The neatness of the Democrats’ divisions was almost…suspicious. “The only logical explanation of the Democratic Presidential campaign so far,” Scotty Reston wrote in his New York Times column at the end of April, “is that it must have been planned by the Republicans.” Little did he know his joke was literally true. The White House was delighted at George McGovern’s ascendancy; he was the one serious contender they never rat-fucked. They loved the combustion between the kind of people who loved Humphrey and the kind of people who liked McGovern; they themselves had helped set the fuse.
