Reported by the Washington Post:
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 Nixon for decades, died May 28 at an assisted-living center in Tucson. He was 94….
Tuck’s bedevilment of Nixon began in 1950, when a teacher clueless about his political preferences asked him to set up an upcoming Nixon speech. He set it up, all right — in the biggest available venue, scheduled at a time when the campus would be fairly empty. After providing Nixon with a long-winded introduction calculated to bore the few people who showed up, he left the candidate to flounder in a stone-cold room.
This was but the first of many stunts in a career that also included a considerable amount of more conventional organizational work for Democratic candidates.
I don’t know what his life and faculties were like in his final years, but I do hope that he was aware of this bit of performance art by his modern-day successors.
Dick Tuck, RIP.