who gives A hoot? 267
Chamber of Commerce board, working to attract new industry to Grays
Harbor.
In My Life, Clinton’s thousand-page autobiography, there’s not one
word about spotted owls or the timber summit. It’s as if Air Force One
never stopped in Portland or flew over Forks en route to Vancouver, B.C.,
for a meeting with Boris Yeltsin. Gorton is not the least bit surprised:
“Bill Clinton could be intensely engaged and participate intelligently in a
conversation on almost any subject and then forget it totally an hour later
if it wasn’t an element in his own agenda.
“I still find it curious that the one politician in Washington who fought
for the people in Grays Harbor—and for eastern Washington to preserve
the dams—was an Ivy League lawyer in Seattle who neither hunts nor
fishes nor cares much for long walks in the woods. I believe that the
Americans most neglected by the establishment are not racial minori-
ties but the working and middle classes in rural and small-city Amer-
ica.The people whose predecessors built America and whose chil... -
dren still fight its wars deserve a voice, and that is what I have tried to
provide.”