Dick Tuck - Pranks

Pranks

Tuck first met Richard Nixon as a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck stated, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit." Tuck agreed and launched his first prank against Nixon. He rented a big auditorium, invited only a small number of people, and gave a long-winded speech to introduce the candidate. When Nixon came on stage, Tuck asked him to speak about the International Monetary Fund. When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."

Tuck's most famous prank against Nixon is known as "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles. At the campaign stop, a backdrop of children holding "welcome" signs in English and Chinese was set up. As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?" The sign was a reference to an unsecured $205,000 loan that Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald. Nixon grabbed a sign and, on camera, ripped it up. (Later, Tuck learned, to his chagrin, that the Chinese characters actually spelled out “What about the huge loan?”)

After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who put on a Nixon button and embraced the candidate in front of TV cameras. She said, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."

Tuck is credited with waving a train out of the station while Nixon was still speaking, but he denies committing this prank. The prank became a Trivial Pursuit question, but cannot be attributed to Tuck. Tuck has said he did wear a conductor's hat and waved to the engineer, but that the train stayed put. He also played similar pranks against Barry Goldwater in 1964. He was dubbed by one newspaper, "the Democrat Pixie of 1964."

In 1968, Tuck utilized Republican nominee Nixon's own campaign slogan against him; he hired a very pregnant African-American woman to wander around a Nixon rally in a predominantly white area, wearing a T-shirt that said, "Nixon's the One!"