Roger Stone should be a footnote in history. Instead, his life shows our descent to shamelessness. [View all]

[Zorro]

In 1978, Democrat Charles “Pug” Ravenel was giving Sen. Strom Thurmond (R), the former segregationist, a tough race for reelection in South Carolina. Ravenel was from a prominent, well-liked local family, but had made the mistake of prepping at Exeter and playing football at Harvard.

How do you tackle him? Well, if you were Roger Stone, you somehow “heard” thirdhand that Ravenel had promised at a private Manhattan fundraiser to be a “third senator from New York.” You get that rumor published in a minor New York rag. Then you and your partner in crime, a young South Carolina hustler named Lee Atwater, take this “news” and spread it from Charleston to Greenville to Myrtle Beach. And then you win the race going away, even as poor ol’ Pug protests that he’d never said any such thing.

Stone proudly told me the Ravenel story years later. As a political reporter, then and now, I talked with Roger a good bit — we all did — and over the decades he inevitably book-ended the conversations the same way. They began, “You didn’t hear this from me,” and ended, “Keep me out of trouble.”

I didn’t admit hearing things from him, but there was nothing I could do, even if I wanted to, to keep him out of trouble.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/roger-stone-embodies-the-political-age-from-nixon-to-trump/2019/11/15/fd2a5006-07f2-11ea-8ac0-0810ed197c7e_story.html