Suspicious George

When Sen. George McGovern visited the Nixon Library last month, director Tim Naftali gave him copies of recently opened records suggesting strongly that Nixon aides Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson were behind revelations that McGovern's running mate in his 1972 campaign against President Nixon, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had been treated for depression. Outraged though McGovern may have been, it's hard to imagine that his campaign wouldn't have used intelligence about, for instance, Vice President Agnew's corruption. Saying that he hadn't known before that the White House was involved, McGovern (mild-mannered and gracious though he is said to be) speculated recklessly to "Vanity Fair" that President Nixon might have been behind the attempt to assassinate Gov. George Wallace:

McGovern pointed out that if you look at elections in a certain way, you could say that Ross Perot elected Bill Clinton and Ralph Nader put George W. Bush over the top. “In 1968, George Wallace had garnered 10 million votes and we figured that, running again in 1972, he might pick up as many as 20 million votes,” McGovern said. The segregationist Alabama governor had been campaigning with the slogan “Send Them a Message,” and it was assumed that his votes would almost all come from Nixon’s base, but on May 15, 1972, an assassination attempt left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down and he was forced to withdraw from the race. I was still wondering where McGovern was going with this when he came to a shocking supposition: “You know, Wallace went to his grave thinking Nixon’s people were behind the shooting. I thought at the time, ‘Well, George is a little gaga.’ But now … you have to wonder … ”