The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

106 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
it. The third thing is that he hates bigotry. “Al Rosellini’s ethnicity and
religion were immaterial.”
While critics snort at the notion that Gorton was oblivious to Dysart’s
activities, former staffers and campaign workers say it’s entirely plausible.
After he settled in as attorney general and especially as a U.S. senator,
he was a delegator, they say, and largely detached from personnel issues
and operational details. “He wanted to be the senator,” says former chief of
staff J. Vander Stoep. On the campaign trail he’d let the experts develop a
battle plan. If he liked it, he was content to be the candidate and stick to
the script. Mike McGavick, the son of a good friend, grew up to be the most
trusted member of Gorton’s inner circle. McGavick had enormous strategic
leeway when they were in campaign mode. Slade sometimes was bemused
to be “the grown-up” getting prepped and counseled by the kids. 29
“i thinK he’s Lying,” Fred Dore always said of Gorton’s denials in the
Dysart affair, which lingered on for another two years after Dysart resigned
from the Attorney General’s Office following the election. Despite
Gorton’s denials, rumors persisted that Dysart was still secretly on the
AG’s payroll. He’d been seen around the Legislature during the 1973 session.
Adele determined, however, that he’d been doing “private work for
various clients.” Dysart soon took a job in Washington, D.C., as counsel
to the National Governors’ Conference, of which Evans was chairman.
“But another reason for the continued interest in Dysart,” Adele wrote, “is
his longtime friendship, or so it’s said, with a couple of principals in that
boil on the political process, Watergate,” namely Ehrlichman and his protégé,
Egil “Bud” Krogh. “Those aforementioned whisperers think it interesting
that the Dysart political espionage followed on the heels of the
Watergate espionage and some of the circumstances are oddly coincidental.”
For one thing, Adele noted, Dysart said neither Gorton nor Evans
knew what he was up to. “Some of those close to the people involved,
however, doubted that Dysart, not a stupid man, would go so far on his
own. . . .What they suspicioned was that Jim Dolliver, who is to Evans
what Ehrlichman was to Nixon, and ex-state GOP chairman Gummie
Johnson persuaded Dysart to use his ability and power to make the investigation,
all the while keeping Evans and Gorton in the dark so they could
later honestly say they knew nothing about it.” 30
Krogh, who got caught up in the twilight zone of Nixon’s West Wing
and agreed to direct the infamous White House “Plumbers,” told Gorton’s
biographer in 2010 that he and Dysart were friendly but he could
recall no conversations between them about any sort of political espio-