The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

the fReshMAn 41
they were dating, John derided communism as an oppressive ideology.
She told him her secret and suggested he wouldn’t want to marry such a
person. John said he didn’t care. He loved her. Instead of pressuring her
to quit the party, he felt certain she would grow out of it. She quickly did,
feeling foolish at her naiveté. 6
Now, besides sleeping with the enemy, the right-wingers said John
Goldmark’s membership in the ACLU was prima facie evidence he was
“the tool of a monstrous conspiracy to remake America into a totalitarian
state.” Both Goldmarks “are in fact under Communist Party discipline,”
they would later charge. 7
“It was a brutal, nasty campaign and Goldmark was slaughtered,” Gorton
recalls, voice tinged with revulsion. While Goldmark lost his seat in
the Legislature, his indignation was intact. If he went away quietly it
might usher in a whole new era of red-baiting in Washington politics,
he told Dwyer. He wanted to sue for libel. Dwyer and his co-counsel, a
facile Okanogan attorney, took the case for no fee and with little hope of
winning a sizable judgment. That it would be “the first libel case of its
kind before a rural jury” was tantalizing to Dwyer. 8 He was a renaissance
man who loved Shakespeare, mountain-climbing and causes that
seemed lost. Soon after arriving in Seattle, Gorton had defended an
antitrust case against Dwyer and learned “just how damn good he was.
I decided that if I were ever in really big trouble and completely in the
right I would want Bill Dwyer to be my lawyer. And if I were ever in
really, really big trouble and completely in the wrong I would want John
Ehrlichman to be my lawyer.” A gifted attorney, Ehrlichman would lose
his moral compass somewhere in the West Wing. Growing success
never altered Dwyer’s mantra. It was “This above all: to thine own self
be true.”
goLdMARK sued Canwell, Ashley Holden, the publisher of the weekly
Tonasket Tribune, and two others for libel. The trial began on Nov. 4, 1963.
Okanogan’s old three-story courthouse, with its spartan courtroom,
seemed plucked from To Kill a Mockingbird. Dwyer knew Gorton admired
Goldmark. He asked him to be the last in a diverse array of 12 reputation
witnesses.
“When Bill called, I knew that if I said yes it would cost me. And I
knew that if I said no I’d be a coward,” Gorton says. “Looking back, that
may have been the pivotal moment of my career in politics. There had
been no incident in those first three terms that had really tested my character.
I said yes.” That moment of decision reminds him of the hymn