One tricky Dick deserved another

August 8, 2008 10:33 AM

Richard Nixon had his nemisis and his name was Dick Tuck . Is Inventive, high quality campaign pranking a thing of the past?

More on Tuck in a New Yorker piece, and a 1973 piece in Time from which much of the first link seems to be taken.

posted by salishsea (26 comments total)

However, Tuck was up to his usual tricks during this campaign, such as when he hired several pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs that read "Nixon's the One."

HA! I never get tired of reading about Dick Tuck.
posted by NoMich at 10:44 AM on August 8, 2008

God bless Dick Tuck.
posted by wsg at 10:47 AM on August 8, 2008

I'd love to have this nowadays, but any pranking would only reflect badly on Obama.
posted by LSK at 10:48 AM on August 8, 2008

Congressman Nixon as a member of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in the late 1940s.

Nixon was running an extremely dirty campaign, making every effort to portray his opponent as a communist-sympathizer.

Why did it take until GWB for me to pay attention and start hating Republicans?
posted by DU at 10:53 AM on August 8, 2008

Michael Moore, during '96 election, created a bunch of ridiculous front groups and sent donations in their name to Dole, Perot and Buchanan. Only Buchanan's campaign cashed their checks, so only he could claim the support of Pedophiles for Free Trade, Abortionists for Buchanan and The John Wayne Gacy Fan Club. The irony is that Pat himself pioneered the technique of creating unsavory fronts to send money to Democratic rivals to Nixon.

Still, that's small potatoes compared to Tuck.
posted by Bromius at 10:56 AM on August 8, 2008 [3 favorites]

It's so interesting to me to see the GOP lack of humor going back this far. It's like a chronic mineral deficiency in the species; completely lacking in any sense of playfulness. I suspect it's based in the inherent sefishness and lust for power. They aren't trying to amuse and enlighten anyone in the process, instead it is just completely savage and base.

If Dick Tuck inspired Donald Segretti, I shudder to think what the next evolution up (down?) from Karl Rove is gonna be.
posted by butterstick at 10:59 AM on August 8, 2008

Richard Nixon had a nemesis and his name was Richard Nixon.
posted by Ironmouth at 11:01 AM on August 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Was the word "dick" not a euphemism for penis back in the 60's? Or, I suppose, in the 40's when all these poor Dicks got named by their parents.
posted by GuyZero at 11:02 AM on August 8, 2008

It isn't at the Presidential level, but there's this "Mike Stark" guy that posts results of his exploits against Limbaugh and O'Reilly over at dkos. Or he used to--haven't seen him around for a while.
posted by DU at 11:04 AM on August 8, 2008

If Dick Tuck inspired Donald Segretti, I shudder to think what the next evolution up (down?) from Karl Rove is gonna be.

If the Batman movies are any indication: The Joker.
posted by Bromius at 11:04 AM on August 8, 2008

This is amazing. I think it works, in part, because Nixon was such an openly vicious motherfucker in his campaigns, though. No one felt bad for him because he was such an attack dog.
posted by shmegegge at 11:11 AM on August 8, 2008

...the GOP lack of humor...

McCain compared to Don Rickles.

So yeah, no sense of humor.
posted by DU at 11:31 AM on August 8, 2008

It's so interesting to me to see the GOP lack of humor going back this far.

This may just be the Nixon effect.
posted by grobstein at 11:37 AM on August 8, 2008

It's so interesting to me to see the GOP lack of humor going back this far. It's like a chronic mineral deficiency in the species; completely lacking in any sense of playfulness. I suspect it's based in the inherent sefishness and lust for power. They aren't trying to amuse and enlighten anyone in the process, instead it is just completely savage and base.

Yah, it's so crazy that they don't have a sense of humor about people making fun of them. Who do they think they are anyway?

Fact of the matter is, there were dolphins at John Kerry events, and there were people patrolling Barney Frank's Georgetown haunts for male prostitutes, and similar panks (of varying degrees of humor) by Republicans, and Democrats rarely got a kick out of them either. If there's a chronic humor deficiency, I think it's non-partisan. Or maybe just bi-partisan.
posted by Slap Factory at 11:41 AM on August 8, 2008

Tuck was up to his usual tricks during this campaign, such as when he hired several pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs that read "Nixon's the One."
posted by mecran01 at 11:51 AM on August 8, 2008

Was the word "dick" not a euphemism for penis back in the 60's?

