In the election for California State Senator in 1966, candidate Richard ’Dick’ Tuck put up billboard signs that read, “The job needs Tuck and Tuck needs the job,” and for some reason, he didn’t win the election. When the ballots were nearly counted and it was looking bad for the Democrat Tuck, (he took only 10% of the vote) he quipped, you “just wait till the dead vote comes in” and ended his concession speech by saying, “The people have spoken, the bastards.” Losing to Republican George Danielson, a former FBI man and assistant DA who in 1970 was elected to the first of six terms in the US House of Representatives, Danielson then served on the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon’s impeachment trial — voting in favor of three articles of impeachment against Nixon, so how’s them apples?
After that ‘66 election loss, while working on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign team in ‘68 Dick Tuck was there when RFK was shot in Los Angeles and rode in the ambulance with the dying RFK as he was rushed to the hospital. Years before, Richard Nixon had become obsessed with the fellow Californian Tuck, recorded on the White House tapes, Nixon, speaking to H. R. Haldeman about Donald Segretti and his involvement in the Watergate break-in said, “Dick Tuck did that to me! Let’s get out what Dick Tuck did!” Truth be told, Richard Nixon came to actually like and admire Dick Tuck and his obsession was mutual: as he celebrated his 90th birthday in 2014, Tuck released a statement to the press proposing August 9th, (the day in 1974 that Nixon resigned) to be memorialized as a national holiday called ‘Nixmas.’ Nixon said Segretti’s efforts as a dirty trickster — including the forging a letter on the stationery of US Vice-Presidential candidate Ed Muskie bad mouthing Black folks — weren’t up to Tuck’s pranks. On the tape, Nixon calls Segretti “a little bit on the stupid side” and his efforts “half-assed,” not having Tuck’s pluck, Haldeman called Segretti’s Plumbers, “a very immature kind of operation, obviously…”
Trump’s dirty trickster Roger Stone was Segretti’s coffee boy way back in those days, just an apprentice plumber in training, before he got the Nixon tattoo emblazoned on his back for life, but Nixon knew the whole operation was a shit show: “… Shows what a master Dick Tuck is,” the president replied to Haldeman in a conversation taped March 13, 1973 “Segretti’s hasn’t been a bit similar.” “Nixon was an admirer,” Tuck admitted, “He had a kind of a love-hate relationship with his paranoia.” Tuck lived mortgage-free in Richard Nixon’s head his whole life and yet he was also one of the few people on Earth who could admit truthfully that Hunter S. Thompson, “shot a pistol at my wedding.” A political prankster of the first order, Tuck’s methods were usually met with a giggle and his gags were handled with panache — and always with the purpose of winning arguments and elections. “I always used to hate the word ‘prank,’” Tuck was once quoted saying, “I don’t consider the Boston Tea Party a prank. Rather, it was a staged event with an important political message.” Egged limos and staged violence in which Tuck was accused of were ultimately traced back to the Republicans themselves, as has proven to be a thing with them.
“He’s saying the riot in San Jose was my doing, but it was his doing.”
Tuck was a former US Marine who served in WWII in a bomb disposal unit, and the joke goes that he went on to a life setting political bombs, blown up in the faces of various hapless Republican candidates, some diffused by smarter Republicans, others hilariously not. Perhaps his most creative put-on was his first, while Tuck was in college, a then California Rep. Nixon’s team contacted his school because Tricky Dick wanted to hold a political rally on the campus and the school put him in touch with an ‘advance man’ none other than the merry prankster, Richard Tuck, to take care of everything. Madness ensued. Actually, very little madness ensued because after Tuck scheduled the rally with the Nixon team, he booked a huge room but then he didn’t advertise the event, and when Nixon arrived to deliver his speech to a nearly empty hall, Tuck informed him that — for educational purposes — Nixon needed to talk exclusively about the International Monetary Fund, which Nixon dutifully started to do, not realizing until much later that he’d been had by Tuck for the first of dozens of times in the following decades. But what Tuck helped bring into the world, Richard Nixon and the Republicans would soon weaponize:
Segretti inspired Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who in the ’80s and ’90s would run dirty-tricks-driven campaigns for Republicans that helped birth the bloodthirsty and post-epistemological political moment in which we now find ourselves. What is the Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe — with his pimp suits, his fuzzy handcuffs and his suspiciously edited videos — but a Dick Tuck without the wit?
