Missing Slade Gordon

I miss Slade Gorton on the political scene.

I wrote 122 columns about him during his 10 years in the state House, 12 years as attorney general and 18 years in the U.S. Senate.

So it took me a long time to read the book about him, “Slade Gorton, A Half Century In Politics” by John C. Hughes, not because it was boring, which it was not, but because I knew most of the people in it and had to read every single page.

I’m not going to review it. You can buy one for yourself like I did. I will recall some of my dealings with him. In fact, I didn’t have much hope for him at the beginning.

He was new and a total unknown in 1968, when he decided to run for the House by riding, he told me, on the coattails of the popular Gov. Dan Evans.

“Slade is a brilliant lawyer whose intelligence frightens people,” I wrote. “He’s like a computer, exceedingly handy, seldom wrong, absolutely impersonal, but people aren’t attracted to machines no matter how valuable those machines are. If he wins, it will be the one race where Gov. Dan Evans’ coattails counted.”

He won the race but would never have won any popularity contest among his caucus where he soon became majority leader. They respected his ability and superior intelligence but when he cracked the whip he left some pretty deep scars on his own people. He worked like a dog, so much so that his wife, Sally, used to bring the kids over to stand in the House wings and catch a glimpse of their father.

Once a strong supporter of President Nixon, he became convinced of otherwise and told a Seattle Rotary Club luncheon that he felt Nixon was impeachable on three counts but he should resign for the good of the country. Few if any GOP leaders had dared go that far.

He flirted with running for governor but not against close friend Evans and ran for attorney general instead.

Next he became a U.S. Senator where he chaired the Interior Appropriations Committee which handled the budget for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He tried in vain to make the wealthy casino-owning tribes give some of their federal appropriations to the poor ones. The wealthy tribes refused and the poor ones were afraid to push it. He put a proviso in the budget bill that said any Indian tribe that accepts federal funds waives its sovereign immunity to lawsuits but withdrew it when it became obvious it would not pass.

What, I asked Gorton, exactly do we, as a nation, owe the Indian tribes? “Indians,” he said, “have been the subject of a full, total welfare system for 150 years, far longer than anyone else in the country, and the impact on them has been almost totally negative. The net result is when they say they are poorer than the rest of society, higher in alcoholism and lower in life expectancy, they are right. It is as a result of the welfare system, and is not a rationale for more of the same.

“Just because a newly conquered people were promised help doesn’t mean that 150 years later, their great-great grandchildren have to be supported. The whole design of treaties was to help them integrate so they could be contributing members of society.”

One of my favorite Gorton stories though was the time he was to give a speech here and we guests were told he was in his hotel room resting because he felt ill. When he came down, I was startled to become the recipient of a kiss. On the lips.

The normally reserved senator smacked several women present, all old friends.

I thought you were sick, I said. “Oh, I think I’m coming down with something, “ he said. He was right. State Sen. Ellen Craswell, also a kiss recipient, and I both came down with something. It was called the flu.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA, 98340.)