The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

new fRiends And oLd eneMies 279
as guests of its Cultural Foundation. Given some leeway to experiment
with Western-style government, Estonia was moving too quickly for the
Kremlin’s comfort, poised to establish its own Congress before Sovietsanctioned
elections. Other members of Congress, including John Miller,
a Republican from Seattle, encountered roadblocks when they made
plans to visit Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia to observe elections. 10
Gorton viewed the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics as tyranny.
He was in close contact with the fair-sized group of Baltic expatriates in
Seattle. After his defeat in 1986, his secretary was a Latvian who had come
to the Northwest as a teenager. The most active ex-officio ambassador was
a man from Estonia who often popped into his path. In fact, he was the last
person Gorton met with before returning to the Senate in 1988. “Remember
the Baltics, Slade!” he admonished. “I promised I would. Because of
him, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Congress of Estonia.”
Gorton accepted with glee and immediately set to work on a speech
enumerating the rights and responsibilities of a democracy—the rule of
law and freedom of speech tempered with civility, including “How will
you treat your minority—the Russians who will still live among you?”
“One particularly important aspect of equality before the law and
equality of opportunity is its relationship to half or more than half of the
population of every society: our women,” Gorton wrote. “Through most
of history and most societies, women have been and still are severely limited
in their ability to live up to their full potential. This is profoundly
unjust, both to women and to men, and may be the greatest inhibition to
the success of human society.” At Gorton’s urging, a statement addressing
the oppression of women in Muslim societies was incorporated into
the report of the 9/11 Commission some 15 years later.
“I worked really hard on that speech, but it soon became evident that
no way were the Soviets going to let us in.” Gorton gave the speech on the
floor of the U.S. Senate and airmailed a videotape to Estonia. It was played
before some 800 at the inaugural meeting of their Congress. An empty
front row seat bore Gorton’s name and a bouquet of roses. “It got more
publicity, I’m sure, than if I had been able actually to show up. Happily, a
few months later, Estonia was free.” The grateful new republic awarded
him the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 1 st Class.
“in teRMs of the one Act that had a profound impact on a significant
number of lives,” Gorton believes the most significant achievement of his
18 years in Congress was his response to the Chinese government’s
bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989.