As the late, great, former Speaker of the House Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill famously once said, “all politics is local,” and to truly appreciate how this brand of big-city political skulduggery truly began in America, let’s start here in Boston, Massachusetts. Now, one could easily begin a story about political dirty tricks and rat-fucking with the granddaddy of graft in America, ‘Boss’ William Marcy Tweed, the big-boned inventor of the most corrupt style of big-city machine politics that swept across the country by 1900, with Tweed and ‘Tammany Hall’ in New York City the prime example of unmitigated graft, greed and corruption in American politics, however Boston’s brand of the Democratic Party rat-fuck displayed a little more finesse à la Dick Tuck, Boston Ward Boss Martin Lomasney, for example, had a love of politics and people, especially his constituents in Boston’s old Ward Eight in what is now referred to as ‘West Boston,’ where Boston Garden (today called the TD BankNorth Garden by tourists) sits on land once owned by Marty Lomasney, right next to Lomasney Way.
Martin Lomasney was an old-school, Boston Irish politician the likes of which many local politicians would emulate, but few would ever attain his level of soft power. His signature brand of retail politics set the cast for what a decent city boss would look like in America for the next 100 years, he was born in County Mayo in Ireland during the Great Famine, from where his family had moved to Boston in 1850 to escape the intentional British hate crime. Lomasney then lost his parents and sister to TB while he was still a child and he and his brother were thrown onto the streets of pre-Civil War Boston, where the only social services available to working people back then was the Catholic Church. He was hired to work for Ward Boss Mike Hall, soon rewarded for his muscle and ‘tenacity’ with a patronage job as a lamplighter, thus given the golden key to rise above the street poverty that he was born into, to a life of respectability among the Boston ‘Brahmins.’
Lomasney made the most of his opportunities in life by understanding how the American political system really worked. Even though he wasn’t a saint, (accused of violence more than once) he did attend church every Sunday and he never took a drink of booze, but more than anything, he knew how to deliver exactly enough votes to pass any legislation he deemed necessary, not necessarily through overt physical intimidation, but more significantly with clearly pointed and intelligent suggestions. He welcomed Irish immigrants just off the boat as did Boss Tweed in New York, same here in Boston where they were given an ideological roadmap to their new hometown with helpful suggestions about who was on their side in City Hall and whom they should vote for in the next local elections.
“Never write when you can speak. Never speak when you can nod.”
Lomasney was a master of the political dirty trick, he employed ‘mattress voters,’ ‘muscle men,’ ‘straw horses’ and the famous un-dead citizenry who would always vote their ghostly consciences for whomever Martin Lomasney had endorsed. He hated the term ‘Boss’ and preferred the more spiritual, affectionate nickname ’The Mahatma’ (first among Brahmins), coined by a local editorial cartoonist, but after bruising local elections were over, Lomasney was an honest and hard-working advocate for his community. He started one of the first democratic political clubs in America, the Hendricks Club (named after a long-forgotten Irish Republican), similar to the political clubs in Ireland and England that he knew about, with the Church providing the only other social services available to ordinary folks by calling in and distributing favors, jobs, housing, coal for heat in the winter, immigration assistance, influence in court cases, money for fledgling business ventures and when all was said and done: cash for funeral expenses.
Lomasney also kept a file in his office with compromising gossip and documented intelligence on all of his political enemies, which often times proved very useful in negotiation, believe it or not, and the Hendricks Club then became known as “a machine for getting votes,” with Lomasney’s political operation lending the American political machine its name before Tweed and from his base in Boston’s Eighth Ward (later Ward 5, then 3), he basically ran things in BeanTown for 50 years. Not that there weren’t a few bumps in the road, in 1894, Lomasney was shot in an unsuccessful assassination attempt, his assailant, a stupid and corrupt businessman named James Dunan blamed Lomasney for a dispute that he had with the Boston Board of Health, but Lomasney shook the murder attempt off and later shot back, (verbally) “People might not like their Aldermen, but they don’t think they should be shot without a fair trial.”
