The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

duMB And duMped 25
political future an impecunious Yankee Republican Protestant had in
Boston. So I said no to Ropes & Gray and decided to go to Seattle, knowing
that the day I told Crafty Ginny this news would be the last date I
would ever have with her, for she had decided that the man she married
would be governor of New York. As it was, it was a nice goodbye.” Ginny
ended up as the wealthy widow of a Kentucky horse-breeder.
LAw degRee in suitcAse, Gorton bought a one-way bus ticket to Seattle.
“I can read a map, Slade,” his mother said. “I know you’re going as far
from Boston as you can get.”
He stepped off the bus at the Greyhound Station in downtown Seattle—it’s
still there at 811 Stewart St.—on a Monday morning in the summer
of 1953 with $300 in his jeans and a single suitcase. For a nickel, he
invested in a copy of the Post-Intelligencer and found an ad in the classifieds
for a boarding house in the University District.
In those days, Seattle’s law firms, like the city itself, were relatively
small. The biggest had about 30 lawyers, which struck Gorton as ideal.
Better yet, Seattle society—unlike Boston—was open to newcomers. “It
didn’t matter whether your family had been here for several generations
or whether you were brand new.”
His timing was right in another respect. The bar exam cram course
was beginning that very night. As the first Saturday session was winding
down, the instructor said, “If there is a Slade Gorton here would he
come up and see me?” Slade presented himself. The instructor extended
his hand. “Ken MacDonald, Dartmouth ’39. Would you like to spend the
weekend at my house?” MacDonald, a former Bostonian who had survived
serious wounds as an infantry sergeant during World War II, was
already a much-admired civil rights attorney in Seattle. “They were wonderful
to me,” Slade recalls, “and I saw a lot of the very liberal MacDonald
family. It was just Dartmouth; that was the only connection.”
He was in Seattle for only five months before he dodged the draft.
Although his parents had moved to Boston, Slade was still under the
jurisdiction of the Evanston Draft Board. The easiest person in the world
to draft was someone who no longer voted or lived there, so he showed up
on their radar the minute his deferment ended with his graduation from
law school. As luck would have it, Alan Farnsworth, a doppelganger
friend from Columbia—professors couldn’t tell them apart—had received
an Air Force commission and was helping process appointments to the
Judge Advocate General corps. Lieutenant Farnsworth put his pal’s application
on top of the stack.