The Little-Known Group That Pioneered Watergate’s Dirty Tricks—and Changed American Politics

Fifty 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. Investigations into his role in the bungled Watergate break-in two years earlier had revealed a pattern of abuses of power—with shocking details of break-ins and dirty tricks captivating the nation during the televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings in the summer of 1973. 

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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.

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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.

In the end, for members of TRG like Chapin, the USC elections taught them how to excel at dirty campaign tactics — and how to get away with them with few consequences.

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.

Nixon, in turn, handpicked several of them, including Ziegler, Chapin, Gordon Strachan, and Herbert Porter, to serve in prominent positions in his administration. He especially liked that they shared his humble West Coast roots and didn’t come from the inner circles of Ivy League universities or other elite east coast schools.

The ties between the Nixon Administration and TRG became public on Oct. 15, 1972, when Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in their investigation of Segretti’s career, revealed that he was one of several members of Nixon’s staff who had been members of TRG during their time at USC between 1961 and 1963. The reporting duo identified Segretti, a former attorney with the Treasury Department, as a contact person for hiring operatives for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) — which, like TRG where he got his start, aimed to sabotage political opponents.

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 weeks that followed Woodward and Bernstein’s initial article, several California newspapers covered the shady history of Trojans for Representative Government, and its connection to GOP elected officials. In a Los Angeles Times piece, reporter Bella Stumbo interviewed several USC faculty, including Coonradt, to explore the machinations of secret societies like Trojans for Representative Government and Theta Nu Epsilon, and to figure out why USC student politics were so raucous. Coonradt, who had advised USC’s student newspaper the Daily Trojan since 1948, told Stumbo that student government elections at USC had long mirrored the amoral tactics lately made infamous by the Nixon Administration. In his words: “Every year at USC is a Watergate.”

This reporting put Trojans for Representative Government in the national spotlight as Americans learned about how its dirty tricks had set the table for the Watergate scandal.

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. In the decades after Watergate, Republican strategists like Ailes continued to embrace these sorts of bruising tactics, though without breaking the law like CREEP did.

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Most notable among them was Lee Atwater, who ran George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, which famously tied Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis to the ACLU, which Bush labelled a “subversive organization.” More famously, Atwater viciously scapegoated Dukakis for the actions of convicted murder William Horton, setting a damaging precedent for race-baiting in American politics. While a political group separate from the Bush campaign ran the famous “Weekend Passes” ad featuring Horton’s mugshot, Atwater capitalized on its success to skewer Dukakis on crime.

The practice of political sabotage received renewed attention during the 2016 campaign and the Trump Administration. Trump associate Roger Stone had once been a member of Nixon’s staff, although he refused to identify with the “USC mafia” of Segretti and Chapin, and he readily resurrected Nixonian tactics on behalf of Trump. In March 2024, the New Republic reported that State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland recommended that Trump’s former attorney, John Eastman, be disbarred for his unethical behavior in trying to overturn the 2020 election, asserting that Eastman’s misconduct exceeded Segretti’s own behavior during the Watergate scandal.

The term ratf–king itself has even made a comeback during the 2024 election cycle. Last year, an advisor to Trump told Rolling Stone magazine that they viewed primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as a “total ratf–k” against candidate Ron DeSantis, and were offering him secret support to tank the latter’s campaign against Trump.

The story of Trojans for Representative Government provided a historical grounding for the dirty election tactics we live with today. Although TRG proved short-lived, their Machiavellian philosophy of winning elections by any means necessary has become a hallmark of the Republican Party under Trump. That ethos is likely to shape the 2024 campaign.

Jonathan van Harmelen is a 20th century U.S. political historian. He writes about California political history and Asian American history, and his work has been featured in TIME, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is finishing a book on the role of Congress in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.