Roger Stone, now under indictment on several counts related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, has always reveled in being a political mischief-maker. It’s a reputation he has burnished since he was 19 years old, when he was involved in the “dirty tricks” operation of Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. More recently, he bragged publicly about purported contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, the subject of Friday’s indictment.

When asked in the 2017 documentary Get Me Roger Stone why he has embraced the role of “dirty trickster,” he shrugged and said, “Well, I’m stuck with it now. It’s going to be in the first paragraph of my New York Times obit, so I might as well go with the flow.”


“Dirty trickster” is one thing. But Stone, who says he will plead not guilty to the charges against him, hasn’t been so eager to embrace another, more profane Nixon-era label with which he’s often tagged: “ratfucker,” or a political operator who engages in roguish behind-the-scenes behavior to undermine rivals. He’s inexorably linked to the term, even if he doesn’t like it. “Stone’s specialty is being a ‘ratfucker,’” wrote Will Greenberg of Mother Jones in 2017. Abigail Tracy of Vanity Fair called him a “professional ratfucker” last year—a description echoed by the Law & Crime website after Friday’s indictment.

Where did the word “ratfucking” come from, and how did Stone become one of its prime targets?

As first recounted by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men, the term “ratfucking” entered the lingo of the Nixon campaign thanks to Donald Segretti, who was hired by his old college friend, Dwight Chapin, to sabotage the campaigns of Democrats running in the 1972 primaries. As undergraduates at the University of Southern California, Segretti and Chapin, along with other future Nixon staffers including press secretary Ron Ziegler, had been involved in a group called Trojans for Representative Government that gleefully engaged in shady tactics to win campus elections.

“The Trojans called their brand of electioneering ‘ratfucking,’” wrote Woodward and Bernstein. “Ballot boxes were stuffed, spies were planted in the opposition camp, and bogus campaign literature abounded.”


The “USC mafia” on Nixon’s staff carried on their collegiate tradition of “ratfucking,” but Stone—who dropped out of The George Washington University to work on the 1972 campaign—never identified with what he saw as a West Coast frat-boy culture on the staff. As Stone recalled in an April 2016 Politico interview, Segretti and other USC alumni were engaged in unproductive hijinks that had no effect on swaying votes. “What was the point? Harassment? That’s ratfucking,” Stone said. “That comes out of the USC fraternity parlance. I didn’t go to USC.”

That Politico interview followed an incident that, whether Stone liked it or not, linked him firmly with the charge of “ratfucking.” In the heat of the Republican primaries, the National Enquirer published an unsubstantiated story about Senator Ted Cruz, then competing in the Republican presidential primary, alleging that he had five secret mistresses. Stone, an informal adviser to Donald Trump at the time, told the Enquirer that “these stories have been swirling about Cruz for some time.”

Cruz lashed out at “Donald Trump and his henchmen” after a campaign event in Wisconsin, focusing on Stone in particular for his role in the Enquirer story. “I would note that Mr. Stone is a man who has 50 years of dirty tricks behind him,” Cruz said, before obliquely referring to “ratfucking”: “He’s a man for whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent.” Cruz compounded the oddity with an awkwardly constructed punchline: “Well, let me be clear, Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him.”

Surprisingly enough, the history of “ratfucking” as a political term of art for sleazy maneuvers goes back nearly a century. In February 1922, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote down a list of then-current slang, including “dumbbell,” “upstage,” “lousy,” “high-hat” and “rat-fuck.” Unfortunately, Wilson did not supply definitions for the words in his list, which saw the light of day only with the publication of The Twenties, culled from his diaries and notebooks, in 1975. We can surmise, though, that for Wilson “rat-fuck” meant either “a contemptible or despicable person” or “a bungled or disorganized operation or undertaking,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the two main senses of what they label “U.S. coarse slang,” dating back to Wilson’s usage.


The “bungled or disorganized operation” meaning may in fact go back to World War I. Unsurprisingly, it is hard to piece together the history of such a taboo term, but in his book The F-Word, the lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower seeks to do just that, even if it means reading between the lines to decipher the military-grade F-bombs lurking behind cleaned-up euphemisms. (Think of the innocuous explanations of the acronyms “snafu” and “fubar” as “situation normal all fouled up” and “fouled up beyond all recognition.”)

Sheidlower zeroes in on a veteran of General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force named Leonard H. Nason, who used a series of rat-related euphemisms in novels he wrote based on his experiences at war. His favorite circumlocution was “rat-kissing” to describe destructive activity, as in, “No more of this rat-kissing” (Sergeant Eadie, 1928) or, “You know, I had a sergeancy clinched if we hadn’t run into all this rat-kissing!” (The Man in the White Slicker, 1929). And in a turn of phrase that Ted Cruz would appreciate, Nason referred to “this here gigantic rat-copulation they call a war” in his 1930 novel, A Corporal Once.

