The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

17 | A Gold Watch for Maggie
Mount st. heLens in Southwest Washington erupted like a hydrogen
bomb at 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980, shedding its summit
in a cataclysmic landslide. A mushroom cloud rose 15 miles
and a pall of ash rolled east at 60 mph, drifting down like gritty gray
snow. It turned day into night in Yakima and Spokane.
The eruption killed 57 people and countless creatures, laid waste to
230 square miles of forest, clogged lakes, rivers and bays and wiped out
highways and bridges. Magnuson, the Senate Appropriations Committee
chairman, went to see his friend Daniel Inouye, a ranking member.
“I’ve had a volcano go off in my state,” Magnuson advised. “Maggie,”
said the senator from Hawaii, “I’ve got them going off in my state all the
time.” “Danny,” Magnuson replied with a smile and a pat, “your time
will come.” Washington state’s senior senator had decided to be “scrupulously
fair with federal funds,” Vice President Walter Mondale once
quipped. “One half for Washington State, one half for the rest of the
country.” 1
As usual, Maggie brought home the bacon: Nearly a billion dollars in
emergency relief. But when he accompanied President Carter on an inspection
tour three days after the eruption, TV cameras caught him
stumbling as he attempted to navigate the stairs from Air Force One to
the tarmac at Portland. A diabetic, the 75-year-old senator had a sore foot
that wouldn’t heal. Opinion polls indicated early on that it would be risky
for him to seek a seventh term. He was president pro tem of the Senate,
the realization of a dream. “Go home. Rest on your laurels. You have nothing
left to prove,” trusted advisers said. “But he couldn’t imagine himself
not being a senator,” said Gerry Johnson, a top aide who resigned at the
beginning of 1979. He had clashed with Jermaine Magnuson, the senator’s
protective spouse. She wanted one last term for her old lion, once the
most raffishly handsome man in Congress. 2
Gorton also couldn’t imagine himself not being a senator. It was what
he’d wanted to be ever since he was 14 when future congressman Walter
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