Echo update about the young dirty tricks of Roger Stone

Published in the March 25, 2019 edition of The New Yorker magazine. This echo from the 1970s, responds to the early years of the Roger Stone's shady campaign activities, in an letter to the editor from Dean Corren, who wrote from Burlington, Vermont:

Letter - Roger Stone's Tricks*

Roger Stone Indicted On 7 Counts Related To 2016 Election Attack: (Stone has a grinning Nixon tattoo? Yuk!)

Stone's political career began in earnest on the 1972 Nixon campaign, with activities such as contributing money to a possible rival of Nixon in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance – then slipping the receipt to the Manchester Union-Leader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone

Letter: I read with great interest Tyler Foggatt's reporting (below) about Roger Stone's teen-age electioneering days in Westchester County New York. (Talk of the Town, march 18th). I knew Roger in school- when he was the president of the student council at John Jay High School, I was the president of the student council at the middle school. In 1971, a year after Stone graduated, I started examining a Westchester County legislature race for a social-studies project, and discovered that Stone appeared to be organizing churches as part of a smear campaign against the incumbent R. Bradlee Boal, a potential violation of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates (Stone later told the Washington Post that his candidate, a Republican named John Hicks-Beach, was the "dumbest politicians" he had ever worked for.) To my knowledge, my amateur reporting was the first investigation into Stone's involvement in shady campaign activities, though certainly not the last.

From Dean Corren, in Burlington Vermont

Article:
*Dept. of Prequels bu Tyler Foggatt
Young Roger Stone’s Cutthroat Teen Spirit

Stone’s student-council playbook? Girls in miniskirts! Free candy! A homophobic whispering campaign! And a peculiar diversion called Slave Day.

In the spring of 1970, when “Let It Be” was at the top of the charts, Rob Neukirch, a junior at John Jay High School, in upper Westchester County, was approached by a member of the senior class with a proposition. 

Was Neukirch interested in running for student-body president? Neukirch was from the suburban version of a political dynasty. His father was a Lewisboro town councilman, and many of his six siblings had served on the student council. 

“I think people saw it as the natural order of things that I’d run,” Neukirch said the other day, by telephone. “But I didn’t know how to run a campaign.” The senior, who was also the acting student-body president, volunteered to be Neukirch’s campaign manager. 

“He got me to buy a hundred balloons with ‘Elect Rob Neukirch’ on them,” Neukirch recalled. “And he told me to never speak the name of the person I was running against—to just use the pronoun.” Neukirch’s campaign manager, whose name was Roger Stone, would later work on Richard Nixon’s 1972 reëlection campaign, in which the candidate also refrained from speaking the name of his opponent, George McGovern. 

Nixon won by a landslide.

“I thought Roger was pretty harmless back then,” Neukirch, who teaches college theater, said. Before Stone was a political operative, orchestrating Brooks Brothers’ riots and exchanging secret messages with WikiLeaks, he was Egghead, the kid who got bullied on the school bus, not for being a bookworm but for having a perfectly oval-shaped cranium. (Noreen Carvolth, ’69, recalled, “I can really vividly picture his head.”) Stone told Alex Jones, on InfoWars, that he likes to run and to lift weights. 

At John Jay, he was a male cheerleader (“Here come the purple-and-white down on the field / We know the other team will have to yield! ”). “The jock group had no use for Roger Stone,” Marc Ortmayer, ’69 and a member of the Indians football squad, said.

Politics was Stone’s favorite extracurricular. From his yearbook entry: “Chronic campaigner,” “L’etat c’est moi,” and “future plans—president of the United States 1988.” 

One classmate recalled a teen-age bedroom strewn with John Birch literature. “He had it in his mind that he was the next Nixon,” Ortmayer said. (Stone has a grinning Nixon tattooed on his back.) “He was constantly walking around giving Nixon’s two-handed victory sign,” Ortmayer continued. Earlier this year, Stone made the sign as he left the courthouse, after being indicted by Robert Mueller for lying to Congress.

During his presidential run, Neukirch watched his campaign manager, Egghead, morph into a dirty trickster. 

“He was just a little too fervent about the campaigning thing and winning,” Neukirch said. “A classmate says he remembers Roger instituting a whispering campaign against my rival, claiming he was a homosexual. Yikes.” (Stone denies this.)

By then, Stone was an old campaign hand. As a sophomore, he’d run for vice-president against a junior, a football star en route to Dartmouth. “But Stone was a master,” Ortmayer said. “He appreciated that he had no chance of winning unless he did something truly extraordinary, which is what he did.” At an assembly for the candidates to make speeches, he said, Stone enlisted a bunch of “very cute girls, in miniskirts, to toss candy into the crowd.”

“And Roger’s speech!” Neukirch said. “It was like he was running for V.P. of the U.S.!” At the end of his remarks, dozens of balloons dropped from the auditorium’s ceiling. “I still have no idea how he did that,” Carvolth said. Stone won.

Stone has fostered a more dramatic version of his student-council years: a Times profile described how, as V.P., he “manipulated the ouster of the president and his own succession.”

“I don’t recall the ‘ouster’ of anyone,” Neukirch said. Ortmayer, the president whom Stone supposedly toppled, denies the story. “Stone takes credit for something that I had absolutely no problem doing myself,” he said, “which is getting thrown off the student council.” Ortmayer had returned to school after living abroad with his family, and, newly cosmopolitan, he couldn’t be bothered to engage in such suburban American teen-age concerns as student council. But Carvolth remembered hearing that Stone had brought Ortmayer’s dereliction of duty to the attention of the school principal.

Stone was elected student-council president in his senior year, enabling him to run such activities as Slave Day, when you could buy a classmate and make him or her carry your books. Then, he helped usher Neukirch to the presidency, a service that he eventually performed for Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. But being president didn’t mean much to Neukirch. “I don’t recall a darn thing about it,” he said. “There was a small room that was an ‘office,’ and Roger showed it to me and said something to the effect of ‘One day, all this could be yours.’ ” 

This article appears in the print edition of the March 18, 2019, issue, with the headline “Young Roger Stone.”

Tyler Foggatt is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.