The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

270 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
come up with $100 million. No one thought we could do it, and I wasn’t
so sure myself.”
fouR yeARs eARLieR, after losing his seat in the Senate, Gorton thought
his political career was over. If he was home for good, he hated the thought
of life without a baseball team. He began trolling for Japanese investors.
Washington was emerging as not only the gateway to the Pacific Rim but
as a prime location for Japanese high-tech investment. In an increasingly
information-based economy, the Japanese genius for cutting-edge technology
and marketing propelled Tokyo to one of the world’s major financial
centers. Affordable, high-quality products like Sony’s “Walkman”
portable stereo and trouble-free autos generated a yen for investment in
real estate at home and abroad. The bubble would burst. While it lasted,
however, Japan was on a roll and aggressively acquisitive.
For the hard-working Japanese, the ball park holds an allure that rivals
sumo. They’re passionate about their baseball—yakyu. In 1987, unbeknownst
to Gorton and all but the American baseball cognoscenti, Ichiro
Suzuki, a 14-year-old with a sophisticated swing, was beginning to attract
the attention of scouts for the Orix BlueWave.
Gorton had long admired the Japanese. “Besides loving baseball,
they’re disciplined and enterprising, now among the richest people in the
world. I contacted our ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, and we did
a little work on that angle in 1987. But nothing came of it. Then Smulyan
stepped in to buy the club. In December of 1991, when he announced the
Mariners were for sale, we were once again on the brink of losing our
team. I had my secretary call Nintendo and ask for a meeting with Arakawa
and Howard Lincoln, who was their number one American.” The
conversation went like this:
“What’s the subject?”
“Baseball.”
“Well, we don’t have any interest in baseball, but of course if the senator
wants to come out and see us we would be honored to meet with him.”
They talked for nearly two hours. “For not having any interest in baseball,
they certainly had a lot of questions. If Nintendo wasn’t interested in
making an investment, I hoped Arakawa’s father-in-law might give us
some leads.”
Gorton departed on a trade mission to Russia.
Arakawa dutifully called Yamauchi, who listened intently, then said,
“You don’t have to look for other companies. I will do it.” 4
Arakawa was stunned. He told his father-in-law it was a bad invest-