Before entering politics, Dougherty spent many years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, working as a stockman, buying and selling cattle.

[5] One of those calls, in which Kennedy congratulated his South Dakotan supporters over a speaker phone, was taped by Dougherty and eventually preserved on a compact disc.

[4] After receiving the Democratic nomination, McGovern replaced his running mate, Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, with former Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver of Maryland, after being urged to do so by Dougherty, among others.

[6] In a 1973 book, Neil R. Peirce described his 1969 interview of Dougherty: ...With his lean figure, Western blue jeans, cowboy hat, and boots, he looks as if he would be more at home in a Marlboro cigarette ad than working closely with the sophisticated Kennedy clan of the old East.

When I first interviewed Dougherty in 1969, I was amazed by his confidence that the South Dakota Democratic party of the 1970s could become consistently competitive with the GOP, building a coalition of farmers, college people, intellectual suburbanites, and labor and cutting down the Republican edge in the cities.

The breakdown of South Dakota's insularity through television and travel was leading in that direction, Dougherty argued; he said his own attitudes on race were greatly altered by travel with Bobby Kennedy to the ghettos of the great cities and subsequently by the nine-hour ride on Bobby's funeral train from New York to Washington, watching impoverished blacks and others who lined the train platforms in 100-degree to honor their fallen hero.