A Short History of Political Dirty Tricks

1776 Our Country's father-to-be, George Washington, is the target of bogus letters bearing his forged signature that are circulated in the colonies by devious agents of King George. The letters imply that Washington, then commander in chief of the Continental Army, has engaged in extramarital affairs and is a closet royalist who secretly yearns for the return of British rule.

1797: Former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, now practicing law in New York, is compelled to go public with details of his six-year affair with young New York housewife Maria Reynolds. Compounding the scandal is the fact that Reynolds and her husband have been blackmailing the married Hamilton and quietly implicating him in other fraudulent schemes. Hamilton had confided the affair to congressional leaders in 1792. One of them, future president James Monroe, wrote a private memorandum of the confession. Later, as the Republicans--led by Monroe and Thomas Jefferson--prepare to grab the presidency in 1800, the incriminating notes find their way to a friendly journalist who exposes the Reynolds affair as well as charges of fiscal chicanery against Federalist Party leader Hamilton. Hamilton apologizes for the affair, denies the fraud charges and is quickly supported by his wife Betsey and longtime mentor, George Washington.

1804: Another of Hamilton's many foes is fellow New Yorker Aaron Burr. Hamilton worked vigorously to defeat Burr for the presidency in 1801 and the New York governorship in 1804. Each time, Hamilton makes free use of slander and gossip. Burr finally calls Hamilton on his "despicable opinions" and kills his rival in a duel in July 1804.

1828: Democrats spread rumors that incumbent President John Quincy Adams and his wife engaged in premarital sexual relations and call him "the pimp" for purportedly arranging liaisons with American chippies for Russian czar Alexander I during Adams' tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Russia (1809--14). Adams' federal Republican allies, meanwhile, spread gossip that Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Jackson's mother was a "common prostitute," brought to the American colonies to service British soldiers, and that the candidate himself is guilty of adultery and bigamy. The bigamy charge concerns Jackson's marriage to Rachel Robards in 1791--at a time, it turned out, when Rachel was still legally married to her first husband, though not living with him (the Jacksons were remarried in 1794, after Rachel received a formal divorce). An 1827 pamphlet, Truth's Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor, charges that Jackson had sweet-talked Rachel into abandoning her husband and living with Old Hickory as his wife. Jackson defeats Adams, but Rachel dies of a heart attack shortly after his inauguration. Jackson blames the campaign smears.

1836: Republicans initiate a whispering campaign that Democratic presidential candidate Martin Van Buren wears ladies' corsets to rein in his sizable girth and takes far more baths than a normal man should.

1844: Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay is accused of rampant immorality. Democrats charge that the Senator and former Secretary of State lives in a Washington, D.C., brothel, is a notorious drunkard and gambler and that he manipulated a political opponent into a fatal duel. The Democratic candidate, former Tennessee governor and acknowledged slaveholder James Polk, is the victim of an elaborate smear in which abolitionist newspapers reprint a bogus excerpt from a Southern states' travel guide that describes Polk using a branding iron to mark his slaves for identification. The fraud is uncovered, abolitionists rally to Polk's campaign (Clay also owned slaves) and Polk is elected.

1884: A dirty-trick double-dip. Republicans lampoon Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland for having kept a mistress and for fathering an illegitimate son when he was a lawyer in Buffalo, taunting the then-governor with the ditty, "Ma! Ma! Where's my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha." Democrats, meanwhile, leap on a blasphemous charge made by a supporter of Republican candidate James Blaine, in which it is claimed that the Democrats are "the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion." Some pamphlets even attribute the offensive remark to Blaine himself. Blaine belatedly repudiates his supporters' slander, while Cleveland comes clean on the sexual misconduct charge and is elected.

1928: Democratic presidential candidate and New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for the presidency, is accused of building a tunnel from New York City to the Vatican.

