The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

152 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
the Boldt Decision being Exhibit A), but he backed the Equal Rights
Amendment and opposed a constitutional amendment banning abortion
“because we live in a pluralistic society.” His environmental record was
also praiseworthy.
Gorton’s first hurdle was defeating a self-styled “real Reagan conservative,”
Lloyd Cooney. A paratrooper in World War II, Cooney was sort
of a Mormon Barry Goldwater. In June, he resigned as president and
on-air editorialist at Seattle’s KIRO, the broadcasting company owned by
the LDS Church, to challenge Gorton for the Republican nomination.
Emmett Watson, long the sage of three-dot journalism in Seattle, once
described Cooney’s TV persona as “an unseasoned platter of elbow macaroni
. . . [T]he quintessential stuffed shirt: bland, preachy and too selfrighteous
for comfort.” Cooney delivered his pungent management editorials
five nights a week, often right from the hip. He had a strong base of
support in the resurgent fallout shelter wing of the party, true believers
who sported “Impeach the media” buttons during Watergate. To them,
Slade Gorton was a highly suspect commodity. 4
“Cooney was someone you couldn’t take lightly,” says Paul Newman, the
political consultant who worked with the Gorton campaign in 1980. (And
not to be confused with the popular actor, although he has some Butch Cassidy
bravado—as well as Brooklyn bluntness—in his voice.) “The religious
right was emerging and they loved Lloyd. That was the year I became aware
of a quantum leap in power they had taken. We couldn’t be the enemy. So
right from the get-go, even though we knew we couldn’t get them on our
side, we were nice to them; we respected them. Anything we could do not
to be the enemy we did. They never totally unified behind Lloyd.”
Gorton bested Cooney by 84,000 votes, ironically making better use of
TV. With only 36.6 percent of the primary vote, Magnuson was as vulnerable
as they’d believed. Gorton, Cooney and two little-known Republicans
accounted for 59 percent. The outcome also illustrated the impact of
Washington’s blanket primary (now morphed into a regardless-of-party
“top two”), which allows voters to cross party lines and vote for whomever
they choose. Gorton might well have lost to Cooney in a party-registration
primary, such was the strength of the conservative bloc. Cooney, in reality,
was less intransigent than his flock. “I found him to be a nice guy,
without a trace of meanness,” says Gorton. “He endorsed me the day after
the primary.”
Newman, it was abundantly clear, knew his stuff.
The Gorton-for-Senate campaign was now fully energized, collecting
$180,000 from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They’d al-