The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

282 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
St. Mark’s, but they wouldn’t have found Gorton there either. He had
boycotted St. Mark’s since suffering through a Christmas Eve sermon a
decade earlier on the importance of a nuclear weapons freeze. He would
have mailed the rector a copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon if he’d
thought there was any chance it would inspire more rational homilies.
The book’s author, Rebecca West, observed that some people just seemed
intent on thrusting the “blunt muzzle” of their stupidity into conclaves of
state. 13
The day after the protests, Bush’s generals unleashed the most devastating
air assault in history, followed by a ground war that steamrolled
Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard in 100 hours. From start to finish,
it was five weeks. What the Iraqi dictator had billed as the Mother of All
Battles turned out to be the Son of Waterloo.
If the president had ordered the Pentagon to keep on rolling, ousting
Hussein right then and there, as many argued we should, would the Mideast
have been a safer place by the time the president’s son occupied the
Oval Office a decade later? “In retrospect, with 20-20 hindsight, yes,” says
Gorton. “But I can’t claim that I held that view at the time because we had
reached the limit of the U.N. resolution that gave us our coalition. I exchanged
views on the subject with Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning columnist. He was right and I was wrong. But Bush was
outrageously wrong in not stopping the slaughter of the Shi ites in southern
Iraq by Saddam immediately
af ter the shooting
war was over.”
As soMeone who was
often at the White House
during the administration
of the 41 st president,
endorsed the candidacy of
the 43 rd early on and later
played a key role in investigating
the root causes
of the 9/11 terror attacks,
Gorton’s views on the
Bushes are intriguing:
“George W. Bush is
tougher than his dad. His
dad is a very soft personal-
President George H.W. Bush greets Gorton
as Vice President Dan Quayle looks on. Gorton
family album