The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

A goLd wAtch foR MAggie 153
ready spent most of it, however, and Gorton borrowed $200,000 from his
father. Magnuson already had $800,000 and expected his war chest to top
$1 million. Slade’s supporters sported buttons that said “I’m a Slade Gorton
skinny cat.”
It was crucial to unify the party behind Slade. “As it turned out we
didn’t have to do a damn thing,” Newman says. “It was done masterfully
for us by Jennifer Dunn, the state Republican Party chairman. In the
beginning I thought that nobody who looked that good could be that
sharp, but she was. She was everything a state chairman should be. And
the party came together seamlessly. I became a
Jennifer Dunn fan. It was no surprise to me that
she later made her mark in Congress.” 5
Gorton’s brothers, Mike and Nat, raised
$6,000 for the campaign at “Another Tea Party”
in Boston, touting him as a potential “third senator
from Massachusetts.” They fudged, however,
in billing him as “a native son who went
West.” When news of the event trickled back to
Seattle, Slade told reporters, “I was born in Illinois and grew up in Evanston.
I’ve never lived in Massachusetts. I chewed Mike out royally when I
saw it. I was mad as hell.” But he kept the money. 6
“the fiRst tiMe i Met sLAde,” Newman recalls, “was after I got a call,
probably from his old pal Joe McGavick, inviting me to a meeting with his
brain trust. I told them right up front, ‘I think you’re going up against
Goliath without a stone in your sling.’ I was impressed, however, that
Slade didn’t care. His attitude was ‘We’re going to do this regardless of
how tough it is,’ and even later on when we were really sucking for money
he was always determined. He was putting it all on the line. Everybody
understood that Slade was smart and that his arrival would raise the average
IQ in the Senate by probably five points, but I don’t think people realized
how tough he is. He’s the equivalent of an intellectual alley fighter—
willing to mix it up. I told them, ‘We’ve got to take Warren Magnuson’s
greatest strengths and use them against him—jujitsu them. And we’ve
got to use Scoop Jackson as our weapon.’”
They developed a survey to gauge how deeply the issue of seniority
resonated with the public. One choice was this: “To protect its future, a
state needs one senior senator with great influence and one junior senator
who is building seniority, even if that means less influence in these difficult
times.” The response crossed all lines—age, gender, race, political