The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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majority leader’s plan and gave him something to shop around on the
House floor. Gorton warned that two could play that game.
A lot of people, including some members of his own party, were wary
of Slade “because he could just outsmart anybody,” Don Eldridge said.
But Greive had way more detractors and clearly had met his match in
Gorton. “I tell you, the two of them, that was a combination,” the GOP
caucus chairman said. “I’d liked to have been a little mouse in the corner
at some of those sessions.” 18 Pritchard said Greive was “Machiavelli on
redistricting. He was too smart for everybody . . . until he ran into Gorton,”
who “knew every jot, diddle, corner—whatever it was.” 19
The combatants were like car salesmen trying to close a deal with a
squirrely prospect who didn’t want extra undercoat. No one knows his
own district like an incumbent. Members of their caucuses squinted at
the maps as they traced the new lines. “The worst part,” Greive said,
“would be that you thought you had everybody satisfied, and then at the
last minute Fred Dore would come along and say, ‘You’ve got to do something
for Petrich!’” 20 One day, Greive and Senator John T. McCutcheon
from Pierce County were looking on as Foster drew boundary lines.
“No, no, no, no,” McCutcheon said. “I don’t want that precinct. Move
away from American Lake.”
“What is your rationale about moving away from American Lake?”
Foster asked.
“My rationale is quite simple: To save my ass!” 21
“Slade and Bob understood the numbers equally well,” says Foster, who
went on to become chief clerk of the House and chief of staff to Governor
Booth Gardner in the 1980s. “Slade knew he couldn’t write enough Republican
districts to win a majority. It all depended on the swing districts.”
Foster and McCurdy were getting a real-world education in practical
politics that no classroom could provide. They even roomed together for a
while. “Greive often said that if they would leave the two of us alone for
an evening or two we could have solved the redistricting puzzle,” says
McCurdy, who wrote a thesis on the experience and became a university
professor. He hadn’t met Gorton before that memorable 1963 session.
“The first thing you noticed immediately about him was that he wasn’t
from Washington State. He didn’t look, walk or talk like the Pritchards,
the Moriartys and the Evanses and, for that matter, a lot of people on the
Democratic side. He clearly kind of exuded this aura of an Eastern intellectual.
He was incredibly smart, and you had to be to understand redistricting.
You basically had to memorize all the districts. We didn’t have
computers so all of this was on paper or in your head.”