Lincoln Steffens from the NY Evening Post was a muckraking journalist known for investigating corruption in American government in a series of items he named “The Shame of the Cities,” and he came to Boston to spend some time with The Mahatma, but he found to his surprise a man who was an exception to the rule. Steffens said Lomasney was probably the best public servant he had ever met, scrupulously honest and wholly committed to his constituents. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote of Lomasney that, “He lived a simple, low-key life, renting a small apartment and wearing the same old battered straw hat year round, but to the people of the West End he was a God. Arriving early each morning at his headquarters, Lomasney worked 365 days a year, caring for ‘his’ people in all phases of their lives.”
“The most corrupt politician in history”
One of Martin Lomasney’s earliest political rivals was a Boston attorney by the name of Daniel Coakley, the personification of the ‘Dapper Dan,’ he was a well-dressed con-man and erstwhile politician from the Boss Tweed school, his days kept busy shaking down unwitting marks and the occasional blackmail, greasing palms of those on the take and also a ‘frenemy’ of some of the most notorious and corrupt Mayors of Boston, especially James Michael Curley, who was once elected to office while cooling his heels in jail. Dapper Dan Coakley started out as a train conductor on the Cambridge Street Railway Company, at night he filled in as a bartender in Haymarket Square, but after he was caught repeatedly stealing carfares he was shit-canned by the trolley company for ‘negligence’ and after that he moved to New York where went to work as a reporter for the New York Sun. The following year he returned to Boston as sports reporter for the Boston Herald, read and appreciated by local fans for his snarky barbs and profanity, he also made a local name for himself as an (on the take) boxing referee. Like his brother, he became a lawyer and years later in the 1940s was responsible, with the use of a fake Catholic priest, for corruptly arranging a pardon for Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the future ‘Don’ of the New England ‘La Cosa Nostra,’ working out of Providence, Rhode Island.
Coakley first made headlines way back in 1909 as the lawyer for William J. ‘Big Bill’ Keliher, who was convicted of looting of the National City Bank of Cambridge. Dapper Dan and Big Bill had a bit of a ‘kerfuffle’ in Coakley’s law office and the Cambridge police had to be called in to forcibly remove Big Bill from Coakley’s office, Bill was later sentenced to 18 years for jury tampering but not before he accused Coakley of accepting $23,000 in tainted money and further claimed from prison that he had paid off his lawyer to bribe the US District Attorney as well as jury members. Coakley also tangled with the other legendary Mayor of Boston, John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, (grandfather of JFK), Coakley went against him after Fitzy testified in court against one of Coakley’s guilty clients as part of an investigation into corruption during Fitzgerald’s first term as mayor. Shortly after that indignity, a woman nicknamed ‘Toodles,’ a blonde bombshell who lived at a gambling joint known as the ‘Ferncroft Inn’ stopped into Coakley’s office for some lawyerly advice. Seems her boss, a guy named Henry Mansfield had taught her how to read marked cards, operate a rigged roulette wheel and perform other various cons while he was paying Toodles $75 a week plus expenses while getting sweet on her, eventually giving her expensive gifts and taking her on lavish trips while signing her into cruises and hotels as his wife, natch. He promised to marry Toodles, but unfortunately, he was already married and he didn’t, so Elizabeth ‘Toodles’ Ryan ended up hiring the corrupt attorney Dan Coakley to represent her in a lawsuit against her former boss for breach of contract.
