HST: What do you mean by they? You people have been around longer than I have. What do you mean—exactly what would they have done to Governor West?
Dougherty: Well, they’d have to abandon him on the South Carolina challenge by changing their vote.
Stearns: Once they’d gone over 1509, they would have seated Governor West’s delegation.
Dougherty: So to get back down under they’d have had to abandon him.
Stearns: When it really came down to it, they had less guts than we had. We were willing to sell out the women, but they weren’t willing to sell out a Southern governor.
HST: When did King figure it out?
Stearns: Well, I think we were ahead of them almost from the beginning. It turned out our strategy confused them almost as much as it may have confused our own supporters.
HST: Johnson in the Post said it confused Jack Chestnut [Humphrey’s campaign manager]. Johnson said the Humphrey people bought it completely; they were sitting there with him watching it on TV.
Stearns: Oh, they did. His aides interpreted it as a great victory. What confused them was the fact that we went out to win it at the beginning. They’ve been reading the columnists for a month about undisciplined, unruly McGovern delegates, and I think once they saw us start to win the South Carolina challenge, I think they relaxed. That was just what they wanted us to do. We needed to set out to win for some political reason because we couldn’t sell out the women completely. If there was a chance to win it, then we had the obligation to try and win.
Dougherty: What did Chestnut say to Humphrey?
Stearns: He said, “We’ve given a great setback to McGovern.” But Humphrey was smarter: Humphrey said, “No, they ran that deliberately…”
HST: Yeah, Humphrey said, “They’re pulling it back.” There was a TV pool reporter with him at the hotel. I was watching Humphrey’s face, and, Jesus, it just turned to wax. He looked the worst I’ve ever seen him—which makes me very happy, that son of a bitch. He should be buried with his head down in the sand. I’ve never been so disgusted with a human being in politics.
Dougherty: One thing, Humphrey isn’t dumb. He’s got a bunch of dumb guys around him.
Stearns: He’s smart—he’s been around a long time. He was the only one of that group who knew what was going on.
HST: According to Johnson, they thought they had it locked up until about halfway through—then all of a sudden they realized…
Stearns: Yeah, but we really did try to win at first, and I think they relaxed then. But with Ohio coming in, we had thirty bogus votes from Minnesota on that total. Maybe a few others—I have to go over the totals again—but Minnesota was what I caught, and then we had Ohio holding out to the end.
Stearns: King passed twice to make sure that his was the last vote that was cast. At that point I was trying to cut our total down to the point where no matter how he cast those votes, no matter how or what they did with those Ohio votes, there was no way they could push us into that area [where the Convention would have been forced to decide what constituted a majority—thus imperiling McGovern’s chance for a first-ballot victory].
HST: So you just wanted to get as low as you could, once you decided to go down?
Stearns: Well, I didn’t want to go as low as I could, I wanted a good vote for the women’s challenge, but I wanted it just low enough that there was nothing King could do to re-write it.
HST: So it had to be almost 80 votes low.
Stearns: Yeah, I think we came in at about 1420 or 1430. And we were prepared to go lower. The number that I was aiming to get us down to was about 1410 and we had those lined up, but as we started taking the votes off, finally King gave up and went ahead and cast his vote. I think we cut it down to the figure where King couldn’t win, and I think he realized that.
HST: When you say dropping it down, now, you mean changes?
Dougherty: When we had time, we shaved them and shaved again.
Stearns: Yeah, we cut them as they were cast and we were ready to change them after.
HST: Did you have to go back and do it? I’ve forgotten.
Stearns: A few of them, we did. We went back to Wisconsin. Wisconsin originally came through at 54, then we cut it down to 37. Oregon came through at 33 and we cut it down to 17 or whatever the figure was. I had Rhode Island ready too, I mean, they would have moved all 22 votes…
HST: You were hung between 1410 and a possible 1500?
Stearns: What I was aiming for was the figure at which Ohio could not have made a difference.
HST: Yeah, but the most you could have gotten—if you hadn’t had that option of losing, when you saw you might not win—you think it was about 1500?
Stearns: Well, my feeling was that on the issue of the challenge itself we were stuck at around 1500. That was clear from the beginning and it would have been disastrous. To keep them from playing with the vote, we had to show them that we had the discipline on the floor, that there was nothing they could do at that point.
Dougherty: But it got tougher to hold that discipline as it went along.
HST: What Gary Hart was quoted as saying was that you couldn’t afford to let them know you had control of the floor. Is that right?
Stearns: No, I think it’s just the opposite. We wanted them to think that we had the control. Otherwise we would have been shifting votes all night.
HST: How long did that fencing with King go on? Did he fuck you up at any time?
Stearns: No, that was their one attempt at that.
HST: All he did was pass twice?
Stearns: No, Ohio passed three times, but I think they realized the fourth time they came around that it was hopeless. They knew we had control.
HST: He didn’t really make any moves except passing.
Stearns: He kept passing. His strategy was to have Ohio cast their votes last so they could manipulate Ohio votes in a way that would have thrown us into the procedural test.
Dougherty: We had some hard votes in Ohio, too—ones they couldn’t move.
