The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

220 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
by the ABA as “lacking in intellectual capacity.” “We are all horse-traders
here,” said Rudy Boschwitz. 15*
The consensus was that Gorton won all three of the debates, two of
which were televised statewide. He had prepped by recruiting Phil
Gramm to play Adams in a mock debate, complete with rostrums and a
TV camera. “It is the worst humiliation I have ever suffered,” Gorton recalls,
“and a great lesson that Gramm is one of the smartest guys who
ever came down the pike. Here was a conservative Republican mopping
the floor with me with a dead-on performance as a liberal Democrat. I
beat the real Brock Adams at least that badly in our debates.” But how
many votes did he win? Seattle’s KOMO TV, one of the sponsors, selected
a panel of undecided voters and asked them to rate the candidates’ performances.
Gorton was clearly the better debater, the real people agreed, yet
he came across as “too cold, too tight, too forced,” with a smile that
seemed pasted on. They were “more inclined as a result of the encounter
to vote for Adams,” who was chirpy but likable. Gorton’s people told him
he had to work at being more charming. They aired a commercial featuring
the engaging Sally Gorton. “Sometimes he doesn’t let it show,” she
told voters, “but he cares so much.” Evans, the sure-fire surrogate, cut
several radio and TV commercials denouncing the attacks on his friend
in his rich baritone. 16
Unchastened, Adams asserted that the Republican plan to convert a
civilian commercial reactor to produce weapons-grade plutonium would
violate the 1968 nuclear proliferation treaty. A new commercial aired in
the last days of the campaign featured Adams standing in front of one
of the mothballed WPPSS plants, charging that if Gorton had his way it
would become “a nuclear-bomb factory.” Slade was outraged. “If political
hypocrisy were a crime, Brock Adams would go to jail!” Calling Hanford
a bomb factory, Gorton said, “is sort of like calling a rope manufacturer
a hangman.” An aide handed reporters copies of a speech Adams
had made in 1966 when he was a member of Congress. In it, Adams
called the N Reactor “a valuable asset which has served us well in building
our defenses.” 17
Gorton charged that Adams missed key votes as a congressman and
was an ineffective Transportation Secretary. Further, he was a “foreign
agent” during his lobbying days, representing Japanese fishing companies
competing with Washington fishermen and Algerian oil and natural
* In 1992, however, Kennedy graciously agreed to grease the skids for the Senate confirmation
of Slade’s brother Nat to the federal bench in Massachusetts.