Dick Tuck
Political practical joker and Democratic Party activist who specialised in tormenting Richard Nixon
DICK TUCK, who has died aged 94, was credited as the originator of the tradition of stunts aimed at embarrassing politicians on the campaign trail, his favourite victims being US Republican candidates – specifically Richard Nixon.
So effective was he that in 1971, while planning President Nixon’s re-election campaign, Nixon’s top aides put together what they called “Dick Tuck capability” – a dirty tricks operations team.
The following year they hired a team of Cuban exile professional burglars from Florida who were tasked with entering the Democratic National Committee chairman’s office in the Watergate Hotel complex to see if he had any dirty secrets against Nixon in his office drawer. It was the beginning of the Watergate scandal that ultimately caused Nixon’s downfall.
Dick Tuck first met Nixon while a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1950. At the time, Tuck was working for the Democrat, Helen Douglas, who was running for the US Senate against Nixon and whom Nixon was portraying as a communist sympathiser. Tuck decided to insinuate himself into the Republican’s campaign staff and secured the position of “advance man” – responsible for organising rallies.
He began by booking a 4,000-seat auditorium, the largest on the university campus, on a day when few students were likely to attend. When Nixon turned up there were only 40 students in the audience – numbers which dwindled further still after Tuck rose to give a rambling introductory speech before announcing that the candidate would speak about a topic “all Californians care about, the International Monetary Fund”.
Nixon, who had no plans to talk about the IMF, struggled through the disastrous evening, and as he was leaving he demanded to know Tuck’s name. “Dick Tuck,” said the furious candidate, “you have just made your last advance!”
During the 1960 presidential race, Tuck slipped into technicians’ overalls and, disguised as a stagehand, mounted a ladder to the lighting rig in the studio where Nixon, by now vice-president of the US, was due to take on his Democratic opponent John F Kennedy in a televised debate. Nixon was seen glowering at the camera, sweat trickling down his forehead – the result of Tuck aiming a powerful backlight straight down on to the top of his head.
The following day Nixon flew to Memphis, Tennessee, to be greeted on the tarmac by a huge elderly woman
– a Tuck plant – wearing a large Nixon campaign button. “Don’t worry, son,” she said as she flung her arms around the hapless candidate. “Kennedy won last night but you will do better next time.”
Not long afterwards, when Nixon, touring the country, was addressing crowds from the platform at the back of his train, Tuck, dressed as a conductor, was said to have ordered the driver to pull out of a station before Nixon had finished speaking. (Tuck recalled that “the crowd went out like the morning tide”, but later said that he had made the story up.) On another occasion the train pulled in at a station to be greeted by a group of “pregnant” women with pillows stuffed up their dresses, holding placards bearing his campaign slogan: “Nixon’s the one”.
Two years later, in 1962, when Nixon was campaigning for governor of California, Tuck arranged for him to be greeted by a group of children holding a huge banner bearing the legend “Welcome Nixon” in English above its supposed translation into Chinese.
Nixon went over to the children and posed for the cameras, only to be informed that the translation read “How about the Hughes loan?” – a reference to the scandal involving Nixon’s brother Donald who had taken out a $205,000 unsecured loan from the billionaire Howard Hughes. A furious Nixon was then seen on camera grabbing the banner and tearing it up.
Though Tuck was a constant presence at party rallies, also directing more than half a dozen successful state and local races for Democratic candidates, he himself only stood once for public office.
In 1966 he ran for the California State Senate with campaign billboards which read “Tuck” in large letters, with the name “Dick” in much smaller letters superimposed on the “T” of Tuck, thus turning it into an “F”. Tuck hoped voters would think his opponent had defaced the billboards and that he would “get the sympathy vote”.
In the event, he came third and as the votes piled up against him he was asked for his reaction. His observation, “The People have spoken, the bastards” (attributed by some to Mark Twain) has entered popular parlance and was much deployed by elements of the British press after the 2016 EU referendum.
One of five sons of a copper mine manager, Richard Gregory Tuck was born in Hayden, Arizona, on January 25 1924. After service during the Second World War in the US Marines, disarming unexploded bombs in the South Pacific, he studied Political Science on the GI Bill at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In the late 1960s Tuck became a close aide to Robert F Kennedy, and was with him the night he was shot in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential primary campaign. It was Tuck who took off his jacket and placed it under the dying man’s head.
Starting with the Republicans in 1972, Tuck haunted Democratic and Republican National Conventions as the publisher of a gossipy news-sheet called Reliable Source, in which he chronicled “back-room wheelings and dealings”.
In 1980, during a brief period as a political editor for National Lampoon, he obtained copies of 12 hours of the so-called Watergate tapes – recordings of conversations between 1971 and 1973 between President Nixon and administration officials which had helped lead to Nixon’s impeachment.
While transcripts had long been available, the actual recordings had not been broadcast. So when excerpts from the Tuck copies were played it was the first time Americans had heard Nixon and his aides scheming to mislead Watergate investigators.
For many years Tuck claimed to be working on a memoir, to be called Politricks, which would, he promised, chronicle, “a misspent life in American politics”. But it was never published.
In 1944, he married Faith Eversfield. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1989 he married Joyce Daly, who died in 1995. He is survived by a son from his first marriage.