The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

30 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
“and those he rallied with him went out on the revival circuit, so to speak,
to try and open a lot of closed-door minds.” 5
Pritchard and Gorton were part of the Municipal League’s speakers’
bureau, the Town Criers. “Slade was so good at it,” Pritchard marveled. In
truth, he was winging it. “That’s where I think I learned public speaking,”
Gorton says. “I got two C’s in my entire college career and one of
them was in public speaking. So I learned an awful lot about public
speaking during those Metro campaigns.” He volunteered to work the
circuit outside Seattle. “Seattle was going to vote for it; everyone knew
that, but there was a lot of opposition in the rural areas. I got to go to
places where the vote was going to be five- or six-to-one against it.” Metro
lost in the rural areas the first time around, so Ellis shrewdly pulled back
the boundaries here and there to jettison the losing precincts. The second
time around, they were victorious. In the years to come, Gorton would
play a key role in shepherding Ellis’ programs through the Legislature
and Congress. In the late 1960s, a rapid transit bond issue was the major
casualty. The voters’ short-sightedness would haunt them down the road.
thAt fiRst chRistMAs out of the service, Gorton flew east to see his
folks, stopping in New York to have dinner with his friends from Polk Air
Force Base, Lenny and Monique Sheft. The visit led to a close call with a
scandal that could have derailed his political career.
It was the height of the TV quiz show craze. Americans were mesmerized
in 1956 by the drama of a brainy cabbie from Baltimore competing
for staggering sums on CBS’ The $64,000 Question. NBC upped the ante
with Twenty One, where a college student named Elfrida Von Nardroff
took home $226,500.
Monique leaned over her salad and wagged her fork.
“Slade, you have more useless knowledge in your head than anyone
else I know. You ought to be on Twenty One.”
“Sure Monique,” he said with a skeptical grin. “Why don’t you set it up?”
“Nothing easier! Lenny knows the producer. Lenny, call the producer!”
Lenny called the producer, told him his brilliant Air Force buddy—
magna cum laude from Dartmouth—was in town and would be great on
the show. “Send him to the studio tomorrow,” the producer said.
Gorton aced a test for prospective contestants. “Be back here next
Wednesday night and you’ll be the contestant waiting in the wings,” they
said. “If somebody loses you get on.”
Nobody loses. Night after night, Charles Van Doren, a charming English
professor, was locked in prime-time combat with Herb Stempel, a