News about Helen Gahagan Douglas

Richard Gregory 'Dick' Tuck (1924-2018) was a Democratic Party operative who made a career of political pranks, specialising in tormenting Richard Nixon. The pair first crossed paths in 1950 when Tuck was a Second World War veteran studying political science at the University of California , Santa Barbara. Tuck was working part-time for Helen Gahagan Douglas, a Democrat running against Nixon for the California senate seat. Nixon had tried to smear Douglas as a communist sympathiser. The university, unaware of the affiliation, unwittingly asked Tuck to organise Nixon's visit to the university. Tuck arranged for the unsuspecting candidate to speak in one of the largest auditoriums available and barely publicised the event. He introduced Nixon with a long-winded speech, then called the bemused Nixon to the microphone, saying the candidate would speak to the sparse audience about a topic 'all Californians care about, the International Monetary Fund '.