The Other Tricky Dick

NPR's Morning Edition had an interview today with political prankster, and self-appointed Nixon nemesis Dick Tuck. There hasn't been much fun in this presidential campaign, so let's look at some of Tuck's legendary stunts:

At the 1956 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where Nixon was running for reelection as vice president, Tuck discovered that the SF garbage trucks drove by the convention center on the way to the dump. So Tuck paid to have signs on the trucks that read "Dump Nixon."

In one campaign Nixon was doing a whistle-stop train tour. As he was getting warmed up in his stump speech, Tuck allegedly put on a conductor's cap and signaled the engineer, who then pulled the train out of the station, leaving the crowd behind.

In the 1968 presidential campaign, Tuck hired a group of very pregnant black women to picket a Nixon rally with signs reading "Nixon's The One!"

Tuck, now 80, lives in Arizona, and dresses pretty much as pictured above. His own slogan is, "The People Have Spoken, The Bastards."