Dick Tuck is the dean of Democratic Party political pranksters, best known for his practical jokes committed against longtime Republican candidate (and former President) Richard M. Nixon.
Tuck is best known for dressing up as a railroad conductor, and waving a train out of the station while Nixon was still speaking from the train's rear platform. In another gag, as Nixon spoke to a crowd of Chinese-Americans, Tuck caused a sign to be displayed behind Nixon reading (in Chinese) "What about the Howard Hughes secret loan?" (The reclusive billionaire had loaned money to Nixon's brother.) When Nixon ran for president in 1968, it is said that his aides threw away thousands of foreign-language campaign buttons for fear Tuck had gotten to them.
Tuck began as a campaign aide to Helen Gahaghan Douglas, whom Nixon defeated in the election for Senator from California in 1950. Nixon, who had already made a name for himself as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, ran a mud-slinging campaign, falsely portraying Douglas as a Communist sympathizer.
Tuck vowed revenge and was hired as a Nixon campaign aide (while secretly working for Douglas). Tuck organized a Nixon rally, booking the largest auditorium possible. However, he barely publicized it; therefore, Nixon showed up to speak before a crowd of 40 in a 4000 seat auditorium.
In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Vice President during the Eisenhower administration. Tuck learned that the route taken by San Francisco garbage trucks going to the dump led them right past the Republican national convention. Tuck paid to have the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon."
The 1960 Democratic convention was one of the first to be covered by television cameras. Tuck, then an aide to California governor Pat Brown, somehow persuaded the cameras to focus on 8,000 seats full of John F. Kennedy supporters while ignoring 76,000 empty seats.
In 1964, Tuck unsuccessfully ran for the California state senate, promising to rehabilitate the Los Angeles River by either filling it with water or painting it blue. "The job needs Tuck," read a Tuck billboard, "and Tuck needs the job."
In 1968, Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's Presidential campaign and rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.
Nixon emulated Tuck's pranks by hiring dirty tricks specialists such as Donald Segretti. Unlike Tuck's tricks, theirs were mean-spirited rather than humorous. For example, Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers imputing sexual misconduct to Hubert H. Humphrey and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included language denigrating blacks.
Apparently Nixon realized that Segretti's efforts were not comparable to the standard set by Tuck. In a White House conversation taped on March 13, 1973, Nixon commented, "Shows what a master Dick Tuck is ... Segretti's hasn't been a bit similar."
