intRoduction 3
fruit, garnished with Grape Nuts. Sally surveys the hall to see how well he
and Trip wiped their feet. “I used to tell my friends I’ve done more than
most people have done by the time I get him out the door,” she sighs.
They’ve been married for 53 eventful years.
He usually heads to one of his offices or the airport. As a lawyer, lob-
byist, foundation member and political strategist, he still spends a lot of
time in D.C. Fun is a good book. They’re piled high everywhere. Spring
is his favorite season because baseball begins. Without him, Seattle
wouldn’t have the Mariners.
Capable of breathtaking political somersaults, he is slippery. But defi-
nitely not in the sense that Bill Clinton was “Slick Willie,” his silver
tongue and roving eye compromising his brilliant promise. Clinton’s in-
tellectual equal, Gorton is virtually viceless, except for his impatience,
which can morph into arrogance if things get tedious. He bristles when
his integrity is challenged.
After his crushing first defeat in 1986, his friends staged an interven-
tion that rinsed out some of the hubris. He learned to resist the temptation
to finish your sentences; stopped telling reporters they had just asked sin-
gularly stupid questions; grew more thoughtful. His first grandchild, a
chubby-cheeked charmer, was a revelation. She’s now an officer in the U.S.
Navy. The fourth, a handsome boy who turned out to be autistic, taught
him even more. The coupon-clipping closet softie made more appearances.
Confronted by a dullard, however, his eyes still reveal that he’s weighing
whether to respond with a large butterfly net or a blow dart.
“You may have noticed that I’m not the world’s warmest person,” he
quipped to his biographer.
Do tell.
“He’s not a schmoozer,” says Sally, chuckling at the understatement.
“When he plays Pickleball, he always aims for your toes. He hates to lose.”
Besides books, baseball and dogs, he likes York Mints and meat loaf.
The man often accused of being humorless actually laughs a lot, espe-
cially at himself. He can be spontaneously mischievous. Shortly after Al
and Tipper Gore’s famous passionate kiss at the Democratic National
Convention, Slade grabbed Sally at a Republican gathering and gave her a
smooch that brought down the house. She wanted to kill him.
withLis h eAn fRAMe, tall forehead, angular chin, toothy smile and big,
bespectacled eyes, Thomas Slade Gorton III is a cartoonist’s dream. For a
roast, admirers commissioned a Bobblehead from David Horsey, the Seat-
tle Post-Intelligencer’s Pulitzer Prize winner.