It was then that Toodles unwittingly revealed to Coakley that she had sucked face with Coakley’s freshest enemy: John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald at the Ferncroft. After the trial, which she lost, Toodles had the last word on the courthouse steps, saying, “I wouldn’t marry that fat old slob anyway,” to LOL reporters, then Coakley ran flat out back to his office and used the privileged info he had received about Honey Fitz, selling it out to Fitzgerald’s #1 political rival: the rogue Mayor James Michael Curley. Together, Coakley and Curley sent a letter revealing the affair directly to Fitzgerald’s wife, after which Curley snarked in public that he planned to deliver a series of public lectures, including one called, “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles.” The “Toodles affair” as it would be called in the history books would ultimately sink Honey Fitz’s political career as he quietly dropped out of that 1913 mayoral race, which Curley then promptly went on to win by a landslide.
“My candidacy was likely to result in the election of an enemy.”
Daniel Coakley was one of those people who found the devious way of life more exciting and better suited to their bad temperament. Clever enough to have made an honest fortune, he was a proud con-man and blackmailer, always spinning the double deal and turning the tables. Coakley’s most salacious and brazen con was probably the shaking down of Hollywood silent-film actor Fatty Arbuckle two years before Arbuckle was charged with killing an aspiring actress in one of the most high profile murder trials in US history, but Coakley’s most well-known case, the one with the most press ramifications that intimately tied to the Arbuckle case, concerned the ‘Mishawum Manor,’ a house of dubious services rendered nightly in the Town of Woburn, Massachusetts (then a fairly seedy suburb of Boston) run by the Madam ‘Brownie’ Kennedy (no relation).
One fine day back in 1917, a group of famous movie moguls, among them Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky, gave a dinner for the rising film star Fatty Arbuckle at Boston’s swanky Copley Plaza Hotel. After the dinner, the men left the man of honor and went to another ‘party’ with their party of about fifteen bigwigs to the ‘Manor,’ where Brownie and her girls were eagerly awaiting them, but somehow a photographer also happened to be at the Manor and what followed, in the language of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, was “an orgy of drink and lust…” “[A] debauch in a bawdy house …” and, most pungently, “[A] stench in the nostrils of common decency.” Apparently, before the movie men left the fair City of Boston the morning following the party, they gave Brownie a check for $1,200 (them’s pre-WWI dollars) but a few days later came the real bill of lading, they were informed that they might be indicted on a series of trumped-up bunko charges. Dapper Dan giddily relayed the news to them by Hizzoner Mayor Curley, who personally put through the telephone call to the lawyers for the movie studios, who promptly met with Coakley and paid him $100,000 large to have the party largely forgotten. ‘Poof.’ Before magically reappearing in the press shortly thereafter. ‘Un-poof.’
In 1920 Coakley, believe it or not, served as Charles effin’ Ponzi’s attorney, (the man for whom the damned corrupt scheme was named), Coakley raked in $25,000-a-year from Charlie Ponzi in bogus legal fees while Coakley took part in countless other extortion schemes for which he was ultimately disbarred in 1922 for deceit, malpractice, and gross misconduct — but that didn’t dissuade him in 1925 to run for Mayor of Boston — and he finished fourth, then he ran again in 1929 but finished that time with only 1% of the vote. He ran for a third pathetic time in ‘33, but he did drop out of that race, however Coakley’s purpose in all three campaigns was really just to siphon away votes from James Michael Curley, who it seems eventually turned on him as well, so even in defeat, Coakley found a way to win.
So, it’s no surprise that John F. Kennedy and his father Joseph P. Kennedy had to play the well-worn Boston political game to get JFK elected to political office for the first time, Papa Kennedy enlisted a not-so-random Boston janitor who also happened to have the same name as young JFK’s most formidable opponent in the ‘46 Massachusetts Congressional race, a guy by the name of Joe Russo. It turned out the the ‘straw man’ wasn’t needed in the election after all and JFK won the Democratic nomination easily over the two Joe Russos, but Kennedy’s reputation as a do-anything-it-takes-to-win politician was born in Boston and would dog him in the election for president, where Richard Nixon would go on to challenge the 1960 election results after he lost, dragging on months after losing the presidential election to JFK, tarnishing Kennedy’s victory and possibly helping to lead to Kennedy’s demise (more on that later), yet the massive chip on Nixon’s shoulder that would finally result in Watergate would lead directly to Nixon’s own fall from grace, after he became the first and only US President to resign in the face of impeachment, so’s how’s them lemons?
