What You Need to Know About Roger Stone’s Career and Influence in Politics

Roger Stone – From Childhood Political Prodigy to Prominent Political Operative

Much of the recent news coverage of Roger Stone has been agenda-driven negativity. The mainstream media spent months focused on federal charges leveled against Stone for his associations with President Donald Trump.

The former president first commuted an unusually harsh sentence and has since pardoned Stone. The presidential pardon a news story that generated nearly as rabid a media response in and of itself.

However, lost in all the legal wrangling and partisan opinions about Stone is his tireless influence on American politics. Roger Stone was a critical voice in conservative politics long before Donald J. Trump even envisioned running for public office. Let’s look at Roger Stone’s career and influence in politics.

Childhood Political Prodigy

Roger Stone was born in Norwalk, Connecticut late in the summer of 1952. Stone grew up in a fairly normal middle-class lifestyle. His mother may be partly responsible for sparking a sense of activism in the young Stone.

Gloria Stone was active in local youth organizations, including the president of Stone’s elementary school PTA. Roger Stone’s own sense of active political persuasion reportedly started during his days as a student at Meadow Pond Elementary.

As a seven-year-old grade school kid, Stone remembers an adamant interest in the 1960 Presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. It’s in the school cafeteria line that Stone says he orchestrated his first political gimmick.

Stone would vocally broadcast a rumor about candidate Richard Nixon, a boast he hoped would filtrate back his classmate’s parent’s ears. The young Roger insisted to the wide-eyed astonishment of his peers that candidate Nixon was going to push for school on Saturdays.

Stone’s adventures into politics were only beginning. During his junior year at John Jay High School, as the vice-president of the student body, Stone coordinated an effort to remove the sitting student body president. It worked.

The following year, Stone used other strategies that he envisioned as “smart politics”, to claim as second-term as student body president. After reading The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater, Stone shifted his political ideology.

At 12-years-of-age, Stone volunteered for the Arizona Senator’s 1964 campaign for the U.S. Presidency as the Republican Candidate. It was eight years later as a student at George Washington University when Stone stepped into American politics full-time.

Stone invited Jeb Magruder to speak at the Young Republicans Club on campus in 1972. He had the foresight to envision this as the chance of a lifetime. Stone petitioned Magruder for a job working for President Nixon’s reelection campaign. He was hired. Stone left school to embark on a new political adventure. A childhood political prodigy was now on the big stage.

Prodigy Becomes a Sensation

Almost overnight, Roger Stone’s perceived influence in politics skyrocketed. His first dedicated work as a political strategist was Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign. While his official capacity according to the campaign was a simple junior-scheduler, he made considerable contributions that flew under the official radar.

Stone became as much a political operative as he was a campaign worker. The young and aspiring 20-year-old had a knack for political theater. Nixon rewarded Stone’s dedication with an appointment in the Office of Economic Opportunity.

After the former president resigned, Stone began working for Senator Bob Dole. It was during his duties for Dole that Stone ran into his first battle with unsubstantiated accusations from the press. Stone resigned his position in Dole’s office but went right back to work.

Roger Stone’s influence as a professional political operative began to blossom from its roots, beginning in the lunch line at his elementary school. He was an inspirational and organizational force behind the successful run by New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean.

Stone maintained an allegiance to the man who gave him his professional start in politics, handling an advisory role for Richard Nixon post-presidency. In 1980, Roger Stone was recruited to spearhead another run at the White House.

During this period, Stone orchestrated the launch of a Washington D.C. lobbying firm. Black, Manafort, and Stone (BMS), was one of D.C.’s first influential lobbying agencies. BMS was extremely instrumental in both of Ronald Reagan’s successful runs at the U.S. Presidency.

Stone was at the heart of both. During the 1990s, Stone continued to lobby successfully for various conservative candidates. However, it was a new relationship that would forge outside of politics that would eventually become one of his biggest.

Roger Stone worked in a lobbying capacity for the casinos owned by Donald Trump. Partly due to some conflicts in the mid-1990s, Stone resigned and took a position on Bob Dole’s staff again.

This time Stone was entrusted with helping Dole secure the 1996 Republican nomination for president. This was one of the few instances where Stone’s involvement in a high-profile national campaign did not prove successful.

In 2000, Stone rekindled his relationship with Donald Trump. While Trump’s bid as a third-party candidate never really gained any momentum, a future force was forged. Beginning in 2010, Stone’s insistence that he was a conservative-libertarian proved true.

He spent most of the next four years assisting various state campaigns of Libertarian candidates. When Donald Trump announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2016, one of the first names he brought on board was Roger Stone.

While Stone did not remain in an official capacity for Team Trump much past the summer of 2015, his influence was obvious. He helped lay the framework for the Trump ideology that insisted upon a strategy line that politics was a dirty business, and the dirtiest usually prevailed.

Roger Stone’s influence on American politics has spanned 60 years. He started as a young boy using the art of persuasion in the cafeteria line at his elementary school. In the years that passed, Stone became an integral part of the most successful conservative ambitions.

The undeserved admonishment by the mainstream media, strictly because of his support for the 45th President of the United States, certainly has taxed Stone’s sense of ambition. However, Stone will turn 69 in August. These last two years have been difficult for him and his family.

However, no one close to Roger Stone believes he’s finished playing some part in conservative politics. Even if Stone were to retire from the scene permanently, no one can deny that a childhood political prodigy, turned professional political operative, hasn’t been one of the most influential people in American politics.