McGoverning #10: High Heat

Never sweat; never blink. That was a woman’s life in a public role already and this, these circumstances, they tightened the rules hard and fast.

Jean Westwood looked up for a moment from the blazing lights far above the convention floor and considered her position. The whole thing — the entire year-long effort to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the reformist outsider George McGovern, and with that a shot at changing the way the Democratic Party did, well, everything — rested on a knife’s edge. There were several moving pieces and if any of them did not come to rest in the right spots, encourage the correct responses from the correct people at just the right times, it would all fall apart. So of course, with that steep risk of failure and blame, the men at the top of McGovern’s campaign had put a woman in charge.

That wasn’t the only reason, of course. The reason more blame wouldn’t then wash over to those top-rank men, if it all went south this day, was because they’d argue the woman they chose — herself, Westwood reflected, with steel in her thoughts — was the most skilled parliamentarian they had. And she was; she knew the delegate selection processes in damned near every one of the fifty states, the rules drafted for this convention, the legal and parliamentary bases for the maneuver the McGovern army hoped to run. And no good deed goes unpunished.

It had started three weeks prior, when much of the preliminary work for the Miami convention was done by its Credentials and Rules committees as they met in session back in Washington, DC, laid the groundwork in hopes this shindig would be the opposite of the bloody, chaotic, bitter, tragic meeting in Chicago back in ‘68. Jean Westwood had hurried with all that same parliamentary capacity to get her position on Rules confirmed by her home state convention in Utah in time to reach the Washington round before anyone did anything rash.

She did, if only just. Anne Wexler, who loved the spotlight and had visions of being the McGovernite star of Rules until Westwood showed up, had nearly lit the fuse for a blazing row over whether a woman should chair the convention until Westwood scotched it. It was all very well to wave tokens in front of the cameras; it was more important to actually win.

Likewise Westwood complained to Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart that keeping her focused on Rules might dangerously miss the trick afoot with Credentials, where McGovern’s foes had stacked the committee and McGovern’s own few delegates would have to recuse from procedural challenges that involved them. Eli Segal, running Credentials for the McGoverners, was a good guy and a smart young lawyer, but Westwood urged the official bosses that Segal needed backup before the anti-McGovern contingent dashed the Senator’s hopes with a strike against the California delegates.