The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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Post-Intelligencer printed devastating exposés on his tolerance for tolerance
and unsavory friends. Carroll had allies in high places at The Seattle
Times, but it too was investigating how the perniciousness of looking the
other way had poisoned the police force. 10
it wAs coMMon KnowLedge in Pierce County that McCutcheon had a
drinking problem. Some of Gorton’s supporters made sure that news was
passed around in swing counties, but Slade balked at exploiting the character
issue. 11
The Evans campaign, meantime, was confident Dan could beat
O’Connell but never complacent. While some saw O’Connell as an oily
Irish pol, he was also handsome and a forceful speaker, with a dozen
years in statewide office. He could point with legitimate pride to the creation
of an aggressive Consumer Protection Division in the Attorney
General’s Office. O’Connell was mortally wounded, however, when it was
revealed down the stretch that he was a frequenter of Las Vegas casinos.
Evans flatly denied O’Connell’s charge that his campaign planted the stories.
Democrats would bitterly assert that “Straight Arrow” and his henchmen,
Gorton and Gummie Johnson, were holier-than-thou hypocrites.
Gorton and Fletcher hit the road as a pair after the primary. “It was
great because Art Fletcher could draw 400 people where I could draw 40,”
Gorton says. “It was also awful because it didn’t matter whether I spoke
first or second because I was a complete after-thought to the wonderful
orations Art would come through with. He was the son of a preacher, and
boy could he preach himself.” They became great friends.
Gummie Johnson told Mary Ellen McCaffree he was worried that
Gorton—“so bright . . . so abundantly vocabularied”—wasn’t connecting
with Joe Sixpack. She put together a statewide mailer that went out just a
few days before the election. 12
ABout 107,000 ABsentee BALLots were issued statewide that year. The
Gorton campaign cultivated those mail voters. It won him the election.
“They always tended to go Republican, and it depended on how hard you
worked them. We worked them hard,” Gorton recalls. He trailed Mc-
Cutcheon by some 2,500 votes on the morning after the election—less
than two-tenths of a percent—but prevailed by 5,368 when all the absentees
were tallied nine days later. King County, despite the divisions in the
Republican ranks, gave him a 40,000–vote majority. “Had Fred Dore
won the nomination in 1968, he likely would have beaten me,” Gorton
says, shaking his head at the serendipity of history.