The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

unhAppy dAys 101
ately owned up, eyes downcast. He said that’s what he’d been up to when
he took four days of personal leave earlier in the month. 13
Two ostensibly upstanding Republicans—one an Eagle Scout, the
other intolerant of tolerance—now stood accused of political espionage
against an ex-governor allegedly consorting with mobsters. It was a circulation
manager’s dream. Watergate amplified everything.
giLMouR confiRMed thAt dysARt had been working with a detective
hired by the campaign committee. Governor Evans knew about the detective,
the chairman said, but he didn’t realize the attorney general’s chief
deputy was helping. When reporters caught up with him, the governor
said that was quite so. Dysart deserved to be suspended, Evans said. He
saw nothing wrong, however, with hiring a private detective to chase
down rumors about Rosellini. “We’d be foolish not to,” but “there is a difference
between spreading rumors and checking out rumors.” And why
was Rosellini sounding so saintly when he had used an on-duty State
Patrol trooper to investigate Dick Christensen when the Lutheran minister
was the Republican frontrunner for governor in 1964? “Ask him about
that?” Evans said. As for Rosellini’s charge that he’d been the victim of
anti-Italian innuendo, the governor bristled: “Never have I engaged in
racial slurs of any kind.” Evans also categorically denied Rosellini’s claim
that they’d either tapped his phones or obtained his confidential telephone
records. Meantime, Evans said, someone had been investigating
him, too—and they could have at it; he had nothing to hide. “Our campaign
is clean. I gave strict orders at the very beginning to be as clean as
we can be.” Perhaps not the best turn of phrase. 14
Evans and Gorton had other assorted loose cannons and wild-hare
friends, including a Wenatchee insurance salesman who on November 1
apologized not to Rosellini but to Evans for printing up a batch of “Does
Washington Really Need a Godfather?” bumper stickers. “I meant no
harm,” said Paul C. Meyer. “I thought I had a legitimate message. I was
aiming at telling the people about corruption I saw in Rosellini.” Meyer
said he was a Danish immigrant and a good Republican. How good?
Well, he held off on becoming an American citizen until there was a Republican
in the White House and only sold insurance to Republicans. 15
Some saw the Colacurcio story as yet another October surprise cooked
up by Evans and Gorton. “Many regular Democrats bitterly believe that
the gambling charges” that surfaced just before the 1968 election “were
deliberately unloaded” on John J. O’Connell by the Republicans to get
Evans re-elected, Dick Larsen wrote. He also observed that Dysart was