Which takes us back to ‘Ol Tricky Dick… Tuck, hired by JFK to work on that 1960 presidential campaign because Bobby and John needed a tough, smart political operative who knew how to get under Nixon’s skin, and Tuck had experience as a proven attack dog and Democratic political operative for California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate election (which Gahagan Douglas lost to Nixon), she had hired Tuck to her campaign team to spice things up, and with Nixon’s response the election would become a symbol of modern political skulduggery (ah, the nostalgia), as both Gahagan Douglas’ Democratic primary opponent as well as the Republican nominee Nixon called her “pink right down to her underwear,” insinuating mysterious Communist sympathies (and some other weird shit). Gahagan Douglas was married to the great Hollywood actor Melvin Douglas (who played the role of adviser to the US President in Hal Ashby’s great film, Being There (1978), she ran for the Democratic Party nomination in the primary against Manchester Boddy, the owner and publisher of the LA News, after a hard-hitting, lowballing campaign she defeated him and then the incumbent Democrat Sheridan Downey in an equally knock-down, drag out fight for the nomination, and naturally during the general election Nixon kept up Boddy’s line of attack as Nixon’s campaign manager, Murray Chotiner had 500,000 flyers printed on sheets of pink paper. From the Wikipedia:
Chotiner explained, “The purpose of an election is not to defeat your opponent, but to destroy him.” In a race that was remembered as one of the most vicious in California political history, Nixon’s charges were intentionally directed towards the assassination of Gahagan Douglas’s character. He implied that she was a Communist “fellow traveler” by comparing her votes to those of Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York (a pro-Soviet member of the American Labor Party), and deployed anti-Semitic surrogates to call on voters to reject her because her husband, Melvyn, was Jewish. Gahagan Douglas, in return, popularized a nickname for Nixon (apparently coined by Manchester Boddy) which became one of the most enduring nicknames in American politics: “Tricky Dick”.
Both Democrats who ran against Helen Gahagan Douglas endorsed the Republican Richard Nixon, of all people, while even ‘friend’ and fellow US Rep. John F. Kennedy had quietly donated money to Nixon’s campaign against the Irish-American Gahagan Douglas to ingratiate himself with the eventual winner. Nixon won that election with more than 59% of the vote and Gahagan Douglas’ political career came to a bitter end, but she got the last word as her love affair with future president, Democrat LBJ, was an open secret on Capitol Hill.
“Facebook and digital targeting were the most effective ways to reach the audiences”
Republicans are masters at whining about how the Democrats do something they don’t like, then they flip the script and do the exact same thing but more efficiently, with a bit more mean-spiritedness and a whiff of violence. Lately, the usual conservative attack on cancel culture has now morphed into the Republicans actually canceling everything from Disney World to Bud Light and with that power, and in politics dirt is money, especially when effectively used against opponents, anyone who has ever heard of a guy named Hunter Biden might know that dirt equals millions of dollars worth of political effort, wasted capital in this case, but you get the picture. The Democrats participate in this dirty game as well, and probably began the modern trend, practiced most effectively by Democratic players in the past 35 years by political operatives such as Dick Morris, James Carville, Mark Penn and Bob Shrum. Sleaze is part and parcel of politics and that’s nothing new, but what is a bit new, at least since Nixon’s reign, are the blatantly illegal smears and planted disinformation which the Republican Party has clearly embraced more than the Democrats and since Watergate, it’s now pumped up on steroids with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and his vast Russian disinformation network in the wings.
