The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

84 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
establishment of a state police training academy, a crime lab and full-time
prosecuting attorneys in all but the smallest counties. He promised to
hire lawyers who were “doers and thinkers.” 9
What he didn’t emphasize in his speeches and ads was that he was also
a fervent foe of “tolerance” gambling policies. In King County, tolerance
had spawned a network of payoffs that reached from the street to the assistant
chief. A beat cop who played along could double his base salary
with bribes. Pull-tabs, punchboards, cardrooms and prostitution proliferated.
Gorton’s problem was that talk of a crackdown wouldn’t sit well with
the guys rolling dice for coffee in Renton and at church-basement bingo
parties in Puyallup.
the Action teAM AdvAnced intact from the primary. Gorton caught a
big break when McCutcheon edged Dore for the Democratic nomination.
Gorton and many other observers in both parties had figured Dore was
the man to beat. But McCutcheon had the Pierce County Democratic vote
locked up while the four other Democrats divvied up King County.
With only 23 percent, Gorton was the top vote-getter in the primary. The
Democrats captured fully 63 percent of the vote. Kerr, to Gorton’s surprise,
finished a respectable fourth overall. The faceless Republican did particularly
well in Eastern Washington, carrying Benton, Walla Walla and
eight other counties. Gorton obviously needed to shed his Brooks Brothers
suit and spend more time making friends in places like Waitsburg—
a lesson he learned well that year. “Black Jack Slade” was the desperado of
Western dime novel fame, Gorton notes, “so Slade was not a good name
to start out with, running for statewide office as an unknown.”
There were no Gorton-McCutcheon debates during the eight-week
push to the general election. Despite winning the endorsement of 16 daily
newspapers and the overwhelming support of the legal community, Gorton
knew he was the underdog. Voter apathy for the down-ballot races was
one problem. Another was the ideological schism in his own party. Kerr
wrote letters to conservative King County Republicans urging them to
vote for McCutcheon. The source for the tightly controlled mailing list
clearly was the right-wing county chairman, Ken Rogstad. “We’re going to
get Gorton,” Rogstad’s good friend, County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll,
was heard to boast. The greatest halfback in America when he played for
the University of Washington in 1928, Carroll was in his 20 th year as prosecutor
and King County’s “Mr. Republican.” That he could not get Gorton
was just one of many signs that 1968 was his last hurrah as a power broker.
Seattle, the gutsy magazine published by King Broadcasting, and the