The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

112 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
when we started out from Olympia was in seventh gear,” Gorton recalls.
“By the time we arrived in eastern upstate New York, where Nat joined us,
it was ninth gear. I was back on a bike east of Buffalo and we were moving.”
Nat Gorton had to throw his bike into the car with about 20 miles to
go that day, much to his humiliation.
Two days later, at an Episcopal Church in Vermont the locals warned
that the next leg of their journey was all uphill. They thanked them and
proceeded to pedal to the top of Sherburne Pass. Nat was five minutes
behind but too proud to get off his bike and walk. When he finally caught
up, Becky deadpanned, “Oh Uncle Nat, is this what you call mountains
back East?”
The penultimate leg was an exhausting 95–mile ride from Dartmouth
to Nashua to visit New Hampshire’s attorney general. Slade and Warren
Rudman had become good friends through national meetings and would
go on to serve together in the U.S. Senate.
Tired but excited, on July 20 they set out on the final 40–mile leg to
Gloucester. Slade’s parents drove out to the suburbs to greet them. Sally
celebrated her 40 th birthday the next day, pleased that she had lost a couple
of dress sizes. Becky Gorton was in the Guinness Book of World Records
for a while as the youngest person to have bicycled across America. When
Slade came back to work, he discovered that wags in the office had replaced
his office chair with one that featured a bicycle seat. 12
“When they’re 80, my kids will still remember what they did in the
summer of 1973 and what they learned about their country,” Slade says.
For years to come, the slide show of the bike trip was his crowd-pleaser.
“That’s all the Rotary Clubs wanted to see. They didn’t want to hear about
my consumer protection efforts.” Well, not quite. When he returned from
the trip, he made one of the most controversial decisions of his career in
politics. He announced it at the Seattle Rotary Club, which eagerly wanted
to hear what a leading Republican had to say about the conduct of the
President of the United States.
As the goRtons And heMstAds were departing on their cross-country
adventure, the other Washington was poised to boil. Woodward and Bernstein
were reporting in The Washington Post that ex-White House counsel
John Dean had told the Senate Watergate Committee he discussed the
cover-up with Nixon on least 35 occasions. Claiming executive privilege,
the president would neither testify himself nor grant access to presidential
documents. Then his former appointments secretary revealed that
since 1971 Nixon had recorded all of the conversations in the Oval Office,