In 1972, Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton was revealed to be bipolar just before the US Presidential election and the Democratic nominee McGovern had to unceremoniously dump him after the campaign had received an ‘anonymous’ call to look into Eagleton’s medical history. Also in 1972, a non-existent New Hampshire citizen (actually a staffer in the White House working for Donald Segretti) wrote to the editor of the Manchester Union Leader accusing Muskie of using a derogatory word to describe French Canadians, the letter was written by Kenneth Clawson, an aide working for Segretti, but by chance the newspaper editor apparently insulted Muskie’s wife and the candidate appeared to cry during a press conference – snowflakes were blamed – but the damage was done and Nixon went on to win every state in the Union except the Great Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Less than twenty years later, there’s CREEP coffee boy Roger Stone in his flashy suit, banging on the Palm Beach County Courthouse glass windows during the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000, ten years after that Stone drafts Trump to run for president and what do you know, in 2016 a company by the name of Cambridge Analytica makes headlines, accused of misusing the personal data of up to 50 million Americans on Facebook (ah, the nostalgia) as part of political consulting work that included Trump’s 2016 campaign. Also from the Washington Post:
The company suspended British CEO Alexander Nix for making claims about bribing politicians and entrapping them by ‘sending some girls’ over [to ‘lobby’ them]. Nix was banned from running a company for seven years in 2020 after links to unethical behavior included bribery, honey trap stings, voter disengagement campaigns, obtaining information to discredit political opponents, and spreading information anonymously in political campaigns. Rather than apologize, Trump seemed to gloat about using Cambridge Analytica to beat Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Cambridge Analytica research director Chris Wylie alleged that Steve Bannon signed off on nearly $1 million to obtain data, including from the ‘dark web’ and Facebook. “We had to get Bannon to approve everything at this point. Bannon was Alexander Nix’s boss.” Bannon, Nix, Rebekah Mercer, and billionaire Robert Mercer met in Rebekah Mercer’s Manhattan apartment in the fall of 2013, striking a deal in which Robert Mercer would fund the creation of Cambridge Analytica with $10 million in seed funding according to election records, which then saw the Trump campaign pay the firm as it’s only client $6 million bucks. “We found that Facebook and digital targeting were the most effective ways to reach the audiences,” Trump’s son-in-law told Forbes Magazine in a post-election interview.
Make no mistake, these same sleazy techniques are being employed today by the 2024 Trump campaign team while the Democrats are relegated to sending out trillions and quadrillions of emails begging for money in response, instead of trying out a few of the well-worn and harmless techniques that were so successfully employed by the great Dick Tuck against the not-so-great Dick Nixon. Has anyone heard that Paul ‘effing’ Manafort was back on Trump’s campaign team? Pardon me? And speaking of pardons, if Steve Bannon is so effin smart and made millions investing heavily in Seinfeld or some such shit, after getting a presidential get-out-of-jail-free card, he finds himself BACK in jail (for Contempt of Congress this time??) while awaiting the SmartMatic voting machine trial???, which unlike every other Trump trial is ON before the election at the end of September!
The Lincoln Project did great work in the last election cycle, utilizing Dick Tuck’s brand of good-natured political theater, but Twitter is now Musk-X and they’ve been sidelined this time around, not to mention the sex scandal of one the founding members of the Project, but Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson are still seriously funny guys and smart political operatives that are expert in this area, but it seems that now that Dave Barry is retired and Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke are gone, Hollywood, as usual, is the only media left with anything witty or funny to say about politics lately anymore, yes, thank the Good Lord for Stephen Colbert every weeknight and Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and John Oliver and Lewis Black are still great, but it was a film in the last election, Sasha Baron Cohen’s brilliant Borat (2020) that he duped Rudy Giuliani to hilarious effect, the once-respected, former ‘America’s Mayor’ would famously graduate to the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference and it just so happens that I ran into Rudy this summer — it was kind of surreal as I headed to Harvard’s Lamont Library — there he was being interviewed by some kid with an iPhone while standing on Quincy Street in Harvard Square. As I walked by him, all I could hear him say were the words, “Communists” and “The Democrats.” You’d think someone other than some snot-nosed, Harvard kid would also want to talk to Mr. Giuliani just before the election, and perhaps someone might call him in for an interview or something in the next couple of months and my humble guess is that his calendar is free and he would make for hilarious, free media for some enterprising political satirist. And what about “Laura Loomer?”
‘Nuff said.
Carl Holt
September 16, 2024
Friday 