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Strong in what way?

Condemning Israel, you know. I remember he once went to an Israel Bonds thing, with a tribute to him, and made a speech attacking Israel. He's not calling to recognize the PLO or support the PLO; he's taking a position of criticism of Israel, to say that not everything Israel does is the holiest thing in the world. That you cannot say among Jews. So that it's misinterpreted. Sam Kaynard, the NLRB, Brooklyn, the region, Kaynard is a very, very strong supporter of Israel. Kaynard decided that Davis was anti-Israel and we were in trouble with the NLRB all the time because of that. There was that problem, but we could overcome that.

The other problems are interesting. As you organized the Guild and professionals in the period of the Sixties, you're bringing in people who are influenced by the SDS, who are strong on participatory democracy, and who are members of left-fringe groups. So we have opposition groups inside the union from these small left groups -- and the union is a perfect home for them. Why? Every month, the delegates meet, see. They work to become delegates. In a lot of places nobody wants to. You become the delegate. Okay. You're a delegate. Every month there's a delegate assembly meeting. You get up and you can do your thing for 150, 250, 340 -- by this time the delegate assemblies is three hundred, four hundred people. Davis, who has low fuses, can't stand that and gets into arguments, and we're trying to keep him quiet and cool. Enemies of the union, you know that kind of thing. Usually there's a flare-up. It's not significant, but you are organizing social workers, you're organizing people who speak and who like very often to get up and speak endlessly, and sometimes you have long debates going on lasting hours and hours over rather insignificant kinds of things, but to some people they're very significant. So the effect of all of this very often has a negative effect on the majority. “Listen, I don't want to sit here forever listening to this thing. Let me get out of here.” Later on, as a union the crisis gets very sharp, a lot of people, when Doris takes over, you have real terrorist tactics, there were a lot of delegates saying, “I don't want to come here. You can get killed here.” That kind of thing. I'm jumping.

I wanted to tell you one other thing about strategy and approaches that we did. When Dr. King was assassinated, we first of all put out a special issue of the publication, a very handsome issue on King, a tribute to Dr. King. But we also arranged to do this and we used this strategy later on, too. We went to every hospital, got the management's support, and on a given day at a given time, 12:00 o'clock or 11:00 o'clock, we prepared a statement from the union on