The Democrats: Feuds & Factions

“Right now, they have a great big Band-Aid holding them together—Watergate. When it gets ripped off, watch out.”—Anne Armstrong, then White House counselor, speaking about the Democrats, July 16, 1974

The jockeying for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination has already begun, while the fights that divided the party in 1968 and again in 1972 still smoulder. Henry Jackson’s prime supporters in and around the AFL–CIO’s Committee on Political Education and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority are smoldering the hardest about such things as the retention of most of the McGovern-Fraser guidelines for delegate selection. The Jackson partisans have been vociferous in their dislike of those guidelines ...