Good Old Dirty Tricks?

Some Republicans last week seemed determined to equate the Watergate affair with a tradition of political dirty tricks almost as old as the ballot box itself. Indeed, some nasty pranks have become depressingly commonplace over the years--the stealing of candidates' stationery to issue scurrilous letters or phony press releases, the use of embarrassing out-of-context photos.

Some of it is even funny. One saboteur recently turned loose a box of live cockroaches in Republican headquarters at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel. Lyndon Johnson aides reportedly poured itching powder down the backs of demonstrators carrying anti-L.B.J. signs at his rallies--forcing them to drop their boards and scratch. Democrat Leo Marshall, seeking a seat on Pennsylvania's New Castle County Council in 1966, was the victim of someone who sent a flatbed truck carrying a black band and black semi-nude go-go girls into a conservative white ethnic neighborhood, noisily urging his election. He lost.

The most celebrated political prankster is Dick Tuck, a longtime California Democratic politician who has been unusually quiet this year. During Richard Nixon's 1962 campaign for Governor of California, Tuck donned a railman's cap and signaled the engineer of a Nixon train to pull out. Nixon, speaking at the rear, was in mid-sentence as he saw his crowd suddenly begin to recede. Tuck also filled some of Nixon's Chinese fortune cookies during the 1960 presidential campaign with slips saying "Kennedy will win."

But that kind of one-man activity is hardly in the Watergate's league. It is not the same as hiring former CIA agents to break into a party headquarters and install eavesdropping equipment. Nor is it the same as amassing a huge fund to finance political spying and disruption. Somewhere in the whole furtive, earnest enterprise, the fun of political prankstering disappeared. Bring back Dick Tuck.

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