It may be that Dick Tuck has angered Richard Nixon as much as any other man alive. As relentlessly as Inspector Javert trailed Jean Valjean, as doggedly as Caliban followed Prospero, as surely as a snowball seeks a top hat, Prankster Tuck stalked his quarry from one campaign to the next. "Keep that man away from me," Nixon ordered his staff, who were seldom able to oblige. Ultimately, Nixon paid his adversary the highest compliment: in the 1972 campaign, the White House decided to employ a Dick Tuck of its own. As H.R. Haldeman testified last week, Donald Segretti was hired to adopt Tuck's techniques and use them against the Democrats.
If Segretti was really only meant to be a G.O.P. Tuck, he surely got out of hand. He is currently awaiting trial on charges of distributing a false letter on Edmund Muskie's stationery accusing Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey of sexual misconduct. However dubious some of his antics, Tuck was usually aboveboard. "I was not surreptitious," Tuck insists. "I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer."
Tuck, who was born in Arizona and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was always interested in politics, though not very seriously. "There are ski bums and tennis bums," says Tom Saunders, an old friend. "Tuck is a politics bum." But he knew what he liked and what he did not. Richard Nixon fell into the second category. As Tuck recalls it, the pair first met in a classic encounter that would shape their future relationship. While a student at Santa Barbara, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in her 1950 campaign against Nixon for a seat in the U.S. Senate. "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest," says Tuck. "He asked me to advance a Nixon visit." With that opportunity, Tuck's career of pranksterism was launched. He hired a big auditorium, invited only a handful of people and introduced the candidate with a long-winded, soporific speech. Finally turning to Nixon, Tuck asked him to speak on the International Monetary Fund. At the end of the rally, Nixon asked Tuck: "What's your name again?" When told, the future President replied: "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."
That was only the first of many Tuck jokes to be played on Richard Nixon. In the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon flew to Memphis after his first television debate with John Kennedy. Greeting him as he left the airplane was an effusive matron wearing an oversize Nixon button; she flung her arms around him and commiserated: "Don't worry, son. Kennedy won last night but you'll do better next time." Nixon visibly paled, while sandwiched among the press corps, Tuck was laughing at the stunt he had improvised. One day Nixon was in the middle of a whistle-stop speech on his campaign train when it suddenly pulled out of the station. Tuck, donning a railman's cap, had signaled the engineer to start up.