infiltrate campaigns of candidates such as Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. He also hired a spy in the Humphrey campaign who became Humphrey's driver. According to Stone, during the day he was officially a scheduler in the Nixon campaign, but "By night, I'm trafficking in the black arts. Nixon's people were obsessed with intelligence." Stone maintains he never did anything illegal during the Watergate scandal. The Richard Nixon Foundation later clarified that Stone had been a 20-year-old junior scheduler on the campaign, and that to characterize Stone as one of Nixon's aides or advisers was a "gross misstatement". After Nixon won the 1972 presidential election, Stone worked for the administration in the Office of Economic Opportunity. After Nixon resigned, Stone went to work for Bob Dole, but was later fired after columnist Jack Anderson publicly identified Stone as a Nixon "dirty trickster". In 1975, Stone helped found the National Conservative Political Action Committee, a New Right organization that helped to pioneer independent expenditure political advertising. In the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries, he worked in Ronald Reagan's campaign for U.S. President. In 1977, at age 24, Stone won the presidency of the Young Republicans in a campaign managed by his friend Paul Manafort; they had compiled a dossier on each of the 800 delegates that gathered, which they called "whip books". 1980s: Reagan 1980, lobbying, Bush 1988 Stone went on to serve as chief strategist for Thomas Kean's campaign for Governor of New Jersey in 1981 and for his reelection campaign in 1985. Stone, the "keeper of the Nixon flame", was an adviser to the former President in his post-presidential years, serving as "Nixon's man in Washington". Stone was a protégé of former Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge, who introduced the young Stone to former Vice President Nixon in 1967. After Stone was indicted in 2019, the Nixon Foundation released a statement distancing Stone's ties to Nixon. John Sears recruited Stone to work in Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, coordinating the Northeast. Stone said that Roy Cohn helped him arrange for independent candidate John B. Anderson to get the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York, a move that would help split the opposition to Reagan in the state. Stone said Cohn gave him a suitcase that Stone avoided opening and that, as instructed by Cohn, he dropped off at the office of a lawyer influential in Liberal Party