It most certainly was. I distinctly remember my mother describing a conversation with another woman who spoke about her husband, saying "My Dick this" and "My Dick did that" and doubling up with laughter. It was all mom could do to keep from cracking up when talking to her.

Around the same time, give or take, during Halloween evening of 1968 I recall the scariest thing in the neighborhood was an enormous photo of Nixon in one of neighbor's living room windows.

*shudder*
posted by lordrunningclam at 12:02 PM on August 8, 2008

Yah, it's so crazy that they don't have a sense of humor about people making fun of them. Who do they think they are anyway?

I certainly don't speak for butterstick, but I think he or or she is talking about the attempts, mentioned at the end of the article, of the Nixon campaign to "mimic Tuck's pranks". Which resulted in:

Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers imputing sexual misconduct to Hubert Humphrey and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included language denigrating blacks.

That's not funny, it's just pathetic and gross.
posted by cmonkey at 12:03 PM on August 8, 2008

Yeah, cmonkey is right. It's difficult for Republicans to actually make fun of people, because it's very difficult to hide how much you actually hate someone while you're trying to make fun of them.
posted by roll truck roll at 12:25 PM on August 8, 2008

Yeah, see, the problem is that the CRP (or CREEP, depending on who's doing the acronyming) did many of the same tricks more viciously. Like, for example, giving out the wrong train schedules, or you know, breaking into the Watergate.
posted by klangklangston at 12:27 PM on August 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

There was a popular graffito "Dick Nixon Before he Dicks You"
posted by lathrop at 12:31 PM on August 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

I've always called that maneuver the "Jame Gumb".

Oh, I'm sorry, you're talking about something else.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:54 PM on August 8, 2008

See, that's why I liked Bob Dole so much. He actually had a sense of humor.
posted by Eekacat at 2:30 PM on August 8, 2008

Was the word "dick" not a euphemism for penis back in the 60's?

It has become a euphemism for "Republican" since the Newt Gingrich era.
posted by Daddy-O at 3:28 PM on August 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

On a related note, long-time prankster and hoaxster Alan Abel (more about him here) also "got" Nixon: if one goes to the timeline of his hoaxes, one reads how in 1974 Mr. Abel posed as a former White House employee who had in his possession the infamous 18-and-a-half minute gap missing from the Watergate tapes. When Alan played the tape for the room packed full of eager reporters and cameramen, he acted shocked when his tape had also been mysteriously erased.
posted by ornate insect at 6:31 PM on August 8, 2008

When a huge shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters to be distributed at various ethnic rallies in New York City, Nixon's campaign manager, remembering the 1962 incident with the Chinese signs, ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (he hadn't)

Wait, what? That doesn't make sense at all. Buttons don't just "arrive" - the Nixon campaign must have ordered them, and presumably confirmed the translation before ordering them. It should have been trivially easy to make sure that the text on the buttons matched what was ordered. And this was 6 years after 1962! Mmmm, urban legendalicious...
posted by bakerybob at 8:44 PM on August 8, 2008

I'm surprised no one's mentioned that Dick Tuck confessed publically that he never pulled the pranks attributed to him. I have a copy of Neil Steinberg's book If At All Possible, Involve A Cow: the Book of College Pranks, and he interviews Tuck in chapter 9.


Initially, Steinberg planned to feature Tuck as an example of college prankery at it's finest. But when he attempted to verifty some of Tuck's pranks via independent sources, he kept coming up empty. Steinberg contacted Tuck again for assistance--he just wanted the name of someone who might have attended the campaign appearance Tuck claimed to have arranged for Nixon at UC-Santa Barbara in 1950. That's when Tuck expressed alarm at Steinberg's focus on "the truth": "I think the story is more important than the truth." Under further questioning from Steinberg, Tuck confessed that he'd made all of his stories up.


Tuck's stories are all very cute, but in the end he's just another Hugh Troy. I've never understood why the press continues to promote his legend a decade or more after he came clean. Tuck caved so easily when asked to provide a few concrete details about his lies, that I'm amazed he's still able to dine out on his legend. Even Nixon held out longer when busted.
posted by magstheaxe at 4:48 AM on August 18, 2008