U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton looked just great on his campaign kickoff tour of the state not long ago.

Having laser surgery on his eyes so he could discard those beer bottle glasses he’s worn all his life did wonders not only for his ability to talk eye to eye with people instead of peering down at them as if he were one of their betters, but for his disposition too. He was positively bouncy.

He really had lousy eyesight. Every time he told an audience he was glad to see them, he was lying, he says, because he couldn’t. His health is good at 72. He runs every day, and he’s picked up a little weight although he still enjoys the nickname given him during his leaner, meaner days, “Skeletor.”

I’ve known Slade Gorton since I first went to Olympia in 1961 and he was in his second term in the House. I’ve written over a hundred columns about him over the years. He’s one of the most accessible politicians I ever knew.

Before Gorton, House floor leaders traditionally occupied front row seats. Majority leader Gorton grouped himself and his top aides farther back and became known as “the leader who sits in the middle.”

“He’s a brilliant lawyer whose intelligence frightens people,” I wrote in 1968, when I was assessing his chances to become attorney general. “He’s like a computer, exceedingly handy, seldom wrong, absolutely impersonal, but people aren’t attracted to machines, no matter how valuable those machines are.” It was December before Slade squeaked to victory in the absentees.

AG Gorton hit the ground running. By midterm, I wrote, “If there is any one officeholder in the state who is more unpopular with the citizenry than Slade Gorton, I have yet to see him.:

People were mad at him for shutting down bingo. Law enforcement officers, city and county prosecutors were angry at him for shutting down pinballs and cardrooms. “In short,” I said, “Gorton’s name is mud. Unless he can pull off some miracle to change it, he’s a dead duck for whatever he runs for next.”

He got bingo going again and was re-elected twice.

In 1974, he was one of the first Republican public officials to call on President Nixon to resign. He felt Nixon was impeachable on three counts but should resign for the good of the country. Gov. Dan Evans disagreed.

I wrote my first column about Slade Gorton and the Indians in 1977 when he proposed that the only logical solution to the Boldt fishing rights controversy was for Congress to repeal the Medicine Creek treaty and pay the Indians for the fish. “It is undesirable in a free society,” he said, “to grant special rights which in theory are in perpetuity to a class of citizens on ancestral grounds. It is disruptive to social peace and our general concept of equal rights. It cuts against the general feeling of equal right under the law.”

It didn’t happen, and Gorton went on to become U.S. senator in 1980, only to get the boot in 1986 because he voted to freeze Social Security COLAs in a plan to shore up the SS fund. Shocked and depressed, Gorton swore he would never run for office again and disappeared into private law practice.

By now, friend Dan had become a U.S. senator, filling the vacancy left by the 1983 death of Henry Jackson. Evans never liked the congressional scene and hung it up in 1988, after persuading Gorton to try for a comeback. I wrote that he couldn’t do it without reversing the tide of resentment on the part of seniors who had not forgiven him for voting against their COLAs.

Gorton resolved that by announcing that never again would he vote against the seniors, and he hasn’t. He has become their champion in the matter of Social Security and health care. As AG, he sued five big drug companies for anti-trust violations in conspiring to keep prices of aureomycin, terramycin and tetracycline high, rather than letting a price range be found through competition, and won a settlement.

As senator, he has introduced a bill requiring U.S. drug companies to charge the same in the U.S. as in Canada, where drugs are cheaper.

He has all kinds of irons in the fire, from shifting responsibility for education spending decisions from the feds to the locals, to saving the salmon without destroying Snake River dams important to agriculture and shipping.

Too much to do to quit, he says. Well, he’s the guy that can do it.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)
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