Dick Tuck, the longtime Democratic political prankster who hounded late President Richard Nixon and was standing by Bobby Kennedy’s side when he was assassinated, died on Monday.
Tuck passed away at an assisted living facility in Tucson, Arizona, his friend Randi Dorman told the online newspaper Tucson Sentinel.
A political advisor to former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during his 1968 presidential run, Tuck was standing next to Kennedy when he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the Sentinel said.
While Tuck had worked as a Democratic operative for many years, his favorite target was Nixon, and he haunted the former vice president who was elected to two presidential terms before resigning in disgrace in 1974.
Arguably his most famous stunt against Nixon came while he was campaigning for California governor in 1962 in Los Angeles' Chinatown. At the campaign stop, Tuck quietly passed out signs to children that read "Welcome" in English on one side.
On the other side, it read in Chinese "What about the Hughes loan?" a reference to a controversial loan to Nixon's brother given by billionaire Howard Hughes, the Sentinel said. Learning of the sign, Nixon grabbed one of the signs and tore it up before the TV cameras.
The Sentinel said Tuck later learned that the sign actually read in Chinese "What about the huge loan?"
"It may be that Dick Tuck has angered Richard Nixon as much as any other man alive," Time magazine reported in 1973. "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," Time said.
Tuck was married to Faith Eversfield from 1944 to 1958 and married Joyce Daly in 1989. She died in 1995.
In the end, Tuck won praise from Republicans and others for off-the-cuff antics and left many yearning for the old days of political dirty tricks.
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