The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

104 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
a fellow charter member of Joel Pritchard’s “Dan Evans’ Group of Heavy
Thinkers.” The Dysart caper “is the only gripe I ever had with that wonderful
person, Jim Dolliver,” Gorton says. “Dan was trailing in the polls and
they needed to get some dirt on Rosellini, of which there was plenty to get,
so Dolliver came to Dysart and recruited him to go out and dig up information
on Rosellini.” Despite Slade’s warning to stay out of politics, Dysart
was champing at the bit to see action and craved attention. “I knew nothing
about it until Don McGaffin contacted me,” Gorton says.
That qualifier—“of which there was plenty to get”—italicizes Gorton’s
unapologetic contention that Rosellini had been flirting with the dark
side for decades. Evans said something similar. His campaign didn’t traffic
in slurs, rumors and innuendo, the governor said. “We don’t have to
resort to tactics like that. His record is bad enough to defeat him.” 23
Whether it was his record or the torrent of bad publicity, Rosellini’s
13–point lead evaporated. Republican polls had indicated for weeks that
the undecideds might be as high as 25 percent. On November 7, 1972,
Dan Evans won an unprecedented third consecutive term as governor
with 117,000 votes to spare. Gorton trounced Dore. McGovern won Massachusetts
and the District of Columbia, Nixon everything else, but the
cancer growing on the presidency was metastasizing. 24
guMMie Johnson, A poLiticAL Legend in his own time, is gone. Dolliver
and Dysart are too. Dolliver was appointed to the Washington Supreme
Court by Evans in 1976 and defeated Fred Dore to win a full term. Before
suffering a debilitating stroke in 1993, he had a robust voice and the dazzling
intellectual dexterity to match his gray beard. He was also a deft
political strategist and chief of staff whose counsel had been invaluable to
Evans for nearly a decade. Neither his oral history nor any of his other
public statements address the Dysart incident.
Adele Ferguson, the feisty Bremerton Sun reporter, had several sources
who suggested that Dysart was telling the truth when he said Johnson
was also involved. Evans shares that belief. “I did not know anything
about Dysart’s activities until the news articles appeared,” the former governor
said in 2010. “Dolliver told me some of the details but I really don’t
think he was the chief instigator. Gummie sounds more like the director
of this affair. Actually by today’s standards it was a pretty tame stuff.”
Evans remembers Dysart as “a bright young funny guy” who later “went
off track mentally and occasionally appeared with some wild story to tell,
looking disheveled and lonely.” Dysart died in obscurity in 2003, only 61.
“He was a wonderful guy in many respects,” Gorton says. 25