“Ratfucking” bears a strong resemblance to another animalistic expression used in the military—“fucking the dog,” which by World War II meant either “wasting time” or “committing a serious blunder.” As I explained in a 2015 column for Slate, “fucking the dog” received its own set of euphemisms, most notably “screwing the pooch.” We can surmise that “ratfucking” itself was also used by soldiers in the two World Wars, even though the historical examples found by Sheidlower and others involve various forms of euphemization.

How did “rat-fucking” make the jump to USC-style shenanigans? One piece of evidence comes from a peculiar book published in 1976 by the historian Page Smith titled A Letter from My Father. Most of the book consists of a rambling autobiographical account written by Page’s father, W. Ward Smith, over the course of three decades, including numerous sexual escapades after his divorce from his first wife, Page’s mother. Amid a section about the year 1937 is an excerpt from a letter that Ward sent that year to a woman he was seeing. In the letter, Ward writes about his son Page, who was then a freshman at Dartmouth College:

Ever hear of RAT FUCKING—well I hadn’t either except to make more rats—but at Hanover that means the raiding of the students rooms on one floor by the students from another floor—the boys go in groups of eight or ten—turn everything upside down in the students rooms—even fire buckets of water are employed to make the wreck complete—that's progress—At the schools of higher education (our American Colleges)—RAT FUCKING.

Two decades later, in the late 1950s, this prankish kind of “rat-fucking” had made its way to schools on the West Coast. In a 1965 article about campus vocabulary in the journal American Speech, two language scholars described how “rat-fuck” spread to Stanford University, typically shortened to “R.F.” “Between 1956 and 1960 at least, this was a widely used slang term at Stanford,” they wrote. “An R.F. is a practical joke, dormitory style, like ‘short-sheeting’ or throwing a bed in the shower.” But they noted that its meaning had broadened: “To some undergraduates, it connotes anything unacceptable to the Establishment, whether malicious damage to property or drinking on campus.”

Besides being a noun, the scholars continued, “R.F.” could also serve as a verb, meaning “having a good time, or perhaps doing something that has no particular purpose.” That sense of “R.F.” was playfully alluded to in an editorial cartoon by Tony Auth that appeared in the February 21, 1961 issue of UCLA’s newspaper, the Daily Bruin. In the cartoon, two rats are sitting and talking. One says to the other, “Say, let’s go PFing tonight!”—the implication being that if people go “rat-fucking,” then rats must go “people-fucking.”

About a month before that, “R.F.” made a prominent appearance in another Southern California college paper. In the 1961 Rose Bowl between the Minnesota Golden Gophers and the Washington Huskies, students from the California Institute of Technology, not far from the Rose Bowl’s site in Pasadena, pulled off one of the greatest pranks of all time. During half time, in a routine directed by the Washington marching band, students in the stands were instructed to hold up cards that were supposed to spell out the word “HUSKIES.” Instead, as seen on national television, “CALTECH” appeared. The campus newspaper, the California Tech, celebrated in the January 6, 1961, issue with the banner headline, “Tech Scores First Televised RF.” As deviously explained in an editor’s note, “RF (for Royal Flush) is a contemporary college colloquialism for a clever prank.”


Meanwhile, on fraternity row at USC, Segretti, Chapin and Ziegler were indulging in their own “ratfucking” tactics to fix student elections. They would all go on to work on Nixon’s unsuccessful 1962 campaign for governor of California. At the time, the consummate campaign prankster was actually working for the Democrats: Dick Tuck, “a king gremlin of political shenanigans,” as the New York Times put it in his obituary in May. Tuck engineered many stunts to undermine Nixon, and the “USC mafia” likely honed their craft trying to outdo him. Fittingly, when Tuck visited Caltech for a campus talk in January 1974, the headline in the Tech read, “Master of RF Talks to Techers.”

By then, of course, the “ratfuckers” working for Nixon were being exposed in the unfolding Watergate scandal. But to this day, Roger Stone distances himself from the term. “The Nixon people were amateurish,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “They had this whole USC-fraternity mentality that took over after 1968, with the ‘ratfucking.’ This is how Watergate happens.” Stone might be right that his dirty tricks are more than merely pointless collegiate hijinks, but if his mischief-making did indeed have an impact on the 2016 election, that doesn’t do him any favors in the Mueller investigation.

When Carl Bernstein first pursued the USC connections of Nixon’s dirty tricksters, he was told by a Justice Department attorney, “Ratfucking? You can go right to the top with that one.” In All the President’s Men, Bernstein says that comment led him to wonder if “the President of the United States was the head ratfucker.” Right now, Mueller’s investigators may be asking themselves the same thing.