In 1972, the year of the Watergate break-in, President Richard Nixon was running for re-election.

The frontrunner in the Democratic primary was Senator Ed Muskie from Maine, and Nixon saw him as a real threat.

The Democrat Nixon wanted to run against was Senator George McGovern from South Dakota.

He was an unapologetically left-wing and anti-war candidate.

He could be easily tarred as a friend to dope-smoking communists.

The famous attack line on McGovern was that he stood for acid, amnesty, and abortion.

So Nixon's henchmen worked hard during 1971 and 72 to undermine Muskie and to deliver the nomination to McGovern, essentially to pick their opponent.

They employed some truly wild schemes to achieve their goal.

Here's Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

They hired a man named Elmer Wyatt, who was Muskie's chauffeur.

Wait, they got him hired as the driver?

He volunteered.

And so Muskie accepted him as a volunteer, and the Nixon people paid him $1,000 a month.

Elmer Wyatt was a retired cab driver when he was hired to spy on the Muskie campaign.

One of his jobs as a volunteer was to ferry documents from Muskie's Senate office to campaign headquarters.

There were so many documents to Xerox that Wyatt rented an apartment, a Xerox machine,

and then would stop and make copies of everything and send them to the Nixon campaign.

That was just one of the many methods of interference the Nixon campaign engaged in while

working to undermine Ed Muskie. Some of the others were just petty. On more than one occasion,

members of Nixon's team sneaked into a hotel where the Muskie people were staying, stole all

their shoes from the hallway, and threw them in a dumpster.

But others were less like hijinks and more like cynical acts of fraud.

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