The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

188 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
Mount Baker, was protected, 118,000 acres in all. Five new wilderness
areas bracketed the western and southern boundaries of the Olympic National
Park. Morrison staked out the 150,000-acre Lake Chelan-Sawtooth
Wilderness, while Bremerton Democrat Norm Dicks championed the
Clearwater Wilderness along the northern boundary of Mount Rainier
National Park. The Cougar Lakes area backed by Pritchard and Lowry
became part of the William O. Douglas Wilderness. 14
Jackson had blown a gasket when Reagan’s Interior Department, under
the ham-handed James Watt, set out to open vast tracts of wilderness
to development and limit new additions. After Watt boasted that his coalleasing
commission was diversified with “a black, a woman, two Jews and
a cripple,” Gorton denounced him from the Senate floor as “a failure on
his own terms, a destructively divisive force in American society, an albatross
around the neck of his own president.” 15
When Congress honored Everett’s most famous son by establishing
the 100,000-acre Henry M. Jackson Wilderness in the headwaters of the
Skykomish, Watt was gone, but the White House still balked at a Rose
Garden signing ceremony. Gorton, Evans and other members of the state
delegation, together with Helen and Peter Jackson, assembled at a spectacular
overlook in the North Cascades to dedicate the new wilderness.
Before the ceremony, Gorton, Evans and the Jacksons hiked to a serene
alpine lake to give the wilderness an even more fitting baptism.
With the Washington delegation aggressively honoring Scoop’s legacy
as a conservationist, the 98th Congress ended up putting more wilderness
in the 48 contiguous states under federal protection than any of its
predecessors. 16