168 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
federal judge west of the Mississippi. Earlier in his career, Tanner had
championed Indian fishing rights but he said the law was the law. The
Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission observed with disgust that
the “Salmonscam” defendants stood accused of damaging fish runs by
illegally taking 2,300, fish while ocean fishermen legally caught 129,000
from the same run of upriver spring Chinook. The Sohappys became
martyrs to the cause and the tribes grew unhappier yet with Gorton. A
year later, their lobbying derailed his attempt to push through a bill to ban
gillnetting of steelhead by Indians. Anglers asserted that the commer-
cialization of the prized game fish sanctioned by Judge Boldt was threat-
ening its survival, a notion the tribes hotly contested.^10
iA te f RsXMonths in wAshington, d.c., Gorton was exhilarated and
exasperated. He felt instantly at home in the Senate; there just weren’t
enough hours in the day. “We are assigned to so many committees that
we can’t become experts on much of anything,” he told The New York
Times. “I’m a member of five committees and more than half a dozen
subcommittees. It’s very frustrating to have to miss at least 50 percent
of the meetings of committees of which you’re a member because of
scheduling conflicts; you can only be in one place at a time.... Another
impression is the inability to delegate. As Attorney General, I had 205
attorneys working for me. Obviously, I did the things I found most inter-
esting but the overwhelming bulk of the work of an office like that was...
delegated. I was primarily a recruiter and an administrator.”^11
Dodd was the other senator the Times asked to size up the new Con-
gress. New to the Senate but not to Congress, the liberal from Connecti-
cut complained, “This town is so narcissistic that all we talk about is each
other.I think this Congress is far more political, far more partisan,...
than anything I’ve ever seen before. Whatever else any Democrat may
have to say about the Administration, the Congressional Republicans’
discipline and cohesiveness far outstrips anything I’ve ever seen in the
Democratic Party.”^12 Gorton had to smile. Congress was the big leagues,
but Dodd clearly had never been in combat with the likes of Bob Greive
and Augie Mardesich.
“One pleasant surprise,” Gorton said, “has been the fact that I’ve found
the Senate to be less partisan than the Washington State House of Repre-
sentatives, where I spent 10 years. (In Olympia) the majority party caucus
often met as frequently as three times a day. Everything was determined
by the party caucus. Members of the minority party rarely got to contrib-