the crowd that said “Welcome Nixon!” over a row of Mandarin characters. Nixon smiled broadly at first as he looked over the sign-waving crowd. But when he was told that the Chinese script on the signs read, “What about the Hughes loan?” Nixon grabbed one of the placards and tore it up as the TV cameras rolled.
Tuck was delighted. “Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal,” he said later, taking pleasure in exposing the candidate’s temper. “The message was simple: Do you want a guy like this running your state or nation?”
Tuck’s tactics were later mimicked, admired — and distorted — by political operatives from both parties, including Watergate conspirators who eventually went to jail. Subsequent generations of Republicans credited Tuck with providing vital lessons.
“Tuck was a genius,” said Gary Maloney, a GOP research consultant who worked on Reagan and Bush campaigns, and is a fan of Tuck.
“He showed a wicked sense of humour at a time when Republicans were generally dour and white-bread. I think we acquired humour in part because of Tuck’s example.”
Maloney and others said that Tuck led campaign strategists to hone skills in research, track the words of opposition candidates, and look for opportunities for political theatre that could sway votes.
For example, Republican operatives, in 1997, organized what appeared to be a demonstration at the U.S. Supreme Court as justices deliberated whether to consider a sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. Half a dozen GOP activists wearing raincoats waved picket signs reading “flashers for Clinton.” When they opened their raincoats, they revealed “friend of the court briefs.”
Tuck liked politicians and their strategists and he looked forward to political conventions, attending nearly every one of both political parties through 1992.
As the decades passed, Tuck told reporters that the lighthearted fun he had known in the 1950s and 1960s, had ebbed out of politics. He blamed it in part on the domination of professional advertising with its hard-nosed and polarizing messages that, he said, ushered in an era of distrust.
There was a time, he mused decades later, when he could sneak onto Nixon’s 1960 campaign plane with a personal press pass and a tape recorder. “It was a simpler world then,” he once wrote, “and nobody suspected a guy carrying a bowling bag.”