JIM TUCK
BIOGRAPHY
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Following graduation from Princeton in 1951, Jim Tuck served as a radio correspondent with the First Marine Air Wing in Korea. After a brief and unsatisfying exposure to the Madison Avenue rat race, he made the Big Break in 1958 and ever since has been a self-employed freelance writer.
Tuck's career can be divided into three parts. From the late fifties till the beginning of the seventies -- due to economic necessity -- his main area of concentration was in the men's magazine and exposé field. Having written (mainly under the pseudonym of "Irving O'Malley") for publications like Confidential, True Adventures, Climax and Whisper, Tuck winces as he recalls titles like "Veracruz -- Steaming Port of Call (Girls)," "The Day They Smeared Hitler's Massacre Battalion," "How Many Hollywood Playboys are Gay Boys?," and "I Am the Love Slave of a Voodoo Priestess." Whenever possible, Tuck turned his attention to the serious writing which was less lucrative, publishing articles in Catholic World, Negro Digest (today Black World) and several now defunct political and "little" magazines.
All the time Tuck was submitting travel articles and this ushered in the second phase of his career, when travel writing dominated his output. Affiliated with the Fodor Guides in a contributing capacity, Tuck served as a Regional Editor in Mexico between 1970-82 and as Area Editor for Romania between 1978-80. He wrote four original chapters of FODOR'S MEXICO, three of FODOR'S BUDGET MEXICO, and the Romania chapter of FODOR'S EASTERN EUROPE. For his work in Romania, he was awarded a "Diploma of Honour" by the Romanian government. Though this was the hated Ceausescu regime, Tuck points out that in those days Ceausescu was highly popular in the West because of his independent stance vis a vis the Soviet Union. (Among his friends and admirers were Richard Nixon, Pope Paul VI, King Hussein of Jordan and King Beaudoin of Belgium.) Tuck also produced travel material independently of the Fodor affiliation. Ranging from Morocco to China, he published articles in Newsday, the Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Houston Chronicle, Detroit News, San Diego Union, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Orange County Register and Norfolk Ledger-Star.
With the coming of the eighties, Tuck returned to his first love: historical writing. (He majored in history at college.) Beginning in 1982 he published six books of historical nonfiction. The first was a regional analysis of Mexico's Cristero Rebellion, the second an assessment of Pancho Villa and John Reed as representatives of the romantic tradition in revolution, the third a biography of Karl Radek, leading defendant of the 1937 Stalin Purge Trial, the fourth a study of the relationship between Senator Joe McCarthy and the Hearst press, the fifth an examination of the split in America's liberal community on the issue of collaboration with Communists and the sixth a focus on clergy who supported Soviet Communism between 1933, the year both Hitler and Roosevelt came to power, and 1953, the year Stalin died. (For full titles and more detailed information, check Jim Tuck's Home Page.) Particularly gratifying to Tuck were favorable comments about the McCarthy book from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Gore Vidal.
Beginning in 1991 Tuck wrote a column of opinion called "lnsight Straight," which appeared in two Mexico-based English-language publications. In April 1994 "Insight Straight" was syndicated by Continental News Service in San Diego. His grand total of non-book publications (articles, columns, essays, book reviews, etc.) passed the 1,200-mark.
Politically active, Tuck was associated with the liberal anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) since college days, when he served as vice-president of the Princeton chapter of Students for Democratic Action (ADA's campus affiliate). He founded and served four terms as president of ADA's only overseas chapter and was a member of ADA's national board. His book on the McCarthy era was dedicated to the "Tucson Two," a pair of teachers (both Princeton graduates and personal friends) who lost their jobs during the McCarthy madness. At the time, Tuck was active in a defense committee that unsuccessfully attempted to reverse the dismissal of the "Tucson Two."
Tuck's widow, the former Marķa Ruiz, lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
TO ANYONE READING THIS
The attached open letter is self-explanatory. If, after reading it, you are in sympathy with my design to unmask and demythologize the undeserving individual for whom the memorial fund is currently named and rename it to honor a great humanitarian like Dr. King, address letters, faxes and e-mail communications to the office of President Wright at Dartmouth. OPEN LETTER
November 10, 2000
President James Wright
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755Dear President Wright:
I'm making this an open letter, with appropriate media and Internet distribution, for reasons that will become apparent as you read on.
In 1989 I wrote President Freedman and requested that the S. Pinkney Tuck 1913 Memorial Fund be renamed for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I received a reply from a Mr. Thomas W. Soybel of the Legal Affairs and External Relations Department in which my request was denied. Unfortunately, intense pressure of work has made it impossible for me to pursue the matter further for some time. But now I find myself free to do so.
In his letter, Mr. Soybel made a reference to Pinkney Tuck's "distinguished" career. I believe it's time that you, the Dartmouth community and the general public, should have some accurate information about that career. As follows:
1) Pinkney Tuck was serving as American consul in Geneva at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, in 1927, there were massive demonstrations outside the Consulate. In the wake of these, Tuck issued a statement to the press that he had gone out, mingled with the rioters, and at one point shouted: "Give us the head of the American consul!" The story appeared in the New York Times and Time magazine, resulting in considerable favorable publicity for Tuck.
