Mere Verbal Bombshells Don’t Rattle the Colonel

It wasn’t the first time someone opened fire on retired Marine Col. William Dougherty. But you can bet it was the first time anyone called him a coward.

When Rep. Robert K. Dornan confronted the 72-year-old war hero early this week, during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Orange County Republican Party, the congressman had good reason to be mad.

Dougherty, after all, the committee’s most voluble member, publicly backed Dornan’s Democratic opponent Loretta Sanchez, whom the registrar of voters officially declared the winner Friday.

But when Dornan got personal, calling Dougherty a “coward,” “a poor excuse for a Marine” and “a pathetic old senile man,” he divided the Republican Party between lovers and haters of the colorful colonel.

Among Republicans who wish Dougherty were the more conventional old soldier, willing to just fade away, Dornan drew strong support for his tirade. But among Republicans who admire Dougherty, a gravel-voiced veteran of two wars with two Distinguished Flying Crosses to show for his service, Dornan inspired rage.

“I thought Dornan’s comments were totally uncalled for,” says John Elekes, a former Dougherty law partner and a self-styled staunch Republican, who differs with Dougherty’s political views but respects his candor.

“I told Bill, ‘You were too much of a gentleman. You should’ve called him a loser.’ Of course, I added an adjective to ‘loser.’ ”

Michael Schroeder, however, the state GOP vice chairman, says Dornan did nothing more than blast an outspoken enemy of the party. “[Dougherty] is simply a turncoat,” he said. “And that’s being kind.”

Schroeder pointed out that Dornan was repaying an insult first leveled by Dougherty, who went on record calling Dornan a “war wimp” in Sanchez campaign literature. “He’s just an annoyance who’ll eventually go away,” Schroeder said dismissively of Dougherty.

Such barbs don’t faze the colonel, who looks like a 210-pound bulldog, right down to his jowly glower and ferocious underbite. As a longtime criminal defense lawyer (his most famous client was Christopher Boyce, the spy made famous by the book and movie, “The Falcon and the Snowman”), Dougherty is a man who likes the heat.

Only last week, after being unceremoniously dumped from the Republican Central Committee, Dougherty sued his way back on, and now looks forward to the start of a new two-year term, beginning in January.

Though he suspects that Republicans are sharply divided about his outspokenness, Dougherty says few have criticized him to his face. Instead, he’s spent the last few days fielding calls of support at his Villa Park home and receiving warm welcomes at gatherings of prominent party members.

Accolades seem to suit him.

“The women all kiss me,” he says, stretched out in his favorite easy chair in his den. “And the men all say, Dornan’s an [expletive]!”

A graduate of Bowdoin College, in Maine, where he starred as a tackle on the football team, Dougherty can recite long passages of poetry and literature--and often does. About Dornan, for instance, he quotes Shakespeare, with eyes closed and a hand on his forehead: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Poetry is one of many interests, including old movies, trains, journalism and politics.

Born April 18, 1924, Dougherty takes great pleasure in the fact that his birthday falls on the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. “On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-five,” he says, quoting Longfellow in a voice as rough as burlap, “hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year!”

After flying scores of reconnaissance missions in World War II, Dougherty attended Cornell Law School, working summers as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields to earn his tuition. When the Korean War came along, he quit law school and reenlisted.

One of the best memories of his life is returning from a combat mission in North Korea, feeling a wave of relief wash over him as he tuned in the Armed Forces Radio from Tokyo. For eight minutes and 11 seconds, he listened to Benny Goodman performing “Sing, Sing, Sing,” while staring at the bright moon outside his plane and feeling overjoyed to be alive.

After Korea, he graduated from Cornell and passed the bar, then became a government lawyer. A few years later, he went to work for Republican Sen. Kenneth L. Keating of New York, a job that gave him access to some of the most powerful men of his day.

John F. Kennedy was a friend (“His grandfather was one of the pallbearers at my father’s funeral”), and the location of Kennedy’s seat in the Senate--on the Democratic side of the aisle--never troubled Dougherty.

Supporting Sanchez, therefore--and President Clinton, whom he also endorsed--was not unusual. Sometimes he favors personalities over principles, and he dislikes the far-right conservatives who rail about abortion and immigrants.

If the Republicans don’t like it, Dougherty has a few well-chosen words for each of them. Particularly for Thomas A. Fuentes, the Orange County GOP chairman. “He’s a draft dodger,” Dougherty says. “He’s so phony!”

Married 35 years, the father of three children, Dougherty doesn’t enjoy being vilified and hissed. (During Dornan’s outburst, many anti-Dougherty Republicans chimed in, shouting at Dougherty and calling him “traitor!”)

“I’m not doing this for publicity,” Dougherty says. “I don’t have any desire to do that. I just want to get my party back where it should be, in the middle. The party of Lincoln. The party of Teddy Roosevelt.”

Asked why he doesn’t leave the party, since so many of its members disgust him, Dougherty fixes a furious look on his bulldog face and barks: “Never, never, never. They’ll never get me out of it. Never, never, never.”