Members of Nixon’s staff had confessed to an array of covert unethical (and sometimes illegal) tactics they had used to ensure the president’s reelection in 1972. A member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), Donald Segretti, was open about his work of sabotaging the campaigns of Democratic candidates by disseminating false information. Testifying before the Watergate Committee on Oct. 3, 1973, he admitted that he had undertaken “political tricks” and espionage on behalf of Nixon’s campaign, including creating fake committees and printing propaganda, to foil the campaigns of Democratic candidates such as Senator Edmund Muskie.
And Segretti was clear about when and where he had learned these tricks: as a college student at the University of Southern California, where he had been part of a political association known as Trojans for Representative Government—a group that ended up producing a bunch of Nixon staffers who participated in the Watergate scandal.
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.
The story of Trojans for Representative Government is rooted in USC student politics. Beginning in 1931, a fraternity, Theta Nu Epsilon, dominated USC student politics for decades. In 1948, several students formed their own opposition party, Free Greeks, which later changed its name to Trojans for Representative Government. Their goal was to usurp Theta Nu Epsilon as the leading political organization on campus by positioning itself as a voice for all students. They tried to draw a contrast with their opponents, who they charged were solely interested in serving the interests of their fraternity members. The group quickly became the starting point for the careers of several California politicians, such as California State Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh, who graduated in 1948.
In the early 1960s, TRG became an anti-establishment party that used trickery to win elections. USC journalism professor Fred Coonradt stated in an interview that both Theta Nu Epsilon and Trojans for Representative Government historically engaged in illegal activities ranging from stuffing ballot boxes or dropping acid into them to ransacking campaign headquarters and bribing candidates to withdraw from elections. Future California Assembly Leader Walter Karabian, the student body president in 1959, recalled how Ronald Ziegler and Dwight Chapin—two future Nixon aides—falsely accused him of being a member of a secret society as part of a campaign to make him appear elitist. In 1960, Segretti, Chapin, and Ziegler, according to Coonradt, helped orchestrate a major student government election victory for TRG over Theta Nu Epsilon after several recent defeats.