For the following reasons, there is absolutely no way that this could ever have happened. First, Tuck didn't speak good enough French to pass for a native Genevese. Second, Geneva in 1927 was a fairly small community and the American consul was a high profile figure. Somebody in the crowd would have recognized him. Third -- and nobody can blame him for this -- he never would have been so foolhardy as to go out into a hostile crowd and face a situation where he risked serious injury and perhaps even death. Fourth, he was never able to produce one single corroborative witness to this alleged feat of daring. What actually happened seems obvious. Tuck slipped away for an hour or so (he could have been hiding in the lavatory) and then came back and announced that he had gone out into the crowd and shouted the imprecation that sounds like something lifted from a Walter Scott novel. Conclusion: Pinkney Tuck exploited the judicial murder of two innocent men for the sake of a cheap, fraudulent and self-serving publicity stunt.
2) While serving at the Geneva post, Tuck was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct and vandalism, in the French designation being tapage nocturne. In the company of two local playboys, both Swiss nationals, Tuck participated in a drunken rampage in which property was destroyed and neighborhood residents annoyed by having their garbage cans knocked over. Tuck's companions in this escapade were a native Swiss named Horace de Pourtalès and a naturalized Swiss of U.S. origin named Frederick Bates. I believe this is the sole case on record of an American consul being arrested by police of his host country for engaging in behavior at the juvenile delinquent level. The only thing that saved Tuck's career was the fact that his father-in-law, my grandfather James M. Beck, had been solicitor general under Harding and Coolidge and therefore had a measure of influence in Republican political circles. Shortly after the incident, Tuck was quietly transferred to Czechoslovakia.
3) Tuck definitely had ties with organized crime. His contact -- or, perhaps more accurately, "control" -- was a mob figure named Blinky Palermo, the latter not to be confused with the German avant garde painter who appropriated his name. Blinky Palermo and a colleague, Frankie Carbo, exercised a strong influence in boxing during the 1940s and 1950s and Palermo would continually lavish on Tuck batches of prime tickets, 10 to 15 at a time, to championship fights and other major sporting events. Tuck never made any great secret of the relationship. On the contrary, he seemed proud to have a connection, however tenuous, with such a dangerously influential segment of our society. Whenever the tickets came through, I recall that he would wave them around in a sort of feverish triumph. I asked Tuck several times what he had done to merit these benefactions but his response was always supercilious and dismissive, typically: "It's nothing a parlor liberal like you would understand." Though I have no concrete proof, I suspect the service he rendered was money laundering. Tuck lived in Paris during fall and winter and in Geneva during spring and summer. This would put him in close proximity to two of Europe's leading financial centers. Another possiblity is that he was acting as a liaison between American organized crime and that bloc of corrupt French deputies traditionally controlled by the Corsican Mafia. Tuck had many friendships of this nature -- some going back to the days whjen he was stationed at Vichy and palling around with the Laval-de Chambrun clique. (Tuck's curious passivity in dealing with the notorious Franco-American collaborator Charles Bedaux is noted on p. 208 of Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy.)
Looking back on this distasteful episode, I can't help but feeing a grudging admiration for the masterful psychology displayed by Pinkney Tuck's organized crime manipulators. In selecting Blinky Palermo as his control, in making sure he always received 10 to 15 tickets rather than a smaller number, they made it possible for Tuck to fulfill his dearest wish and invite (as he always did) some of those Racquet Club-Brook Club types on whom he fawned so obsequiously. Then off they'd go to their ringside seats at the Joe Louis fight, the Rocky Graziano fight, the Jake La Motta fight. With his pliant servility to the Racquet Club-Brook Club WASP elitists, and his pliant servility to the elites of Hollywood and organized crime (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Blinky Palermo), Tuck puts me in mind of that repellent historical figure defined by Camille Paglia as the court hermaphrodite.
4) I recommend an investigation to determine if there was any connection between Pinkney Tuck's very sudden "resignation" as ambassador to Egypt in 1948 and an attack on him in Drew Pearson's column which preceded that "resignation." Though I never saw the column, I frequently heard Tuck raging about it. Apparently Pearson had charged that Tuck, à la Jonathan Pollard, was more interested with serving the interests of a foreign government (in this case Britain) than those of his own country. If so, such behavior would be completely consistent with an exaggerated and sycophantic anglophilia that was one of Tuck's defining characteristics and which he carried to the extent of affecting a British accent -- though he was born on Staten Island. (One derives wry amusement from imagining conversations between Blinky Palermo and a prancing pseudo-English-accented poseur like Pinkney Tuck.) I also find it significant that Tuck's "resignation" from the Cairo post was almost immediately followed by his being appointed a director of the Suez Canal Company. The Suez board was then completely controlled by the British and French and this plum could well have been a reward for services rendered.
I rest my case. Whatever my feelings about this individual, the fact remains that I am legally his closest surviving relative. So I feel that my wishes in this matter should be respected. I therefore once again direct that the name of the "S. Pinkney Tuck 1913 Memorial Fund" be changed to the "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Fund."
Like Martin, President Wright, I have a dream. It is a dream of a memorial fund at Dartmouth, a fund named after a man of the moral grandeur of Dr. King and no longer tainted by the name of Blinky Palermo's errand boy -- a figure whose character was so conspicuously lacking in content.
Very truly yours,
Jim Tuck
Distribution:
The Dartmouth
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