The Committee to Keep Dick Tasting

Anyone who has researched at a presidential library knows that presidents get a lot of weird mail. When I was conducting research for my dissertation on food safety regulation, I always made time to pull boxes with labels like “Crank Letters” or “Misc. Correspondence.” There’s a certain thrill in finding letters written on cat-shaped stationery, or ones that look more like a ransom note than a presidential correspondence. Yet even I was not prepared for the following missive sent to Richard Nixon in 1970:

Mr. President, 

In this time of crisis we are appalled at your proposal to eliminate one of the few remaining bastions of tradition and culture in this country. We are referring to the liquidation of the Federal Tea-tasting Commission, and that body’s one full-time employee, Mr. Dick… With the greatest possible emphasis, we ask you to keep Dick tasting!”¹

Photo by the author.

The letter was the work of  “The Committee of 10,000 to Keep Dick Tasting,” with its headquarters listed as 208 Mitchell Hall, Berkeley, California. Not surprisingly, this address was a former dormitory on the UC-Berkeley campus.²

Even though the letter was a joke, the context and controversy it described were real. A U.S. tea-tasting commission actually existed, formally called the Board of Tea Examiners, and Robert H. Dick was the name of a real Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee who worked for the agency for over 30 years.³ According to other, more serious FDA materials in this folder, Dick’s job was to sample imported tea and judge its quality and safety for the U.S. market. President Nixon did attempt to abolish the tea-tasting commission during his tenure, although his attempt proved unsuccessful.⁴ The commission was, however, protected not by any surge in popular support but rather by bureaucratic inertia.⁵ It was eventually abolished in 1996 when Dick retired.⁶

Richard Nixon, Chou En-Lai, William Rogers, and others have tea during a Revolutionary Opera performance intermission, 1972 (National Archives).

In a case like this, I often wonder what the letter-writers would think about all this. After all, it might be the only object the authors ever produced that will be permanently saved in an archive. Besides, there were things I wanted to know that had nothing to do with tea inspection: Whose idea was it to sit down at the typewriter? Who was the genius who threw in the pun about “liquidation”? Who did this?

My unique problem, however, was that I knew exactly who did this. The letter included nine signatures, and they were frankly a historian’s dream: uncommon names with middle initials and written in a decently clear hand. I couldn’t not search for them. I quickly learned that many of the former “committee members” had gone on to successful lives and careers — which then led me to the question of what to do next. How do you ask someone, “Hi, any chance you might have sent Richard Nixon a dick joke fifty years ago?” Would they find it intrusive, prying, or just plain weird for some random stranger to dredge up a decades-old prank? Or would they appreciate the unexpected connection to their past? Even if they replied, what new information could I really learn?

I did learn at least one thing: time had not eroded the former pranksters’ sense of humor. One former committee member actually wrote me back with the following:

Seeing the letter of March 18, 1970, I must acknowledge past membership in the Committee of 10,000 to Keep Dick Tasting. I don’t know the identities of the other 9,991 members, but of the nine signatories I recognize five as friends of mine … I wish I could claim authorship, but I have no recollection who drafted this missive.

Citation: Email correspondence with the author. Identity concealed to protect the guilty.

Wikimedia Commons

1. Letter to President Richard Nixon from the Committee to Keep Dick Tasting, March 18, 1970, WHCF, General FG 23-7 Food and Drug Administration, Box 9, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California.
2. According to an online exhibit, Mitchell Hall was a men’s dormitory that was completed in 1965 as part of the Fernwald complex. See “Berkeley Housing,” University of California History Digital Archives. The dorms in the Fernwald complex are not shown on a 1965 campus map (Atkinson Photographic Archive), but an arrow near the International House gives its relative location. Note that in a different plat from 1965, Fernwald is not marked:
   “University of California photogrammetric survey plat, Berkeley campus,” Berkeley Library Digital Collections.
3. Kat Eschner, “The FDA Used to Have People Whose Job Was to Taste Tea,” Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 15, 2017.
4. Memorandum from James D. Grant, Deputy Commissioner of the FDA to Dr. Edward Harper, The White House, Re: The Tea Act, March 30, 1970, WHCF, General FG 23-7 Food and Drug Administration, Box 9, Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
5. See generally the contents of: WHCF, General FG 23-7 Food and Drug Administration, Box 9, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California.
6. Publ. L. 104–128, 110 Stat. 1198, April 9, 1996; “Congress Votes to End Tea Tasting Board,” New York Times, March 26, 1996.