Dick Tuck, political operative who pranked Nixon, dies at 94
Source: Portland Press Herald
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 M. Nixon for decades, died May 28 at an assisted-living center in Tucson, Arizona. 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, Indiana, 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.
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Read more: https://www.pressherald.com/2018/05/30/dick-tuck-political-operative-who-pranked-nixon-dies-at-94/
= new reply since forum marked as read
From the OP link - this story is hilarious -
At the time, Tuck was a World War II 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 absent-minded 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.
https://www.pressherald.com/2018/05/30/dick-tuck-political-operative-who-pranked-nixon-dies-at-94/
Now it seems standard that GOPers give "disjointed" speeches.
Dick Tuck is an American political consultant, writer, campaign strategist, advance man, political candidate and the nemesis of Richard Nixon. Tuck worked on many political campaigns for national and California Democrats, including Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Richard Hatcher, Pat Brown and Jerry Brown. He was editor of the Reliable Source, an informal newspaper published for many years during Democratic Party conventions and Political Editor for the National Lampoon. Tuck resides in Tucson, Arizona.
Early Life
Tuck was born in Hayden, Arizona January 25, 1924. His father, Frank J. Tuck, was a Harvard University graduate who helped pioneer the Arizona copper industry, managing mines in Arizona for Kennecott Copper. Dick is the youngest of the four Tuck brothers.
Tuck is known for his well-rounded secondary education, having completed a "tour" of four of the finest Jesuit schools in the West, including
• St. John's Military Academy, Los Angeles, CA
• Campion Jesuit High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
• Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California
• Loyola High School in Los Angeles, California.
WWII Pearl Harbor was attacked just a few weeks before Tuck's 18th birthday, and he enlisted in the Marines. Having spent many of his boyhood summers in Southern California, Tuck has a great love for aquatic activities like surfing and skin diving. Tuck's basic training aptitude tests returned very high scores in the mental and physical skills required for disarming unexploded bombs and other explosives, so after receiving advanced training from the British, Tuck joined the Navy's 1st Mobile Explosive Investigation Unit (MEIU). In Britain, Tuck was taught how to combine CO2 fire extinguisher snow with pure distilled alcohol to freeze a bomb's electric fuse, thus rendering it inoperable. For this use the unit carried with it a 40 gallon tank of alcohol. Coincidentally, the alcohol was safe for human consumption in small quantities with orange juice. Thus, Tuck spent the war touring the South Pacific dealing with the messy explosive offal of war.
More: http://dicktuck.com/bio.html
I knew of his reputation as a prankster but little else.
And in reading that I remember hearing of his campaign slogan "The Job Needs Tuck and Tuck Needs the Job"