William Dougherty

William Dougherty (April 6, 1932 – July 3, 2010) was an American businessman, lobbyist, and Democratic politician who was the 31st Lieutenant Governor of South Dakota from 1971 to 1975.

Early life and education Dougherty graduated from South Dakota State University in 1954. Before entering politics, Dougherty spent many years in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, working as a stockman, buying and selling cattle. In the late 1950s, he befriended the Kennedy family, enabling his rise in politics.

Political career In 1960, he worked on Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, meeting Kennedy's brother, future Senator Ted Kennedy, during that campaign. Although John F. Kennedy won the presidency that year, the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, won South Dakota's four electoral votes. In 1968, Dougherty managed New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy's South Dakota campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency; with Dougherty at the helm, Kennedy won the South Dakota primary on the same day he won the California primary. However, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, California that night; Dougherty had spoken to him on the telephone twice shortly before the assassination. 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.

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. He retired from his lobbying career in 2009. He was inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in September 2009.

In 2010, he died of cancer in Sioux Falls.