I was just wondering. As part of preparations for 2023, which political party in Nigeria will produce a Dick Tuck, the man once described by New York Times as the US Democratic Party’s Political Prankster-in-Chief?
As a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Richard Gregory Duck launched what turned out to be a long and creative career as a consultant, strategist and campaign advance man for Democratic candidates in US elections. He first sharpened his skills in 1950 against Republican candidate for Senate Richard Nixon, a Congressman known for far-right anti-Communist rhetoric. Though a supporter of Democratic opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas, Tuck volunteered in Nixon’s campaign organization and was soon assigned as advance man for Nixon’s campaign rally at University of California.
Tuck went and hired a hall with 2,000-seat capacity, but so poorly advertised the event that only 23 people turned up for the rally. When Nixon arrived, Tuck gave a long and boring introductory speech that ensured that some people left the hall. He then invited the candidate to speak on, of all things, International Monetary Fund, a matter of least concern to Americans.
According to one account, “Nixon struggled through the disastrous evening and on his way out, he asked the advance man his name again. ‘Dick Tuck, sir.’ Nixon then said, “Dick Tuck, you have just made your last advance!”
Over the next three decades, Tuck carried out many more pranks against Republican candidates but he specialized in Richard Nixon. A day after the epochal US presidential election debates of 1960 at Memphis, Tennessee, Tuck hired a buxom woman wearing a huge Nixon campaign button. As soon as Nixon emerged from the studio, she hugged him and said loudly to the whirling TV cameras, “Don’t worry, son! Kennedy beat you tonight but you will get even next time!”
During a whistle-stop campaign tour, Nixon was speaking on a train’s platform when Dick Tuck donned a railway station man’s uniform and signaled to the train driver to pull off! Tuck also infiltrated a Nixon campaign dinner with millionaire donors and “donated” well wrapped cookies. As each dinner guest opened his own, a slip of paper fell out with the inscription, “Kennedy will win.”
In 1962 when Richard Nixon attempted a political comeback by running for Governor of California, he was campaigning in Los Angeles’ Chinatown when he saw smiling children raising a huge banner with an English language inscription, “Welcome, Nixon” and another inscription under it in Chinese. Nixon stopped his motorcade and said, “Let’s have a picture.” It turned out that Dick Tuck planted the children. The message in Chinese read, “How about the Hughes loan?” It was reference to a then fresh scandal, an unsecured $205,000 loan that reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes gave to Vice President Nixon’s younger brother, Donald in 1956.
Among many other pranks that he did, Tuck’s agents ensured that buses left ahead of schedule at Republican rallies, campaign trains made unscheduled stops, bands struck up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” lyric at a Republican rally, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson balloons floated up during a Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater campaign rally in 1964, and Tuck-planted men dressed in the uniform and helmets of Fire Service chiefs deliberately gave reporters an underestimate of crowds at Republican rallies.
Dick Tuck pulled pranks even on himself.
In 1966, he ran for a California Senate seat. He announced his candidacy in a cemetery, saying “No one, not even the dead, should be deprived of their voting rights!” As TV stations announced the results that night and Tuck was far behind, he told journalists, “Just wait till the cemetery votes come in.”
APC probably needs this kind of prankster, operating just on the edges of legality, instead of an acerbic-tongued FFK who makes the most vilifying allegations against perceived opponents, thoroughly heats up the polity, only to make a complete about turn and parade alongside the same people that he only recently vilified.
In contrast, Dick Tuck, who died in 2018 at the age of 94, never switched over and supported any Republican candidate, at any level, during his long sojourn as American politics’ number one prankster.
mmjega@21stcenturychronicle.com
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