240 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
finally cornered him and asked if they could talk. “I’m not in public life
anymore,” Gorton snarled. “I don’t have to talk to you.” With that, he
turned on his heel and walked away. A year later, Partlow went to Seattle
for Gorton’s first interview about the Senate race. “He could not have
been friendlier. We went to a nearby restaurant, just the two of us sitting
there on a mid-morning weekday, chatting like long lost friends at a ta-
ble with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. It was like right out of the
1950s.” After Partlow wrote about the new Gorton, Mike Oakland, who
edited the editorial page, hooted that he had gone in the tank for Slade.
With McGavick in tow, Gorton even had dinner with Joel Connelly, his
on-again, off-again bête noire. Before the salad arrived, Slade and Mickie
Pailthorp, an activist lawyer who was the love of Connelly’s life, became
absorbed in a free-wheeling discussion on the fine points of all things
legal, as well as U.S. policy in the Balkans and dog-training, leaving Con-
nelly and McGavick to talk politics.^23
“McGavick was right. I was a lousy listener,” Gorton says. Losing
something he valued so dearly had a salutary effect. “I learned a lot.”
theRe wAs ALso A new Lowry—a makeover even more striking than the
kinder, gentler Gorton. Bob Shrum, a sought-after Democratic consul-
tant and speechwriter, told Lowry to lose the scraggly beard that the Se-
attle version of Saturday Night Live said made him a leading contender in
the Yasser Arafat Look-Alike Contest. And he couldn’t pound the table or
wave his arms like a cross between Huey Long and Joe Cocker or deliver
his bug-eyed battle cry—“We’re right and they’re wrong!” That wasn’t
senatorial.^24
In the course of one summer’s day, Gorton could be seen driving a
miniature Model T at the Pacific County Fair while Lowry was giving a
staid speech in Aberdeen in a handsome pinstripe suit. Like an awkward
Irish step dancer, he kept trying to remember to keep his arms at his
sides. But he was still the same small-town guy who grew up among the
amber waves of grain on the Palouse, Lowry stressed; still a passionate
supporter of “all those working-class folks” depending on Social Security
for their retirement. Gorton wanted to balance the budget on the backs of
senior citizens, Lowry said, and now he’s making $250 an hour as a lob-
byist—“a total of $60,000 of taxpayers’ money to push conversion of a
WPPSS plant into a weapons-production reactor.” As Lowry got the hang
of being more dignified, it served him well. He was an engaging, natural-
born politician with a solid base in the state’s largest, increasingly blue
county. Gorton and McGavick never once underestimated him.^25