Donald Segretti’s attempted recruitment of Alex Shipley

Donald Segretti’s attempted recruitment of Alex Shipley was an effort to enlist a former Army officer in a covert campaign to disrupt Democratic primaries. The proposals described by Shipley ranged from infiltrating rival campaigns to deceiving rally organizers and recruiting operatives. Shipley said he never carried out the assignments, and he could not independently prove that Segretti represented Richard Nixon’s campaign; the account therefore exposed the design of the proposed operation without, by itself, establishing who had authorized it.

The Proposal and Its Purpose

Segretti first approached Shipley in the summer of 1971, when the two men were former Army associates and both were nearing the end of their military service. Shipley later described himself as an assistant attorney general in Tennessee, living in Nashville. The initial account reached the reporters through a lawyer, who said Shipley had been asked to join the Nixon campaign in an unusual way. The recruiter, the lawyer cautioned, had not been identified to him.

Shipley’s account described a team meant to interfere with Democratic campaigning during the primaries, with what the recruiter presented as virtually unlimited money available. Its broader purpose, as Segretti explained it, was not simply to embarrass individual candidates. He wanted to cause enough disruption that the Democrats could not reunite after a bitter nomination contest. Shipley recalled Segretti saying, “What we want to do is cause enough havoc so they can’t.”

The pitch depended on concealment. In one proposed scheme, an operative would approach a worker supporting John F. Kennedy while pretending to share that allegiance, then encourage the worker to join Edmund S. Muskie’s campaign and pass along information. The worker would believe the intelligence helped Kennedy against Muskie; in reality, the operation would use it for another purpose. Shipley described the deal as “slick,” but was surprised that the apparent target was Democratic campaigning rather than a conventional campaign job.

A Series of Approaches

Shipley reconstructed the recruitment chronology from his notes. Segretti called on June 26, 1971, saying he would be in Washington, and attended a dinner party at Shipley’s apartment that evening. They did not discuss the proposed operation there. The next morning, June 27, Shipley met him for breakfast. Segretti said he had come to Washington for an interview at the Treasury Department; afterward, Shipley drove him from the Georgetown Inn to Dulles Airport. During that drive Segretti raised political espionage, described the idea of planting operatives in rival campaigns, and eventually named Nixon as the beneficiary. Shipley recalled being taken aback that the activity would take place inside the Democratic primaries.

Segretti renewed the approach over the following weeks. After calling from Fort Ord, he asked Shipley on July 19 to think of five people he might recruit. On July 25, calling from Chicago, he said he had made a similar proposal to Roger Lee Nixt, an Army captain stationed at an Army post there, and pressed Shipley to decide whether he was in. The assignment, Shipley recalled, was to “Enlist people—be imaginative.” Segretti also asked him to fly to Atlanta to help recruit another former Army captain, Kenneth Griffiths. Shipley did not go.

The contacts continued into the fall. On October 23, Segretti called from California and asked Shipley to investigate Muskie’s operation in Tennessee. Shipley said that whenever Segretti made these proposals he would agree in conversation, but never followed through. The repeated requests thus document an attempted recruitment and an expanding set of suggested tasks, not Shipley’s participation in the operation.

Deception as Method

The schemes Shipley described turned ordinary campaign logistics and political loyalties into vulnerabilities. An operative might pose as a candidate’s field manager and falsely warn a coliseum manager that troublemakers were expected at a rally. If the manager postponed a 7:00 P.M. event until 9:00, the venue might be padlocked when the candidate arrived. The disruption would be produced not by a public confrontation but by a lie delivered through the person responsible for access to the hall.

Segretti also urged Shipley to seek recruits who could travel freely and emphasized lawyers, saying he did not want to do anything illegal. He presented the work as entertaining rather than simply coercive. At another point, he suggested using false identification to make the operatives harder to track and mentioned Bill Mooney as a possible pseudonym for himself. These details sharpen the contrast between the operation’s advertised informality and its deliberate use of aliases, infiltration, and fabricated instructions.

The offer included a promised future reward. Segretti told Shipley that the recruits would be taken care of after Nixon’s reelection and that Shipley could receive a good government job. When Shipley asked how anyone could be rewarded for work no one knew about, Segretti’s answer, as Shipley recalled it, was: “Nixon knows that something is being done. It’s a typical deal. Don’t-tell-me-anything-and-I-won’t-know.” The reported formulation offered the allure of political patronage while describing an arrangement in which knowledge and responsibility would be kept apart.

What Shipley’s Account Established

Shipley considered whether to cooperate with Segretti before he identified him to the reporters. He sought advice from a contact who had worked for former Senator Albert Gore’s administrative assistant. The advice was to avoid committing himself while continuing to learn what the proposal involved. After speaking with the Democratic attorney general of Tennessee and assembling his notes, Shipley gave the recruiter’s name as Donald Segretti and supplied dates, locations, and particular assignments. His detailed recollection transformed an initially anonymous tip into a reportable account of how the recruitment was supposed to work.

The account nevertheless carried an explicit evidentiary limit. Shipley had known Segretti in the Army, but had no proof that the offers came from Nixon’s campaign. He said Segretti claimed to be working for Nixon, yet allowed that he might have been working for Kennedy, Muskie, or Sam Yorty. The distinction matters: the reported conversations supported the existence of a proposed political-disruption scheme and identified its alleged recruiter, but did not independently establish the chain of command behind it.

The episode’s significance lies in the concrete mechanics it brought into view. Disruption could be attempted through false affiliations, planted information, fabricated warnings, travel under false identification, and the recruitment of people who might later receive government jobs. Shipley’s refusal to act kept him outside the described operations, while his account gave reporters a chronological, specific portrait of the methods Segretti had proposed—and preserved the unresolved question of who stood behind them.