Word: pranksterism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
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...
...have time for him, they are busy fighting. His mother, dyed cheap blonde, is overworked; fatigue has robbed her of her patience and made her shrewish. His home is cramped and dreary with dirt. His school teachers are rigidly middle class, authoritarian and intolerant; his classmates tell on his prankster efforts to escape ennui. Harvard Square...
...impudence, a charge that was to be echoed throughout his life. In Canberra Grammar, he was classed as industrious but not brilliant, good in English and Latin, terrible in math and, again, impudent. At Sydney University, where he studied arts and law, he was known as a prankster. In his first role as Prime Minister, he played Neville Chamberlain in a 1940 student skit. Stepping to the footlights in a bowler and carrying an umbrella, he said: "I have seen their leader and I have his reply." Pulling the inevitable collegiate roll of toilet paper from his pocket, he added...