The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

tAKing on giAnts 63
A fRiendLy Auto deALeR made an in-kind donation of a loaner car. Dolliver
drove Evans all over the state. “It was easier to drive Dan than to fly
him because Dolliver drove faster than an airplane could fly,” Gorton
jokes. “There were months in which we raised no more than a couple of
thousand dollars.” Norton Clapp, the Weyerhaeuser eminence, passed
the hat among his friends more than once.
Frank Pritchard had been managing A. Ludlow Kramer’s campaign
for secretary of state. It was going so well for the swarthy young Seattle
City Councilman that Frank moved over to help Johnson, who had gone
to the mattresses in a donated room at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle.
“Gummie slept there most nights,” Pritchard recalls. “Between the primary
and the general election I spent practically every day there, and I
learned to smoke cigars. One day I did 12. We had a helluva good time!”
They were tracking poll numbers, reviewing ads and calling Dolliver a
couple of times a day for reality checks from the hustings.
Evans, an engineer to the marrow, tracked the polling data on a graph.
Joel Pritchard kept saying, “Just watch—We’re going to accelerate.” 3 They
barnstormed out of the state convention, calculated they were going to
catch and pass Christensen around August 15 th and apparently did just
that, judging from what happened a month later on Primary Election
Day. Buoyed by ticket-splitters, Evans crushed Christensen and would
never trail Rosellini in the polls. The governor’s hopes for a third term
hung on President Johnson having long coattails. Rosellini tried to tie
Evans to the bellicose Republican nominee, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater,
who once wished out loud that he could just lob a nuclear missile
“into the men’s room of the Kremlin.”
Evans and Gorton were Rockefeller Republicans. Gorton was particularly
suspect to the right because he had been a character witness for John
Goldmark. Evans, however, was the more liberal of the two. His clean-cut,
moderate image appealed to the state’s powerful cohort of swing voters.
Hard-core Goldwaterites noisily dominated the GOP’s grass roots in
Washington State, which left the party in disarray after the 1964 national
convention. Many old-line conservatives, embarrassed by the paranoia of
the rabid right, signed on to help Evans. The campaign made excellent
use of the network of Republican legislators. Four years later, when Gorton
was in a tight race for attorney general that pipeline would prove crucial.
Evans’ lead legislator in Eastern Washington was Don Moos, Slade’s
seatmate in the House. Moos drew an important assignment. Goldwater
campaigned in Washington State only once after the primary election.
“He came to Spokane late in the campaign and Dan had to go, of course,”