Stearns: Right, they couldn’t move our Ohio votes, and as we began cutting that figure down, we finally got to the point where they realized we’d cut it down to zero if we had to.
HST: So his thing was mainly just waiting.
Stearns: To wait until the truth began to dawn on them, that we controlled the votes on the floor.
Dougherty: What we couldn’t afford—hell, it became so obvious—we didn’t want to get the women mad at us.
Stearns: Bill’s point is very good: It got harder as you went along because the more that vote was pushed to 1509, the more our delegates wanted to go for a majority. That’s just what the Humphrey coalition was trying to lure us into, trying to go all out to win the thing, win it with their votes which could have been pulled out from under us, and at that point psychologically to get our supporters to change would have almost been impossible.
Dougherty: I was getting nervous, myself.
Stearns: I know, I was getting all those phone calls back, but…
Dougherty: The delegates were all bitchin’ at me. And I was pissed off.
HST: Why?
Dougherty: I was so worried about our delegates gettin’ pissed off, ’cause they’re all such a great bunch of nonpolitical professionals. I thought, “Ooh shit!” ’Cause, jeez, they got mad at me when I started shaving votes on some of those delegations. You know, “What are you trying to do?” and all that… I didn’t have time to explain it. I just had to be hard and say, “Goddamn it! That’s the way it’s gonna be!”
HST: You mean the delegates themselves didn’t know what was going on?
Dougherty: No! Shit, they weren’t aware.
Stearns: Well, our whips knew. I held a briefing session with them on Monday, and I spent an hour and a half going over the possible parliamentary contingencies.
Dougherty: But the average delegate didn’t know.
Stearns: There were perhaps 250 people on the floor who had a good ide
a of what was going on. There were another 50 or 60 who had a pretty complete idea of what was going on. And then there were about 20 who knew what was going on.
HST: Did state-level leaders like Diane White or Dick Perchlick in the Colorado delegation know what was happening?3
Stearns: No.
HST: That’s amazing. Amazing you could do it. It must have been hell on the floor.
Stearns: It was. That one woman in Nebraska got so damn mad. Oh God, she was mad! But after they saw what it led to in the California vote, then we had a couple of days where we could say almost anything and people realized we weren’t trying to…
Dougherty: That’s when they learned discipline.
HST: Well, Jesus. It was really a helluva gamble then, wasn’t it, given the kind of delegates that were there.
Stearns: Yeah, but you had to take it. We had a nomination at stake.
HST: What was the point then in sending Mankiewicz and Salinger and Hart out to call it a terrible defeat on the floor? After it was over—not before, but after.
Dougherty: Well, on account of the women.
Stearns: We sure didn’t want to get the women angry for us on the California challenge.
Jean Westwood & Frank Mankiewicz stoned on the convention floor. OWEN FRANKEN
Dougherty: The women didn’t catch on, though. They still haven’t. It’s so complicated that they haven’t figured it out.
Stearns: I felt sort of guilty about what we’d done to the Women’s Caucus. Afterwards I went around the trailer saying how bad I felt that we’d done it, but…
HST: What was the long-range effect of that, anyway? Was it just a symbolic thing that you’d done?
Dougherty: McGovern never did have that women’s meeting yesterday. You know the Women’s Caucus called me up and I was in bed. I just hung up. I said, “I can’t help it,” and I hung up.
Stearns: They called me at 7:30 in the morning after I’d just gone to bed, and my response was, “If you really have to meet with him, I’ll arrange it, but the fact that you want to meet with him at 10:00 when the Democratic National Committee is going to convene and elect its first woman chairman in the history of the party shows us how wrong you’ve been all along; all you’re interested in is the form, not the substance. The substance is going to happen over at the National Committee meeting and if you want to do something meaningful, you should go there at 10:00.” So whoever it was hung up. Maybe they went to the committee meeting. Silly. I mean, they want to meet with McGovern while they’re electing their first woman national chairman of the party.
Dougherty: The one that was raisin’ all the hell was the delegate from South Dakota.
Stearns: She caught me about 7:00 in the coffee shop as I was finally getting breakfast.
Dougherty: You know what she’s done for the Democrats? Nothin’, ever. For George McGovern or anything. I really chewed her out on the floor. I said, “Instead of going around startin’ all this trouble, you should be goin’ around puttin’ out the fires.”
HTS: What was the loss, then? What did the women suffer?
Dougherty: That wasn’t what they complained about. They were complaining that there wasn’t enough input from women in the campaign.
HST: Was there any permanent damage done? Any tangible damage?
Dougherty: No, I don’t think so.
HST: The networks must have caught on at some point. I remember I went somewhere and came back and saw Mike Wallace saying what a brilliant move it had been.
Dougherty: I went back to that airlines lounge in the hall, and watched TV a little bit and had coffee after I finished all that sweatin’. And Cronkite is on there saying that McGovern forces have suffered a serious setback and all of a sudden they switched him to the Doral Hotel. There’s David Schoumacher who says, “Well, I’m sorry Walter, maybe they suffered a serious defeat, but when they lost, everybody in the boiler room cheered.”
HST: That probably will go down in the annals of political history. Jesus! What an incredibly byzantine gig! Imagine trying to understand it on TV—not even Machiavelli could have handled that.
