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17 | A Gold Watch for Maggie

M

ount. st heLens in Southwest Washington erupted like a hy-

drogen bomb at 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980, shedding its sum-

mit in a cataclysmic landslide. A mushroom cloud rose 15 miles

and a pall of ash rolled east at 60 mph, drifting down like gritty gray

snow. It turned day into night in Yakima and Spokane.

The eruption killed 57 people and countless creatures, laid waste to

230 square miles of forest, clogged lakes, rivers and bays and wiped out

highways and bridges. Magnuson, the Senate Appropriations Commit-

tee chairman, went to see his friend Daniel Inouye, a ranking member.

“I’ve had a volcano go off in my state,” Magnuson advised. “Maggie,”

said the senator from Hawaii, “I’ve got them going off in my state all the

time.” “Danny,” Magnuson replied with a smile and a pat, “your time

will come.” Washington state’s senior senator had decided to be “scru-

pulously fair with federal funds,” Vice President Walter Mondale once

quipped. “One half for Washington State, one half for the rest of the

country.”^1

As usual, Maggie brought home the bacon: Nearly a billion dollars in

emergency relief. But when he accompanied President Carter on an in-

spection tour three days after the eruption, TV cameras caught him

stumbling as he attempted to navigate the stairs from Air Force One to

the tarmac at Portland. A diabetic, the 75-year-old senator had a sore foot

that wouldn’t heal. Opinion polls indicated early on that it would be risky

for him to seek a seventh term. He was president pro tem of the Senate,

the realization of a dream. “Go home. Rest on your laurels. You have noth-

ing left to prove,” trusted advisers said. “But he couldn’t imagine himself

not being a senator,” said Gerry Johnson, a top aide who resigned at the

beginning of 1979. He had clashed with Jermaine Magnuson, the sena-

tor’s protective spouse. She wanted one last term for her old lion, once the

most raffishly handsome man in Congress.^2

Gorton also couldn’t imagine himself not being a senator. It was what

he’d wanted to be ever since he was 14 when future congressman Walter