174 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
ism. The only genuine anger detectable at the White House today is di-
rected at those Republicans who dare to defy the President on the sale of
our most guarded technological military secrets to the power whose
blackmail payments supply weapons to the P.L.O.... Should the United
States base its national security decisions on what others mistakenly ‘per-
ceive’ to be our motives? Are we so afraid of ‘world opinion’ that we must
cater to its perception even when we know it to be wrong?... When the
un-Reaganlike... pitch failed to persuade his fellow Republicans—some
of whom did not take kindly to the threat that they would be labeled any-
body’s stooges—Mr. Reagan stressed party discipline and finally used
the Sadat assassination as evidence of the need to build a new bastion.”^8
Gorton, Kasten, Quayle and the others proposed that Reagan guarantee
the Senate that he would press the Saudis to cooperate in a Mideast peace
effort and agree to follow U.S. guidelines on operation of the radar planes.
Reagan’s desperate jawboning was winning conversions and collecting
stragglers. A week before the final vote, Gorton extracted White House
support for another $26 million to renovate the Public Health Service
Hospital in Seattle. Still, on October 28, the day of the vote, he was hold-
ing out for more. Gorton’s feisty mother—“Her name was Ruth, but some-
tmes it was more like ‘ruthless,’” Slade quips admiringly—had died two i
weeks earlier at the age of 83. Her senator son arrived at the weekly Sen-
ate prayer breakfast and deduced from the attention he received that many
were attempting to divine which way he’d vote. Around 10 a.m. Gorton
finally “got what neither the lobbying efforts of Boeing Company Chair-
man T.A. Wilson nor the charms of Ronald Reagan were able to give
him”—the written promise from the president: The U.S. would extract
from the Saudis a signed agreement to protect the AWACS technology
and not use the new weaponry to threaten Israel. Smiling broadly, Gorton
navigated a gantlet of reporters as he headed for the floor. “That did it for
me,” Gorton said of the letter before providing a key vote in a hard-won
52-48 victory for Reagan. “I was convinced three weeks ago that the presi-
dent would win. The whole dynamic is on the side of the president. He
has the ability to make a deal if a deal is necessary.”
Gorton insisted that the hospital money and his vote were “entirely
separate” but also conceded with a grin that any lawmaker who had made
an agreement with the administration would not admit it. Deal-making
aside, Gorton said he concluded that “in foreign policy initiatives, there
should be a presumption in favor of supporting the President of the
United States.”
John Glenn, the astronaut hero turned politician who was on the los-