The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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In tandem with downsizing, Gorton’s plan called for giving the Legislature
a much larger professional staff to make it more efficient and “professionalize
it.” Copeland, who took pride in the facilities reforms he had
achieved, dismissed Gorton’s program as meddlesome grandstanding.
“He’s breeding a lot of distrust in the Legislature rather than building
confidence in the Legislature,” he told reporters. 25 Copeland was also
miffed by the Evans-Gorton push for a public disclosure commission. He
was still mad decades later when he told an historian that the whole reform
proposal was “so very typical of Slade. . . . This is for his political
advancement. This is for the enhancement of Slade Gorton; it has nothing
to do with the Legislature of the State of Washington.” As for the
public disclosure commission, “this whole thing sounds so good. Oh, it is
beautiful. But what are they doing? They’re fining most of the time some
guy $1,500 because he was 30 days late on filing his C3 or some dumb
thing. Sure, they’re finding a couple of big ones and things that are just
blatant, but their enforcement ability is so small it’s not worthwhile.” 26
Gorton was undeterred. He was clearly an upwardly mobile politician,
and a lot of people were intent on stopping him in his tracks. Gorton
aggressively defended himself and his office, but he never seemed
flustered—all the more annoying. They came at him in waves. The Seattle
Liberation Front sued him for libel to the tune of $2 million, claiming
it had been defamed by his statement that it was “totally indistinguishable
from fascism and Nazism.” 27
Senator Dore, itching to run against him in 1972, suggested that questionable
fee-splitting and contingency deals involving outside lawyers serving as
special assistant attorneys general had continued on Gorton’s watch. 28
O’Connell’s hiring of San Francisco attorney Joseph Alioto for an antitrust
action against electrical equipment manufacturers was back in the
headlines. Gorton and a dozen utilities had sued to recover a $2.3 million
contingency fee Alioto received when he won a $16 million settlement.
A prominent Democrat who had gone on to be elected mayor of San Francisco,
Alioto gave O’Connell a piece of the action.
McCutcheon, meantime, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 1971,
accused of accepting a $39,000 bribe from O’Connell. (The charges were
dropped after Alioto and O’Connell prevailed in a civil action.) For Democrats,
the plot thickened when it was revealed that Gorton had two White
House meetings concerning the case with ex-Seattle lawyers now orbiting
the Oval Office. One was with John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon aide; the
other was Egil “Bud” Krogh, an Ehrlichman protégé.
Nationally syndicated columnist Marianne Means, exploring “the