1934: In a precursor of later TV-advertising dirty tricks, liberal California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair--best known as the crusading author of The Jungle--is the target of bogus newsreels produced by conservative Hollywood studio boss Irving Thalberg and distributed to theaters through the Hearst Metrotone News service. The staged newsreels typically feature "on-the-street" interviews, with actors posing as voters, in which seemingly well-dressed solid citizens speak out on camera for Sinclair's Republican opponent, Frank Merriam. Sinclair supporters are shown to be a ragtag lot speaking with thick foreign accents. While Sinclair wins nearly 900,000 votes, he loses to Merriam by more than 250,000.

1950: In a Florida primary campaign destined to become a textbook case of dirty tricks, Democratic House member George Smathers challenges two-term incumbent Claude Pepper for their party's nomination to the U.S. Senate. Smathers' campaign primarily targets Pepper's unrestrained liberalism (detractors referred to the Senator as "Red Pepper") and the fears of uneducated voters. In one classic campaign speech in rural northern Florida, Smathers tells his audience that Pepper is a "shameless extrovert" who is known to have engaged in "nepotism" with his sister-in-law, "whose sister was once a thespian" in wicked New York City, and who has acknowledged to have "practiced celibacy" before his marriage. Pepper is defeated by almost 67,000 votes.

1960: Republican presidential candidate (continued on page 169)Dirty Tricks(continued from page 87) Richard Nixon smiles and poses with a group of Chinese American schoolchildren during a campaign stop. Unbeknownst to Nixon, the large banner that the children are carrying says, in Chinese Script, what about the Hughes Loan? This is a reference to the controversial unsecured $205,000 loan from wealthy industrialist and recluse Howard Hughes to Nixon's businessman brother, Donald. The banner stunt is the handiwork of legendary Democratic Party trickster and longtime Nixon nemesis Dick Tuck.

1964: The Republican presidential candidate is attacked in full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers, their bold-face headlines proclaiming: Eleven Hundred Eighty-Nine Psychiatrists said Gold-Water was Psychologically Unfit to be President. The ads are sponsored by the muckraking Fact magazine, which has sent surveys to 12,350 U.S. psychiatrists regarding the Republican presidential nominee's psychological fitness. Only 2417 of the shrinks respond to the Fact questionnaire, and of these, 657 say Goldwater is fit, while 571 say they have no way of knowing. Republicans charge that Democrats have financed the ads but proof is never established.

1972: A watershed year in the history of political dirty tricks begins in February in the New Hampshire presidential primary, when the Manchester Union Leader prints a phony letter (later identified as having come from the White House) charging that an aide to Democratic candidate Edmund Muskie has cast a slur on the state's French Canadian population by referring to them as "Canucks." The newspaper then editorializes against Muskie, and in passing demeans the character of his wife, Jane. Muskie responds by denouncing Union Leader publisher William Loeb as a "gutless coward," but is reported by the press to be so overwrought that he breaks down and cries. The ensuing public perception of Muskie's emotional "weakness" is sufficient to end his hopes to unseat incumbent President Richard Nixon. There is also some evidence that the Republicans hired a woman to run naked from the Democrat's campaign hotel base shouting "I love Ed Muskie!"

In June 1972 five men are arrested by Washington, D.C., police after breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. The burglars--soon to be identified as agents of the Committee to Re-Elect the President--may have been trying to find out what dirt DNC Chairman Lawrence O'Brien had on Nixon's ties to billionaire Howard Hughes. O'Brien had once served as Hughes's Washington public relations representative, was privy to Hughes's political intrigues and was not reluctant to spring embarrassing information on the hated Nixon. Suspicious and fearful of O'Brien's capacity for dirty tricks, the Nixon White House perpetrates the biggest dirty trick of all.

1980: Campaign aides to Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan secretly acquire a highly sensitive issues-briefing book written by Democratic Party strategists to help incumbent Jimmy Carter prepare for his debates with Reagan. The book is then allegedly used (by Reagan partisan George Will, among others) to help coach Reagan in his successful debate appearances against Carter, which are considered a turning point in the Republican's campaign. When the debategate scandal is finally aired in 1983, it seems to threaten Reagan's reelection chances--but is virtually forgotten by 1984.