Ratfucking

Ratfucking is the term the book uses for political infiltration, deception, and sabotage in the Nixon campaign’s orbit. It begins as a name for dirty tricks practiced in college politics, then becomes a charged clue in the reporters’ effort to determine whether such tactics were connected to Donald Segretti, campaign money, and decisions reaching toward the top of the government. The investigation gives the word force, but also exposes its limits: evidence of a method and a network did not by itself establish who authorized every operation or which laws had been broken.

Meaning and Origins

The term had a campus history before it became a subject of federal investigation. A friend of Karlyn Barker, who had attended college with Segretti, Dwight Chapin, and Tim Elbourne, supplied Bernstein with notes about the White House circle and its political connections. All had belonged to Trojans for Representative Government, a campus political party whose members called their style of electioneering ratfucking. The described methods were concrete: stuffing ballot boxes, planting spies in an opposing camp, and circulating bogus campaign literature. The label thus referred not simply to harsh rhetoric, but to tactics that covertly distorted an opponent’s political work.

The group’s later connections made that campus account newly consequential. Chapin and Ron Ziegler had joined Richard Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, managed by Bob Haldeman; after graduation, Chapin, Ziegler, and Elbourne worked at J. Walter Thompson Advertising in Los Angeles, where Haldeman was a vice president. Segretti, meanwhile, had been summoned to Washington and trained for work in a presidential election, according to Barker’s friend. These biographical links established a path by which people familiar with the tactics could enter national campaign politics. They did not, on their own, prove that any specific dirty trick had been ordered by a senior official.

From a Word to a Reporting Lead

The term reached Bernstein through a succession of guarded conversations and reporting leads. On October 7, a United States Department of Justice official said that political sabotage was associated with Segretti, though Segretti was not directly linked to the Watergate break-in. The official indicated that significant information might emerge before the election, but would not discuss either Chapin or Ziegler. The distinction mattered: Segretti’s presence in the investigation and the association of his name with sabotage did not make him a Watergate burglar, nor did they settle who had directed his political work.

Bernstein searched his accumulated reporting records for people who might know about Segretti, the term, Chapin, the USC Mafia, or the Canuck Letter. One call brought a United States Department of Justice attorney to an angry reaction. The attorney regarded the conduct as morally repellent and said the reporters should examine it further, while advising them to make sure their facts were straight. The Canuck Letter—the Muskie letter in the attorney’s account—was described as part of the same subject. The conversation suggested that the alleged sabotage might extend beyond a single operation, but its heat was not itself documentary proof.

A further remark sharpened the question of hierarchy. The attorney said a fruitful line of inquiry was whether the secret fund had paid for ratfucking, and suggested that the strategy went higher than John Mitchell. Bernstein understood how far-reaching that implication could be: if the political tactics were basic strategy reaching above Mitchell, Richard Nixon himself might stand at the head of the operation. The book presents this as a disturbing possibility Bernstein began to consider, not as a conclusion already established by the attorney’s outburst.

Money, Authorization, and the Limits of Proof

The fund supplied a possible mechanism connecting political operations to campaign authority. The Washington Post reported that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants of John Mitchell, then the former manager of Richard Nixon’s campaign, and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The fund contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects; Gordon Liddy had received money from it, records relating to the account had been destroyed, and Hugh Sloan’s suspicions about Watergate had led to his resignation. Those findings established a substantial pool of concealed campaign money associated with espionage. They made the question of whether it also financed political sabotage pressing, without proving that every dirty trick was paid from the account.

Sloan described how authorization had worked. When first approached for money, he called Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell would tell him to release it. The process was routine and took seconds, and the calls had begun in 1971. Initially, Sloan said, Mitchell was the sole person authorized to approve expenditures; authority later passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. This account connected campaign spending to Mitchell’s decisions, including while he was Attorney General of the United States, but the reporters recognized an evidentiary distinction: Sloan’s testimony about the fund and its approvals was not, by itself, proof that Mitchell knew a particular payment financed a particular act of sabotage.

That distinction is central to the meaning of ratfucking in the investigation. The reporters had three attorneys who said Segretti had approached them, along with travel records they regarded as circumstantial. Bernstein acknowledged that they had no evidence that a law had been broken. He nevertheless drafted a lead stating that three attorneys had been asked to conduct political espionage and sabotage on behalf of Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign by a man under Federal Bureau of Investigation investigation in connection with the Watergate bugging. The formulation tied the alleged conduct to the campaign while preserving the narrower, supportable claim about the man’s investigative status. Bernstein and Woodward treated words such as espionage and sabotage as consequential choices, not interchangeable embellishments.

Coordination and Narrative Significance

Deep Throat’s account offered a broader interpretation of the operations: nothing had been freelance; everything was part of it. He explained ratfucking as double-crossing and, in the Nixon forces’ usage, as infiltration of the Democrats. That assertion linked scattered tactics to a coordinated political purpose, while remaining a source’s account that the reporters had to test against other evidence. Deep Throat also returned to Mitchell’s reaction after Watergate. Mitchell, he said, feared that disclosure could ruin the administration and recognized that his own position was ruined. The conversation connected the campaign’s political operations to the mounting danger of exposure, without making the term itself a complete map of responsibility.

The reporting’s structure mirrors the difficulty of the subject. A campus word first identified a recognizable set of tactics; personal connections pointed toward presidential campaign work; attorneys’ accounts and travel records gave the reporters leads; and the secret fund and Sloan’s description of authorization supplied a possible institutional and financial framework. Each layer increased the stakes, but none licensed an automatic leap from association to command. Bernstein’s consideration that Richard Nixon could be the head of the operation arrived amid acknowledged gaps in proof, and the reporters’ method was to publish what they could support piece by piece while the larger picture remained unfinished.

Ratfucking therefore names both an alleged repertoire of political sabotage and the investigative problem of tracing such work through deniable connections. The term’s bluntness contrasts with the careful gradations in the evidence: methods were described, relationships were mapped, funds and approvals were traced, and responsibility at the highest level remained a question to be proved. In the book, its significance lies not only in the tricks it describes, but in how one loaded word opened a route from campus practices to a national campaign and forced reporters to distinguish an ominous pattern from a demonstrated chain of command.