O'Brien's Last Hurrah

On the morrow of the convention, Lawrence F. O'Brien stepped down as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, ending 21 remarkable years as the steward of his party. His last hurrah was to preside with panache over the proceedings in Miami Beach last week. TIME'S Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey chronicles the event through the eyes of the Democrats' pro of pros:

They brought the reports from the floor to Larry O'Brien before the convention opened. Some of them were pretty scary. Beards, longhairs, nuts out there, filling up O'Brien's beloved party seats, ready to tear his whole political life to shreds. He puffed on his Kents and chortled, sitting in his trailer just outside the hall, outwardly calm but inside taut. He would have the whole monstrous affair to oversee.

He stubbed out a cigarette, put on his coat and thought to himself: Here we go--here's reform. He made the 100 crowded strides to the podium looking like what he has always been: a pol. Not young, not old, but plenty Irish and plenty seasoned. Odd that he represented in the minds of many of the new people the very bossism they hated; yet he had held the party together for a decade and sometimes, with men like Treasurer Robert Strauss, almost with his bare hands and certainly with bare wallets. Without O'Brien there would have been no reform.

Just before he took the final steps to view what lay before him, his deputy, Stanley Greigg, took his arm and said, "Keep your sense of humor." Good advice, and O'Brien's face crinkled. He felt pretty good. Then he saw them, and for an instant his internal radar swept the horizon and put them up against the Democrats of other times. Not that much difference, he told himself with relief, after only a few seconds. People keep forgetting that Democrats have always come out of the streets and back alleys. More blacks, thought O'Brien, more women, younger--yes, a beard here and there. Somewhere in the back of his mind lurked the pictures of the faces of those working men of Massachusetts who had listened to him in bars and grubby back rooms when, as a 16-year-old, he gave speeches for his father running for delegate. They wanted a society that worked. So do these people.

O'Brien picked up the huge gavel. Too heavy, he thought. Why not get an electric buzzer next time? He whacked it down, and the great spectacle of Miami Beach was on. He made an early decision. The noisy mass below him had to be managed, somehow led through four days of business, but more important were the millions and millions of Americans who were watching through those blinking red eyes directly in front of him. Talk to them, he told himself, wondering what the man in San Clemente would be seeing in a few hours.

The convention was already behind time when O'Brien started his speech. That was deliberate. Don't harass or push. Stay loose, he kept telling himself. The noise on the floor hardly subsided as he talked--the old Irish rasp, the square sentences full of platitudes, annoyingly interspersed with film clips. Yet here and there people began to listen. It was not the familiar polemic against Richard Nixon. It was not the extravagant praise of the Democratic past. He talked about "the crisis of truth," of the Democrats being "on trial." He did not avoid blame for problems, and he tried to warn his youthful audience that the world is not remade by "a stroke of the pen."

"We need everyone," O'Brien continued. His eyes flicked across the audience as if he might spot his old friend Mayor Richard Daley. He did not see him, and he would not. Too bad, he thought. Foolish politics. "Do we have the guts to level with the American people?" he asked. "We do not promise what we know cannot be delivered by man, God or the Democratic Party." O'Brien had set the tone. Odd that the New Politics should be in him too (later, McGovern phoned his praise and asked for a copy of the speech to help guide him in his acceptance address).

Then the work began. If the McGovern forces did not have the strength, the credentials fight over California could get nasty. O'Brien had ruled early that a majority would be based on those voting, thus avoiding any "shock waves" on the floor that might ignite passions. And if they wanted roll calls, O'Brien would give them roll calls until Judgement Day. He had the right to refuse a roll call if 20% of the delegates did not ask for it, but he ignored this. Be scrupulously fair, he constantly reminded himself. He had deliberately avoided learning too much about supposed candidate strength in the days preceding the convention, lest he might accidentally seem to get involved in anyone's strategy.

The evening wore on. The roll calls in that curious sea of dispassion showed the McGovern strength. O'Brien set an informal tone. There was none of that "most honorable" from "the great state of . . ." If he knew the man it was "Frank" or "John." The McGovern triumph came as almost routine business --no bands or balloons, a procedural footnote. O'Brien hardly noticed, shepherding his energy for the night.

He stepped up and whacked away with his too-big gavel to get the people out of the aisles. He looked down, and there was Pierre Salinger, vested, chubby, one of the men who had worked with him when John Kennedy had won the nomination in 1960. "Will the portly gentleman in front please take his seat," O'Brien intoned. Salinger ignored him. O'Brien chuckled and relaxed. What the hell, he thought, he himself had not paid a bit of attention to all those entreaties when he was running the Kennedy show. After all, most of these guys were actually obeying the chair's demands.

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