A college group pioneered the dirty tricks that led to Watergate. Fifty years later, the tactics still poison politics.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Imagesifty years ago, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon told a national television audience that he would resign the following day. Nixon’s announcement, while historic, was not unexpected.
While presidential elections have been marred by mudslinging since the early Republic, these USC alums deployed a particular type of dirty tricks: what became known as “ratf--king,” or the use of unscrupulous tactics to interfere with the campaigns of opponents. The tactics pioneered by members of Trojans for Representative Government and later CREEP set a precedent for the sort of organized political sabotage that has become commonplace today in a digital world, especially for Republicans.
Chapin met Nixon during his third year at USC. A year later, H.R. Halderman recruited Chapin to work on Nixon’s 1962 unsuccessful California gubernatorial campaign, and Chapin brought Segretti, and Ziegler along. Chapin quickly rose to prominence within Nixon’s inner circle. Soon, dozens of former TRG members joined Nixon’s staff. In addition to hailing from the West Coast and sharing a sense of loyalty to Nixon, they found Nixon’s brand of anti-establishment conservatism appealing.
One of the most famous instances of CREEP resorting to these dirty tricks was their fabrication of the “Canuck letter” that ruined Muskie’s presidential campaign in the 1972 New Hampshire primary by falsely implying that he was biased against the state’s sizable population of voters of French-Canadian descent.
In the half century since Watergate, TRG disbanded, and its operations have fallen out of American political memory. Yet the group’s tactics lived on. Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon strategist who founded Fox News, built upon these strategies with the concept of the orchestra-pit theory: shocking headlines will garner more attention—whether true or not—than balanced and reliable reporting.
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