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[starroute]

51. There's a dandy description that H2O Man quoted here back in 2008

Originally from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6728376

"Segretti turned to more willing recruits: fellow veterans of conservative campus politics. Political dirty tricks were the bread and meat of the young conservative movement that organized in the early sixties around the National Review and the Goldwater for President crusade. Young Americans for Freedom, Tom Charles Huston’s old outfit, for example, set up camp in a hotel for the 1961 conference of the National Student Association with a mimeograph machine, walkie-talkies, and a bevy of secret operatives who pretended to be strangers but identified themselves to one another by wearing suspenders – all funded with the help of Bill Rusher, National Review’s publisher and another former army intelligence officer – and took over the resolutions committee via a phoney ‘middle-of-the-road caucus.’ The Young Republican National Federation was shot through with so much chicanery that its 1963 convention turned into a chair-throwing brawl. College Republicans put on elections more rank than banana republics: here was where young operatives learned the black art of setting up ‘rotten boroughs’ – fake chapters – in order to control the national conventions.

"Then they brought their skills to the grown-ups’ game. One especially nasty operator was loaned by the College Republicans to the campaign to defeat the Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970, Al Dixon. Dixon was having a formal reception to open his Chicago headquarters. This kid assumed an alias, volunteered for the campaign, stole the candidate’s stationary, and distributed a thousand fake invitations – they promised ‘free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing’ – at communes, rock concerts, and street corners where Chicago’s drunken hoboes congregated. The kid’s name was Karl Rove. The RNC soon hired him at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques."