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Slade Gorton was Senator from Washington state from 1981-1987, and then again from 1989-2001. After being born and raised in Illinois, he graduated from Dartmouth College and received his JD from Columbia University. He served in the Army, and later in the Air Force Reserve while working as a private-practice lawyer and state legislator in Washington. As his political involvement grew, Gorton became Washington state attorney general and was appointed to various state and national government commissions. Most recently, Gorton served on the 9-11 Commission investigating the terrorist attacks of 2001.
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PH: As I mentioned, I did a little bit of reading on your career before this interview. As I understand it, went to college at Dartmouth, and then you went to law school straight away at Columbia - is that correct?
SG: Yes. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois.
PH: Okay. And it was a little unclear to me what exactly you did right after law school. Did you set up private practice, or did you actually serve full-time in the military?
SG: No. I had literally never been in Seattle before I finished law school. And I had picked it out of an atlas and almanac. Between my second and third years of law school, I had a summer internship with Ropes and Gray, which is one of the most prestigious Boston law firms. And in fact, the principal person for whom I worked that summer was Elliott Richardson, who was later in the Cabinet and part of the Midnight Massacre in the Nixon Administration and the like, and Ropes and Gray offered me a job. A full-time job, and my family at that time had moved back to Boston, lived in Boston.
But I had really more on my agenda than just being part of that kind of law firm. I was very interested in politics. And it didn't take much imagination to know what kind of future an impecunious Yankee Republican Protestant had in Boston. (chuckles) So I turned down Ropes and Gray.
PH: So did you actually have politics as an interest, even at that early age?
SG: I had politics as an interest. It's the right way of putting it. It certainly - It was not a certainty by any stretch of the imagination, but I was very interested in it.
And that summer, the summer I worked for Ropes and Gray, was the summer of 1952, when Eisenhower was nominated. And one of the key elements in his nomination - It may have been the last national convention where you didn't know who the winner was going to be, when the convention started, between Eisenhower and Taft. One of the key speeches on Eisenhower's behalf was made by a man named Don Eastvold, who was a state senator. His father was a Lutheran minister and the president of PLU. And Don Eastvold was a state senator then who that summer and fall ran successfully for Attorney General. I just, watching it in Boston, said, "Wow, that looks like a great place." That was, at least, one factor, maybe not the major factor, but one factor that caused me to pick Seattle when I was in my last year of law school at Columbia.
PH: So you were really looking around -
SG: I was looking all over the country.
PH: And you had the offer from Ropes and Gray -
SG: But I said no to them, and Seattle law firms didn't customarily interview at Columbia then. I think I may have had one interview. So the day that I received my law degree, I had a one-way bus ticket to Seattle, and about $300 in my pocket, and came out here. But the specific answer to your question is I had military ahead of me, as I knew. So I was out here long enough to take and pass the bar examination. I think it was about five months total, five or six months, before I went into the Air Force. So I came out, took the cram course, took the bar exam, got a job that was essentially a temporary job because of the service, and then went off for three years in the Air Force. Though when I came back I went to the same firm, the firm I'd been with for the two or three months I'd been while I was here. So I had a very, very short career before the military, and I came back here permanently in the late summer of 1956.
PH: Okay. And what was your thought in going into the military? At that point, was it compulsory?
SG: You bet it was. (chuckles) I had - At the time, it seemed like a huge penalty, but in the aftermath, it was great. I had been in the service previously. I'd been drafted into the Army after WWII, in '46. But the Army ended the draft, and I was released after 11 months and 5 days. When the Korean War came along, if you hadn't served for 12 months, it was as if you had not served at all. So I was draft-eligible again. I had been drafted once. Once was enough as far as I was concerned. So I enlisted, and I got the Air Force Judge Advocate position, for a three-year period. It ended up being just short of three years, but it was a mandatory military service.
PH: So, just to recap then, you just fell short of satisfying your military requirement, before, with your 11 months of service in the '40s. But to orient the service to what you thought was a good fit with your skills. You got the JAG appointment -
SG: Well, I preferred being an officer to being a private again! (laughs)
PH: And so then, you did that, and you said you were reluctant to go in, but you felt you got some good things out of it -
SG: Well, no, not reluctant. It just wasn't the choice I would've made, had it been a free choice, had it been a free choice, but it wasn't. My choice was between drafted and getting this judge advocate commission. That was an easy choice. (chuckles)
PH: Yeah. And you said you got some good things out of it. What -
SG: Well, I stayed in the reserves after I got out, until I was elected to the Senate. The three years in the Air Force were pretty good. I tried lots of courts martial, both prosecuting and defending them. It was a good segue into a full-time career. I appreciated the military. I liked the people I met there - felt that they were serving, and serving well, and so I stayed in the reserves all the way through, from the time I got out in 1956. I was in the reserves until 1981.
PH: Wow. Okay.
SG: I did duty at McCord Air Force Base, at the old Payne Field. That was Snohomish County airport when it was an air force base, and then two weeks' duty literally all over the country: Montana, California or Colorado, Alabama - you know, at one time or another. During that entire time, when I was a legislator and Attorney General, I had that constant contact with the military, with the Air Force. From it, developed a very, very strong appreciation for what those men and women do.
PH: So where were you stationed from '53-56? That wasn't in Seattle, was it?
SG: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, the four Southeastern states. A tour of the south, yes.
PH: So you'd just briefly come out here and set up, and then immediately you had to go to the south?
SG: And then immediately went to Alabama.
PH: And then, at the end of that, in '56, you came back here to Seattle?
SG: Straight back to Seattle.
PH: What was your thinking, what was your mindset, at that time?
SG: Well, that's when I was really starting my career: my legal career and any participation I was going to have in politics. But I was here, even when I came back then, I knew very, very few people here. The five lawyers who were in the office that I'd been in briefly and came back to, a handful of others. One of the ironies is that with the exception of those lawyers, all of whom are long since deceased, the single individual I've known longest in Seattle, I met in the first week or two weeks after I came back. I joined the Young Republicans of King County and got to be part of a television debate team, and my debate partner was John Ellis, who ended up now, of course, as CEO of the Mariners after I got the Japanese to buy them. We've been friends for all that period of time.
PH: That's fascinating. So was he actually someone that you helped get into that Mariners position, or was that just coincidental?
SG: Well, the answer to that is yes and no. I was the one who originally solicited and got the Nintendo people to purchase the Mariners. The demand of the League ultimately that was very - They did not want to allow Japanese ownership. It was very clear they did not want to do that. They were ultimately forced into it. They required as a condition of the ownership that the CEO be local, a prominent local person. And John Ellis was just finishing up as CEO of what's now Puget Sound Energy, at the time, and moved naturally into the position. Obviously I - it was a great idea, but I wasn't the one who picked him.
PH: Okay. To get back to that time - That is an amazing story to me that you came out here right after military service - At that time, how old were you, in '56?
SG: In 1956, I was 28.
PH: So you came out here as a 28-year-old, you had your law degree, you had military service behind you, but as you said, you didn't really have a lot of contacts. You were essentially setting up as a new resident of this area. Was that sort of an exciting time, a challenging time?
SG: Very challenging. (chuckles) It was both exciting and apprehensive at the same time, because I was in a new place, under new and different circumstances. My family then lived in Boston, I had grown up in Chicago, law school in New York City - those were the places, other than the military, that I'd had experience with. And I'd never had the slightest temptation to stay in one of those southern states. (laughs)
PH: Did you ever consider, "Boy, maybe I should move back to Boston or Chicago? It's a little tough out here by myself."
SG: No, no, never once.
PH: What was it - a love of the region, of the -
SG: It was a combination of different matters. Part of it was the physical attractiveness. I do like Boston - all my brothers and sisters live back there now. It's a wonderful place. There are some physical similarities - both are on saltwater. That was significant.
But I think the two things that attracted me here - really the three things - that attracted me more than anything else: First, it was a very open society. So many of the people in my profession and others came from somewhere else, like I did. It wasn't like a Southern or Midwestern city where everyone has grown up there, and their parents have grown up there, at all. The second is that when I came here, very much unlike the present circumstances, even the good downtown business law firms were very small. I think the largest law firm in Seattle had something like 30 lawyers. And San Francisco, by contrast, already had very, very large law firms. That I found extremely attractive - that you'd get to know people much more rapidly. And thirdly, it seemed to be politically open. It was a two-party state, unlike Massachusetts, where I was from, and just as it was easy to get into the profession and meet new people, it seemed to me that it would be easy to become a participant in politics. So those would be the three - the four, if you add the physical environment - the four factors that weighed into the decision.
PH: That's interesting. So when, you mentioned a couple of times how you had this incipient political interest. My understanding is that you came back in '56, and was it as soon as the '60s that you got involved, that you got elected -
SG: Two years - it was '58.
PH: That you got elected to the state House of Representatives, right?
SG: Yeah.
PH: You obviously had a very intense, strong political interest.
SG: Well, no one in my family had been in elective politics before. My parents followed it, and we talked about it. But the only relative I ever had who ran for office was my maternal grandfather, who ran on several occasions in Louisiana for statewide office on the Prohibition Party ticket. So that wasn't serious politics, obviously.
But I did have a great interest in it. Probably stemming partly just from family talk, but when I was a freshman in high school, in WWII, a charismatic speaker named Walter Jeb, who was both a physician and Presbyterian minister - he'd been a missionary in China, had been driven out of China by the Japanese and had been elected to Congress in Minnesota. I guess he spoke all over the country, and spoke about public service, of course about the war, and that was about - If there was a single individual who moved me in that direction, it was this guy's speech in front of over 3000 students at Evanston High School. One time during WWII -
PH: Interesting. So you were in high school during this time?
SG: I was in high school, and I had the great good fortune of Walter Jeb was in his 90s, and retired in a retirement home in Washington, DC, when I became a Senator. So I was able to tell him that he was that inspiration.
PH: That's great. So he had sparked an interest in you.
SG: He had sparked an interest. And then as I say, watching the 1952 convention with this young man who had been so successful - who turned out to be a fairly dubious character, in the ultimate analysis - but had gotten me out here, and as I say, when I was released from the Air Force in the late summer of 1956, I joined the Young Republicans right away. They had to have tradition - there was a series of debates on KOMO, in presidential election years, four or five of them, with two Young Republicans and two Young Democrats, on each side. John Ellis and I got paired together, but we were the most, the newest members, so we got the last choice of subjects, so we had to debate agriculture policy. Two young Seattle lawyers with two young Democratic Seattle lawyers - Not one of them knew anything about agriculture! (chuckles)
PH: Do you happen to remember who the two Young Democratic lawyers were?
SG: One of them was named Palmer Smith, and (pauses) I don't remember the other name now. Palmer Smith - He ended up being one of my law partners, years later when I was out of the Senate from '86-88 in the Davis Wright firm.
PH: So when you were doing - Do you think those televised debates were a major key in getting you some exposure?
SG: No. I don't know that anyone watched those debates! (laughs) They were just something that was a lot of fun to do.
PH: Okay. So how did you get from, in '56 showing up with relatively few contacts, and in '58, getting elected?
SG: Well, I got - I became almost immediately, fell in with a small group of Republicans who met once a week or so to chat informally about politics, that included the Pritchard brothers - Frank Pritchard, Jr, and Joel Pritchard, who was later my head man, and no more than 6 or 8 others, all of whom were here. And we became friends. Joel was to run for the Legislature in 1958 from Magnolia, and the Republican party had just been practically wiped out in 1956. We had no statewide offices, and only a handful of people in the Legislature.
That was the first of the great redistricting battles, and there was an entire reapportionment of state legislative seats after the 1956 election. A fairly Republican district in north Seattle ended up with no incumbent at all. Just completely open. And I decided, with these friends, with Joel and Dan Evans, who encouraged me, and got respect - "That's where you ought to go live."
PH: You actually had to live in the district?
SG: Yeah, sure. So about the time I got engaged, I found an apartment out near Roosevelt High School - it was in that area, and ran. I didn't know anybody in the district, but campaigning then was basically going from door to door.
PH: So you just went and shook people's hands -
SG: And I was married early that summer, in the summer of 1958, and we got a handful of friends, and we went door to door more than anyone else in a big race. There were 10 candidates, and I ended up winning.
PH: Fascinating. So from that point on, was the state Legislature, was that a full-time or part-time job?
SG: Oh, no - part-time. And that was the only reason I was permitted to do it. I was in this business law firm that was, I think, quite dubious about whether they wanted their young lawyers to do it. But one of the senior partners who was something of a mentor to me ran interference and got permission from the firm to run. The Legislature met only every other year, then, and I think the shortest time I was in session was 70 days, and the longest, in my last year when I was Majority Leader, was about 4 months. So it was a very part-time job. The salary was $100 a month - I think it went up to $300 a month by the end time. But it was clearly an amateur pursuit.
As I look back on it, there were some great advantages to that over the present Legislature, because the pool of potential candidates was so much larger. Lots of people could run for those offices who simply can't do it today. So when I - Dan Evans had been one term in the Legislature when Joel Pritchard and I got there. We and some of our friends - and we had tiny representation: there were 33 Republicans and 66 Democrats - and we promptly went to work to redefine the Republican party and recruit more candidates and became increasingly more successful when I was Majority Leader.
PH: How much of it was the changing demographics of the state versus - what kind of organizational work did you do to shift that 33-66 balance towards -
SG: Well, what we did mostly was to recruit candidates. We were finding the kind of people who would have real appeal. There was some change in demographics - Remember, in the middle of that period of time, when I was running the third time, this would be 1964 - Dan Evans was running for Governor. In spite of the fact that Goldwater suffered a landslide against him, Evans pulled off a winning governorship. It was two years after that, two years into his Governorship, which was quite popular at the time, that we won a majority in the House. This was by the fact both by demographics and that we had gone through another redistricting - which in spite of Democratic majorities in both houses - we won. The Democratic party broke apart, and the previous set of lines, the lines under which I had won, were very much a Democratic gerrymander. So we had a huge victory by getting lines that gave us an even chance. We won in 1966. I had been the architect of that triumph, and so as I remember, after that election, we had 55 Republican members, of whom 28 were freshmen. And I had drawn the lines - that's what got me elected Majority Leader, because they credited me for having gotten them there.
PH: So, this is all very interesting stuff. Can you give me a sense of what your day-to-day routine was like? If I think about the decade of the '60s, that's when you were in your 30s and you starting this climb, from the state House to the AG's office, ultimately to the Senate. You were making these steps along the way, but the day-to-day, day-in, day-out in your 30s, what were you doing?
SG: Most days, I was practicing law, in this small law firm, and then a couple of successors to it, to that law firm. Like many others, like John Ellis, who was in and is now the Perkins Coie firm, before he went to Puget Power, and a number of my other friends - that was what most day-to-day was involved in.
Every other year, for a few months, I was in Olympia, and of course, the legislative sessions were more intense then than they are now, because they were so short. You worked well into the night, a whole lot of the time. They were extremely intense experiences, which meant that you got to know the other members down there extremely well. We had no staff. When I was Majority - when I finally, when I was Majority Leader in my last term, I had a secretary and an intern. But before that, you had none at all. Most of the times, you didn't have an office! Your office was your desk on the floor. So you had to read all the bills, try to figure them out on your own the night before, debate on them. It was wonderful training, and of course, it was wonderful from the perspective of helping to set public policy.
In that twenty months when you weren't in session, there were a wide range of interim legislative committees that would study particular issues, and that would take some of your time, mostly on weekends. And then the group I was a part of spent a fair amount of time trying to help other candidates, and help recruit other candidates. But if you took the percentage of one's working time, far more of it was spent on the legal career than on politics. At least 60/40, maybe 70/30.
PH: Were you interested and engaged with that work then? On a day-in, day-out basis -
SG: It wasn't as interesting as politics, but of course I was interested and engaged. It was the way I made my living. During this time I was also in the Air Force reserves, which would take - The first part of it was just an evening, just met in the evenings some time. But soon thereafter, it was a one day a month, and two weeks a year situation. It was not only interesting in and of itself, but it was also a significant income supplement.
PH: When I think about that, it sounds like you were juggling a lot of things with the part-time legislative work, the full-time legal work, and then the Air Force reserves - Was it also tough to juggle personal issues with your family? I mean, you had -
SG: Well, of course it was. Days were very full.
PH: Were you sleeping very little, or -
SG: No, no. It was fine.
PH: Interesting. Because that's one of the other themes I'm interested about - how you did manage your time, how you fit all those things in, because, you know -
SG: Well, I wish I could give you some formula for it, but all it was, was just do it! (chuckles)
PH: Interesting. Okay, switching gears again, what about other relationships? You know, you mentioned some very close working relationships with Dan Evans and others to architect the rise of the Republican party in this state. Were there other mentors or peers who made a big difference in your career?
SG: Obviously, the most important ones were the other people in the law office, all of whom were senior to me. Pendleton Miller was the one who had sort of helped kick off my career in the first place, and was probably the senior lawyer whom I most admired. He came from a longtime, very wealthy family here, which made no difference to him. He had a huge work ethic. That meant - made for a considerable mentor. I got to know him better when I was Attorney General.
Perhaps the lawyer I most admired was Bill Dwyer, who later became a judge here. I had one case where I was on the same side of his. I also defended an antitrust case, as a minor defendant, that he prosecuted. He was very good.
From the point of view of mentoring, I can say that I reached an interesting conclusion. I decided five or six years into my career here that if I was ever in litigation, personally myself, and was on the right side, I would want Bill Dwyer to represent me. If I was ever in something like that and was on the wrong side, I would want John Erlichmann to represent me. I had had a couple of cases with him. I had seen how good he was on the wrong side of an issue. (laughs)
PH: That's fascinating. So Erlichmann, he was a lawyer down in California and then went to DC with Nixon, right?
SG: No, he was a lawyer here.
PH: John Erhlichmann?
SG: John Erlichmann is a Seattle lawyer. Complete Seattle person. Haldeman was from California. The pair of Erlichmann and Haldeman. Haldeman was from California, Ehrlichmann was from here - Ehlichmann's son is practicing law here today.
PH: Wow, that's very interesting.
SG: And his wife, who was divorced after awhile, his wife has a second husband Alan Bouchel, who was a legislator in the state Senate while I was. The Ehrlichmanns are definitely a Seattle family. His father was - the family was from Seattle.
PH: I didn't know that. I guess I learn something new every day. So another question I have is, in terms of the sequence, or the progress, what made you decide to move from being Majority Leader of the House to running for AG, and from there onto the Senate?
SG: I made an observation fairly early in my career that as I said, the advantage of the Legislature in those years was that it had recruited from a much wider range of people in our society. And I started in the Legislature in a very interesting time, with a lot of very able people. I think there must've been a half a dozen people whom I started in the Legislature who knew when they were going to be Governor or Senator or even President of the United States. They had a career in politics that was just set. When they were going to do what.
I observed fairly early that that was a great disability, that thinking about what you did today - how what you did today was going to affect when you went up the ladder - disabled you from doing the job you had at the time well. And most of them, obviously, almost every one of them, did not succeed. They may move from the state House of Representatives to the state Senate, and in one case, to being mayor of Seattle, but they weren't the ones in the group who went as far as, say, Dan Evans did, or Joel Pritchard did. The people who got somewhere were the ones who concentrated on the job they had. I can tell you in total candor, when I was Majority Leader, in my first term, running for Attorney General never crossed my mind.
It was not until several months after that session was over, that would be 1967, that one of my friends, and eventually several of them, came to me. It was Mary Ellen McGaffrey, a representative from the University district. She said, "Slade, you really ought to run for Attorney General." Well, of course, it turned out that the then-Attorney General was going to run against Dan Evans for Governor. So it was an open seat. So it was not until December or January before the 1968 election that that was something that all of a sudden that seemed like something that fit.
All this time I'd had a wonderful time as Majority Leader. It was a great session. Another one of my mentors, who still is, was Jim Ellis, who was the great civic hero in Seattle. The cleanup of Lake Washington, the Metro, transportation issues, everything else - When I was Majority Leader, he was running Forward Thrust campaign, and it was up to me to get all the Forward Thrust bills through the state House of Representatives. And because the Senate was harder, and Democratic with Dan Evans as Governor, they spent almost the entire session getting them through the Senate. And I think I had four days to get 7-8 bills through the House, which I did, and they passed. And Jim just seemed to me to be the absolute model of what a citizen ought to be, and of course he is the Ellis in Preston, Gates, and Ellis, mostly retired at the present time. In any event, when Mary Ellen talked to me, that it was going to be very hard to come up with an encore. I had moved up in the Legislature; I was as far as I was going to go, and so it was a good time to move on. But running for Attorney General or being Attorney General was never anything that was on my agenda while I was in the legislature. It just wasn't there at all.
PH: So focusing on the job at hand really helped you excel.
SG: Absolutely! I believe that then, I believe that now, for people who are starting out.
PH: Sure. Can we get a little bit more granular than that? Specifically, what things do you think you did in your work that made it stand out? When you say you did great work or you really focused on the thing at hand, what did that produce that was different than other people?
SG: I worked at it very hard. I understood the bills. I'm quite articulate. My colleagues liked to hear me speak. I guess if I was successful as a leader, it wasn't because of my lovable personality. It was because people were willing to listen to me and thought I was more likely to be right or not.
To go all the way back before I had any leadership, when I was first-term legislator, only one-third of the members of the House being Republicans, and big Democrats in the Senate and the Governor's office, you literally had to, the night before, the Rules Committee would say what bills were the next day, and you'd have to sit there and try to figure out what they were, if they didn't come from a committee of which you were a part. And there were two things that happened in that first term that wouldn't not have happened if I hadn't been there: only two, and not very big.
I was persuaded by a man who had lasted both Republican and Democratic administrations to introduce a bill on securities, on the sale of securities, to stop securities fraud that had been barred on a number of other occasions. So I joined with some Democrats and that passed. I think it was the fact that I understood what it was all about and could explain it, probably had something to do with it.
But the other one was particularly curious. It was close to the end of the session, and as you know - the Legislature is like it is today - there was a last day to consider bills from your own house, and a last day to consider bills from the other house. Well, one of these nights, I'm reading this bill on trade regulation. I prided myself then and could read a bill and tell what it was about. I didn't have a clue what this bill was about! I'm looking at it, and it's not very long, and I just don't know what it's for. What I do know is that the two Democrats and one Republican who were sponsors were not characters whom I greatly admired. And so, but I did go down in front to one of them, and say, "What's this bill all about?" And the guy brightens up and says, "Oh, it's to end gasoline price wars. You know, the fact that they're different prices posted in big letters. What it did was to say you couldn't post your price in anything larger than that (holds fingers about two inches apart). That that was what it was aimed at doing." And I said to myself, "Well, I kind of like gasoline price wars. I'm against this bill!" (chuckles)
So, the next day, I get up and speak against it, and it passes 82-17, or something like that. They just completely ran me over. But there's often jealousies between the House and the Senate. So the Senate had an absolutely identical bill, but with a different number. Instead of passing the House bill, it passed the Senate bill. So that it had come back over and had to go through the House again. It was very late, and it didn't get to the floor until the last day that you could consider Senate bills, when it had to get a two-thirds vote in order to go back through second and third reading. So I enlisted my friends like Dan and Joel, and some of the liberal Democrats whom I admired on the other side, and who sort of liked me, worked really hard, and went through the debate - and there were 35 negative votes out of 99! So it failed, and I was just, "Boy! What a great job you did!" (pounds table several times for emphasis)
Now, the law firm I was with represented Texaco. I assumed Texaco was for this bill. I did not call anyone - I did not call my mentor in the law firm. I just did this all on my own. But the morning after this passes, this lobbyist whom I had seen before but whom I didn't know rolls down to my desk and says, "Great job, Slade! Where do I send -" You know, one of the dubious traditions then was if you had something like that, the lobbyist would send you a bottle or a case of whiskey. "Where do I send your case?" And I said, "Who the fuck are you?" (chuckles) And he said - and I remember the name to this day - "Oh, I'm Truman XXXX. I'm the lobbyist for Standard Oil. That was a wonderful job in defeating that bill." I had assumed he'd be for the bill, if I'd even known who he was - which they weren't - and I had literally never seen nor heard from them during the time. I was furious. I told him to get out of my sight before I decked him. Literally - and it turned out that he represented Standard Oil, but all the oil companies were paying him for this. So my client had been playing for this. So when I went back - the session was over shortly after that - I literally for the once and only time in my life, I wrote the CEO of Texaco and told him what a huge waste of money it was for them to be paying this guy a dime. (laughs hard)
PH: So did that get you some recognition? Did the CEO write back to you or anything?
SG: No, I don't even know. In fact that I don't even - I don't remember - but I doubt that I even heard from him. It was just - But I satisfied myself by doing it. (continues to chuckle). And that taught me a lesson that hasn't been changed since, that the vast amount of money spent on lobbying is completely wasted.
PH: Sure. Fascinating. So, to summarize, I appreciate all this time that you've shared with me. Do you have any - Looking back on that early stage of your career, are there any philosophical nuggets or sort of axioms that you'd pass onto younger people. I feel like you've sprinkled a lot in our conversation -
SG: Joel and I sat in the back row when we were freshmen, and as I said, you had no office back then. You sat at your desk. And until very shortly before a session started, and beginning very shortly after it was over, the floor was open. That's where lobbying was done. Lobbyists would come in, and you'd see them down front. And you very quickly got to know which members they were who voted the way the last person who talked to them did, and which ones had strong enough philosophies so that didn't make any difference. And one day Joel and I are sitting there watching these lobbyists, on either side of one of our weaker members down in front, and just giving him hell, and Joel turned to me and said, "He who can be pressured, will be pressured." (laughs) And I've remembered that lesson all my life. Joel Pritchard was an extremely wise man. (chuckles)
PH: Great. Any other closing thoughts?
SG: No, that ought to do it.
PH: I really appreciate it...
(Closing small talk about Governor Dan Evans and his role in the rise of the Republican party in modern Washington state)
SG: I think you could say it was Dan who started it, because he didn't like being in a minority when he started in 1956. He was very helpful to Joel and to me when we got elected, and then we joined together. He ran for a secondary leadership position when he was first elected, when he was just in his second term. And just got soundly beaten. And then - and let's see, there were 33 of us then. We worked hard enough that there were 40 or 41 of us the next time around, and Dan ran for the #1 leadership position then. That would've been, let's see, after the 1960 election. I guess there must've been been 41, because it was decided by a vote of 21-20.
Dan Evans, you ask him, when you go through that - His career pivoted (tapping on table for emphasis) on - If he had lost that, he never would've been running for Governor four years later, which he was. He won his leadership position by one vote, the second time that he tried for it, with the help of course of all of his friends, and the people whom he had helped recruit who were newly in the Legislature then. So that was our first great political triumph, first great step towards taking over control of the Republican party.
PH: Okay, thanks again for your time. This has been very helpful...
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