The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

98 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
part, Gorton was delighted to have O’Connell in the race. It might be déjà
vu all over again if Dore lost and he ended up with a weaker general election
opponent, just as he had four years earlier when McCutcheon won
the primary. 5
No such luck. Come September, Dore easily defeated O’Connell to win
the Democratic nomination for attorney general. Gorton was the top votegetter
with 33 percent, but the Democrats rolled up nearly twice as many
votes. Slade’s analysis was that the Dore-O’Connell race had energized
Democratic voters while he had only token opposition from a little-known
Republican. In any case, the race for AG rated little more than a frontpage
footnote on the morning after. The banner-headline news was that
Rosellini had thrashed Durkan. Al carried 22 counties, including King,
Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish, and was the top vote-getter overall, besting
Evans’ total by nearly 6 percent. Jim McDermott, a 35–year-old child
psychiatrist from Seattle, finished a distant fifth in his first statewide outing.
The stage was set for a grudge match between two men seeking a
third term in the governor’s office. Durkan was so bruised by Rosellini’s
bare-knuckle campaign targeting “The Two faces of Martin Durkan” that
he reserved judgment on whether he would support him. McDermott
said he had the same misgivings. 6
Gorton headed for the stump, leaving Keith Dysart to mind the store.
“You are not to engage in any politics,” he emphasized, mindful that his
young chief deputy was a political junkie. Some people are “all propeller
and no rudder,” Joel Pritchard once observed. Many remember Dysart as
a high-energy, “independent kind of guy” who could be obsessive—at
turns confident and moody, upbeat and depressed. Years later, it would be
revealed that Dysart had a bipolar disorder, which in retrospect explains
a lot. “We didn’t know much about bipolar illness in those days,” Chris
Bayley says. 7
hunteR s. thoMpson’s cLAssic political travelogue about the Nixon-Mc-
Govern race—“Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail”—captured
the tenor of American politics in the fall of 1972. On October 6, John
Ehrlichman, the Seattle attorney who had become one of Nixon’s top
aides, gave the Post-Intelligencer an exclusive interview. He said he was
confident that evidence from the Watergate break-in, when fully examined,
wouldn’t “come within a country mile of the President of the
United States.” Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler also hotly denied Mc-
Govern’s charges that the administration was engaging in dirty tricks:
“If anyone had been involved in such activities, they would not long be at