The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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become president? I replied: Who would care? . . . Miss Griswold kept me
at my desk for 20 minutes after school.
Slade Gorton is not a guy you go out and drink beer with. He is stern,
politically tough, humorless. When I asked him why he messed up everybody’s
bingo, he answered with a ferocious, rapid-fire legal soliloquy. For
some uncontrollable inner reason, I stayed at my desk for 20 minutes
after the interview. . . . He apparently counts on the fact many people had
a Miss Griswold back there in their lives at one time. She couldn’t have
won any class popularity polls day by day during the school term. But,
in retro spect, there was something reassuring about Miss Griswold. 37
in the spRing of 1971, Governor Evans appointed Don Brazier chairman
of the state Utilities and Transportation Commission. Gorton went looking
for a new chief deputy. He settled on 29–year-old J. Keith Dysart, a
University of Washington Law School graduate who had clerked for
Washington Supreme Court Justice Robert Finley. Dysart was a Young
Republican in good standing. He fairly loved campaigning. Chris Bayley
remembers Dysart’s delight when he staked out a suburban Seattle library
on a rumor that Chuck Carroll would be speaking there during the
1970 campaign for county prosecutor. Dysart called excitedly from a
phone booth to say it was true.
“Carroll had refused to debate me, but Keith tracked him down. I was
rushed to the library by my teenage driver and sat in the back of the crowd
with Keith, who popped up and declared, ‘Mr. Carroll, why won’t you talk
with or debate Mr. Bayley?’ ‘Any place, any time!’ says Carroll, and he
proceeded to accuse me of being a tool of the Ripon Society and Nelson
Rockefeller.”
Dysart had briefly been an assistant attorney general at the University
of Washington before joining John Ehrlichman’s Seattle law firm. He
and Bud Krogh had been junior attorneys there before Ehrlichman was
called to the Nixon West Wing and deputized Krogh. Dysart sometimes
shot from the hip, but he was smart and fun to be around. He seemed to
know everyone. Great wife; two neat kids. They lived not far from the
Gortons in Olympia.
Slade would come to rue the day he hired him.