The Democratic operative who punked Nixon

Dick Tuck bedeviled Republican candidates for decades with his bag of campaign trail tricks. The Democratic operative duped Republican bands into playing Democratic campaign songs, posed as a fire marshal to give reporters bogus crowd numbers, and once snuck secret messages into the fortune cookies at a GOP banquet. He relished tormenting Richard Nixon. The day after Nixon’s 1960 presidential debate against John F. Kennedy, the Republican was approached by an elderly woman wearing one of his campaign buttons. “Don’t worry, son,” she said, hugging Nixon in front of TV news crews, “you’ll do better next time.” It was Tuck who put her up to it. “I’ve made a lot of candidates look foolish,” he said, “usually with a lot of help from the candidates themselves.” Born in Hayden, Ariz., Tuck “was one of four sons of a copper company executive,” said The Washington Post. He joined the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in a bomb disposal unit in the South Pacific. “He began hoodwinking Nixon as a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1950,” said The New York Times. Tuck was secretly working for the Republican’s opponent in a California Senate race when one of his professors unwittingly asked him to work as an advance man for Nixon’s upcoming visit to campus. Tuck rented a 2,000-seat auditorium, but didn’t publicize the event. Only 23 people showed up, and Tuck introduced Nixon by claiming the candidate would speak about a subject “all Californians care about, the International Monetary Fund.” “Dick Tuck,” said a furious Nixon, “you’ve done your last advance.” “One of Tuck’s most effective stunts” came during Nixon’s 1962 campaign for California governor, said Reuters.com. At a rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a Tuck infiltrator waved a sign reading “What about the Hughes loan?” in Mandarin—a reference to a questionable $205,000 loan that Nixon’s brother had received from billionaire Howard Hughes. When the sign was translated for Nixon, the enraged candidate grabbed it and tore it up in full view of the cameras. Tuck himself only ran for office once— a doomed campaign for a California state Senate seat in which he won only 10 percent of the primary vote. “The people have spoken,” Tuck said in his concession speech. “The bastards.”