Stearns: It was the greatest moment in my political career. I’d say I’ve spent four years studying for the ten minutes on that vote—being able to make the right decision in that circumstance: Learning the names of all those delegates, how they’d been chosen, how the whole thing was put together, what the parliamentary situation might be….
HST: What are the most obvious things that could have gone wrong? In the trailer, on the floor, or at the Doral boiler room…?
Stearns: Well, the most obvious thing that could have gone wrong was if we’d lost control of the Convention. The other issue at stake on that South Carolina vote was whether or not we could control our own delegates and whether we could impose the discipline that was going to lead to a working majority that could nominate George McGovern.
HST: Without them even knowing what you were doing.
Stearns: That was the whole question the press was raising right before the Convention. The Humphrey campaign had all this fantastic strategy about how McGovern supporters, because they were ideologically inclined to proportional representation, would desert us on the California issue and then they’d cut us apart from the black caucus by releasing delegates to Chisholm and the women would come running at us in another direction. So the question was whether we could keep control, and that was the most important thing that could have gone wrong, just a complete inability…
HST: What would have been the first manifestation?
Stearns: Well, South Carolina…
HST: No, I mean, even while it was going on. If somebody just stood up and told you to fuck off…?
Stearns: You mean if Bill had gone to Pat Lucey and said, “We want you to cut back to 37 on this” and Pat had turned around to his delegation and said, “I need 20 people to step forward and change their votes.” And people said, “Go to hell…”
HST: You didn’t think that that could have happened?
Stearns: Oh yeah, it could have happened. But we had a bunch of delegates down here that wanted to win…
Dougherty: After Tuesday night though, they got…
Stearns: They got a little restless. I mean after Monday night, they were willing to follow us anywhere, because they realized what we’d done…
HST: On the Daley challenge4 they didn’t. That was Monday night, wasn’t it? What caused that? Why did some of them desert you on the Daley thing?
Stearns: You mean on the compromise? Our hard-core supporters didn’t desert us. We pulled exactly…
Dougherty: We needed a two-thirds vote from the whole Convention on that one.
Stearns: We pulled exactly the vote of absolutely loyal supporters we had. The people who screwed us on that were the Humphrey and Muskie people who were still convinced that they were gonna win. We got Singer and Jackson to agree to publicly announce the compromise…
Dougherty: Let me tell you this story. I was on the floor with John Bailey [Chairman of the Connecticut delegation, and past Chairman of the Democratic National Committee] right when Frank Morrison had the deal in his hand to give it…
See, you could divide that motion in two, parliamentary-wise, and I asked Bailey to give it, to make the motion to suspend the rules. If Bailey made the motion for two-thirds to suspend the rules, I think it would have passed. Then I’d have Frank Morrison make the motion to seat both delegations and it only takes a majority to do that.
HST: So if you separated the two motions, you could have got it.
Dougherty: See, if John Bailey had made the motion to suspend the rules… I wanted to divide the question: have John Bailey make the motion to suspend the rules, then have Frank Morrison make the motion to have the compromise, and it only would have taken a majority on the compromise, see. And we could let some of our people vote the other way and we still could have won it.
HST: Why didn’t Bailey make it?
Dougherty: I was talking to
him right on the phone while we were gettin’ ready to do it. I was right there on Frank Morrison’s phone, and he says, “I won’t do it, because the Mayor [Daley] hasn’t agreed to it.”
And I says, “This is the only chance, John, this is the only chance we’ve got, otherwise we’re gonna kick him right out of the Convention.” I pleaded with him, I said to him, “For the good of the Democratic Party.” And he wouldn’t do it.
Stearns: The Humphrey coalition’s last hope at that point was that we would be willing to sell out Singer and Jackson, who came through for us and did everything we asked them to do on that California vote and on the compromise.
HST: Why did Singer and Jackson go for the compromise? Were they just thinking about carrying Illinois in November?
Stearns: They’re politicians.
Dougherty: You remember me on the floor. I was mad, because I thought those guys, Jackson and Singer, wouldn’t support it either, but they did! See, that just killed any chance Daley had of being seated.
Stearns: That’s when I decided to go all out for Jackson. When they kept their word on that, then that’s fine with me—we’d keep our word, too.
Doughterty: I’ll tell you this. I wanted Daley in that Convention so bad I could taste it.5
Stearns: He should have been there.
Dougherty: There’s a legal question on it, too. I mean those guys, the Jackson delegation, weren’t exactly legally seated, if you really want to be honest about it. I guess they were on the reform rules, but there was nobody running against them.
Stearns: I agree. The Daley side had a good argument. The Jackson side had a good argument, and the compromise would have settled the whole thing.
The problem at that point was to convince the Humphrey coalition that the compromise was the only way they were going to keep Daley in the Convention. But they wouldn’t believe us. Their last hope was that we would not keep that agreement, that we would sell out Singer and Jackson, so that then they could have come back on the majority report, and at that point carry a disaffected Illinois delegation, because whether Daley had been seated or not, at that point the Singer/Jackson delegation would have gone on voting until a majority report had passed.