The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

35 | The Council of Trent
Two AMBitious Men were at the pinnacle of their political careers
in 1996. When Bob Dole resigned from the Senate to run for president,
Trent Lott became majority leader, with Gorton as his attorney
and ex-officio counsel to the Republican leadership team. While to
some they seemed a curious pair, it was a mutual admiration society.
Gorton wished he had Lott’s charm and charisma. Lott appreciated Gorton’s
sophisticated sense of humor and legal acumen. He was one smart
Yankee. On all matters legal, Gorton was Lott’s E.F. Hutton: When Slade
talked, people listened.
Lott had another reason for keeping Gorton at his side on what was
soon dubbed The Council of Trent: “Our leadership team was all basically
from the Deep South. It was also heavily oriented toward conservatives.
We needed sort of a contrarian view. After we all came in and
slapped each other on the back and said this is what we should do, I
needed somebody who’d say, ‘Now wait a minute. Have you considered
this? Have you considered the impact it would have on the Midwest or
the Northwest? Or have you considered the position this puts some of
our more moderate members in?’ Thanks to Slade, we would frequently
stop, think about what we had planned to do and reject it or moderate it
in a way that made it more palatable to the largest group of senators.
We’d get more done his way.
“We had the majority in the House and Senate, but the Democrats had
Clinton, a masterful politician. So we had to find a way to frame our issues
in such a way that we could get Clinton to sign them. The record is
replete with examples of how we did that on everything from safe drinking
water to portability of insurance; balanced budgets, tax cuts—the
whole package. Slade was in the middle of all that.” 1
As Lott’s confidant, Gorton also knew how much their legislative success
owed to the fact that Lott was part of a triad of strange bedfellows.
Lott’s political adviser for his 1988 Senate campaign was a freewheeling
New York consultant named Dick Morris. His main claim to fame in the
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