The Nation: The Man Who Bugged Nixon

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.

When Nixon ran against Pat Brown for Governor of California in 1962, Tuck popped up everywhere like a bad sprite. Nixon would no sooner throw him off the campaign train than he would sneak back on again. At a rally in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, Tuck gave a banner to some children, who waved it aloft when Nixon appeared. “Let’s have a picture,” the candidate suggested. At that point, some of the Chinese happened to read the inscription, WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN?—a reference to the $205,000 that Howard Hughes had lent Nixon’s brother Donald. In a rage, Nixon tore up the banner before TV cameras.

At the 1964 G.O.P. National Convention, Tuck wandered around creating havoc by spreading phony stories about rival candidates and setting one against another—a tactic not too far removed from some of Segretti’s machinations. Once Barry Goldwater was nominated, he replaced Nixon as Tuck’s chief victim. The prankster smuggled a comely girl onto the Goldwater train; every six hours until she was caught, she put out a newsletter ridiculing the campaign. Two years later, Tuck turned serious about politics—or so it seemed. He ran for the California state senate. He professed to be mortally afraid that Nixon would endorse him. In fact, Nixon sent him a good-humored letter threatening to return to California to vote. After he lost, Tuck gave a concession speech: “The people have spoke—the bastards.”

He became subdued. In 1972 he attached himself to the McGovern campaign, but only halfheartedly. McGovern did not seem to appreciate a good joke much more than Nixon. When the President and some fat cats were about to pay a visit to John Connally’s ranch, Tuck proposed sending a Brink’s armored car to the scene followed by a Mexican laundry truck. But the McGovernites vetoed the suggestion.

Just when the prankster’s bag of tricks was practically empty, the White House decided to imitate him. There was talk of “developing a Dick Tuck capability.” Says Tuck: “It sounded like a missile strike. It dawned on me that they would probably have given the job to Lockheed, gone through two cost overruns and the thing still wouldn’t fly.” Crash it did. Recently Tuck and Haldeman came face to face in the Capitol. “You started all of this,” said the ex-chief of staff of the White House. Replied Tuck: “Yeah, Bob, but you guys ran it into the ground.” It is true that, after Watergate, political tricks may never be funny again.