The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

48 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
needed refreshing. In 1955, after injuring her ankle in an auto accident, she
made a dramatic wheelchair entrance to cast the vote that elected O’Brien
speaker for the first time. There’d been a lot of water over the dam since
then. In 1959, she had to get right in his face when he tried to shove her
aside “and put some buddy-buddies on the Rules Committee.” She hated
his “quizzical way of looking at you as though he was superior in knowledge,
ability, power and authority, and you were nothing but a worm.” 9
The Republicans in the House came tantalizingly close to winning a
majority in the 1962 elections. Statewide, they captured nearly 53 percent
of the vote, gained eight seats and were within 228 votes of winning the
two more they needed. It was now 51–48.
The 1963 Legislature was under federal court order to achieve “rational”
redistricting, as opposed to the “invidiously discriminatory” lines
drawn by the Democrats six years earlier to thwart the League of Women
Voters. Evans, Gorton and Pritchard believed that if they couldn’t gain
control, or at least more leverage, Bob Greive, the majority leader in the
Senate, would relegate the GOP to minority status for another decade.
peRRy contActed goRton and floated the capital idea of forming a coalition
to gain control of the House. “Bob was one of first people I met in my
first term,” Gorton recalls. A labor Democrat from the 45 th District in North
Seattle, Perry had once worked the rough-and-tumble docks of San Francisco.
“He was a man with no formal education, but a voracious reader and
magnificently self-educated. We sat across the aisle from each other in my
second term and became friends.” The day after the 1962 election, Perry
told Gorton, “Let’s do it!” O’Brien’s days as speaker were numbered.
Gorton huddled with Evans and Pritchard. Not much to lose, they concluded,
though caution was crucial. They floated the idea with the House
Republican caucus. “Look, the dissident Democrats, have come to us,”
Gorton said calculatingly. “We don’t know if there is anything to it, but
how about putting together a subcommittee that is authorized to deal with
them to see what they have to offer? We won’t make any commitments
and we’ll come back to the caucus when we get something tangible.”
Many of the old guard members were fidgety, but the plotters got the
go-ahead. Gorton, Evans, Pritchard and Elmer Johnston, the Republican
from Spokane who’d been so wary of the freshmen four years earlier,
were assigned to follow up on Perry’s overture.
The 1963 session would be the stuff of legends.